There is something odd about the experience of learning group theory. At first, one is told that the great virtue of groups is their abstractness: many mathematical structures, from number systems, to sets of permutations, to symmetries, to automorphisms of other algebraic structures, to invariants of geometric objects (these last two are examples you won’t meet for a while) have important properties in common, and these are encapsulated in a small set of axioms that lead to a rich theory with applications throughout mathematics. So far so good — understanding about abstraction is wonderful and mind-expanding and the definition of a group is one of the best examples.
But then one studies group actions (and later group representations). They appear to be doing the reverse of abstraction: we take an abstract group and find a way of thinking of it as a group of symmetries. And that is supposed to help us understand the group better — so much so that group actions are an indispensable part of group theory.
So is abstraction good or bad? Well, both the views above are correct. Abstraction does indeed play a very important clarifying role, by showing us that many apparently different phenomena are basically the same, and isolating the aspects of those phenomena that really matter. However, if a group is defined for us in an abstract way (I’ll say more precisely what I mean by this later), then showing that it is isomorphic to a group of symmetries can make it much easier to answer questions about that group.
In this post, and one or two further ones, I want to discuss what a group action actually is, the orbit-stabilizer theorem and how to remember its proof, and how to use group actions to prove facts about groups.
(more…)