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Concept
Symmetric group
Summary
In abstract algebra, the symmetric group defined over any set is the group whose elements are all the bijections from the set to itself, and whose group operation is the composition of functions. In particular, the finite symmetric group defined over a finite set of symbols consists of the permutations that can be performed on the symbols. Since there are ( factorial) such permutation operations, the order (number of elements) of the symmetric group is .
Although symmetric groups can be defined on infinite sets, this article focuses on the finite symmetric groups: their applications, their elements, their conjugacy classes, a finite presentation, their subgroups, their automorphism groups, and their representation theory. For the remainder of this article, "symmetric group" will mean a symmetric group on a finite set.
The symmetric group is important to diverse areas of mathematics such as Galois theory, invariant theory, the representation theory of Lie groups, and combinatorics. Cayley's theorem states that every group is isomorphic to a subgroup of the symmetric group on (the underlying set of) .
The symmetric group on a finite set is the group whose elements are all bijective functions from to and whose group operation is that of function composition. For finite sets, "permutations" and "bijective functions" refer to the same operation, namely rearrangement. The symmetric group of degree is the symmetric group on the set .
The symmetric group on a set is denoted in various ways, including , , , , and . If is the set then the name may be abbreviated to , , , or .
Symmetric groups on infinite sets behave quite differently from symmetric groups on finite sets, and are discussed in , , and .
The symmetric group on a set of elements has order (the factorial of ). It is abelian if and only if is less than or equal to 2. For and (the empty set and the singleton set), the symmetric groups are trivial (they have order ). The group Sn is solvable if and only if .
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