7: The Wonderful World of Cosets
( \newcommand{\kernel}{\mathrm{null}\,}\)
We have already seen one way we can examine a complicated group G: namely, study its subgroups, whose group structures are in some cases much more directly understandable than the structure of G itself. But if H is a subgroup of a group G, if we only study H we lose all the information about G's structure “outside” of H. We might hope that G−H (that is, the set of elements of G that are not in H) is also a subgroup of G, but we immediately see that cannot be the case since the identity element of G must be in H, and H∩(G−H)=∅. Instead, let's ask how we can get at some understanding of G's entire structure using a subgroup H? It turns out we use what are called cosets of H; but before we get to those, we need to cover some preliminary material.
- 7.1: Partitions of and Equivalence Relations on Sets
- The number of partitions of a finite set of n elements gets large very quickly as n goes to infinity. Indeed, there are 52 partitions of a set containing just 5 elements! (The total number of partitions of an n-element set is the Bell number. There is no trivial way of computing Bell number, in general, though the Bell number do satisfy the relatively simple recurrence relation.
- 7.2: Introduction to Cosets and Normal Subgroups
- In this section, we will introduce cosets and normal subgroups, as well as providing the corresponding theorems and examples.
- 7.3: The Index of a Subgroup and Lagrange's Theorem
- In this section, we discuss the index of a subgroup and Lagrange's Theorem, as well two related corollaries.
- 7.4: Exercises
- This page contains the exercises for Chapter 7.