Cayley table

Named after the 19th century British mathematician Arthur Cayley, a Cayley table describes the structure of a finite group by arranging all the possible products of all the group's elements in a square table reminiscent of an addition or multiplication table. Many properties of a group - such as whether or not it is abelian, which elements are inverses of which elements, and the size and contents of the group's center - can be discovered from its Cayley table. A simple example of a Cayley table is the one for the group {1, −1} under ordinary multiplication: Cayley tables were first presented in Cayley's 1854 paper, "On The Theory of Groups, as depending on the symbolic equation θ n = 1". In that paper they were referred to simply as tables, and were merely illustrative - they came to be known as Cayley tables later on, in honour of their creator. Because many Cayley tables describe groups that are not abelian, the product ab with respect to the group's binary operation is not guaranteed to be equal to the product ba for all a and b in the group. In order to avoid confusion, the convention is that the factor that labels the row (termed nearer factor by Cayley) comes first, and that the factor that labels the column (or further factor) is second. For example, the intersection of row a and column b is ab and not ba, as in the following example: The Cayley table tells us whether a group is abelian. Because the group operation of an abelian group is commutative, a group is abelian if and only if its Cayley table's values are symmetric along its diagonal axis. The group {1, −1} above and the cyclic group of order 3 under ordinary multiplication are both examples of abelian groups, and inspection of the symmetry of their Cayley tables verifies this. In contrast, the smallest non-abelian group, the dihedral group of order 6, does not have a symmetric Cayley table. Because associativity is taken as an axiom when dealing with groups, it is often taken for granted when dealing with Cayley tables.