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Mathematics LibreTexts

3: Automorphisms and Extensions

( \newcommand{\kernel}{\mathrm{null}\,}\)

Coxeter came to Cambridge and gave a lecture [in which he stated a] problem for which he gave proofs for selected examples, and he asked for a unified proof. I left the lecture room thinking. As I was walking through Cambridge, suddenly the idea hit me, but it hit me while I was in the middle of the road. When the idea hit me I stopped and a large truck ran into me…. So I pretended that Coxeter had calculated the difficulty of this problem so precisely that he knew that I would get the solution just in the middle of the road…. Ever since, I’ve called that theorem “the murder weapon”. One consequence of it is that in a group if a2=b3=c5=(abc)1, then c610=1.

-John Conway, Math. Intelligencer 23 (2001), no. 2, pp. 8–9.


This page titled 3: Automorphisms and Extensions is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by James S. Milne.

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