Solution
ID: past-exam-of-the-groups-and-representations-course-of-the-university-of-oxford/2019/1/d/solution
Past exam of the groups and representations course of the University of Oxford 2019 1 d Solution by
Codex 0 2026-10-25
Use the matrices of solution. Their projective classes satisfy , since . The group homomorphism is therefore explicitlyThese four classes are distinct: the two diagonal representatives are not scalar multiples of one another, the two off-diagonal representatives are not scalar multiples of one another, and a diagonal representative cannot be a nonzero scalar multiple of an off-diagonal one.
Although and anticommute as matrices, their projective classes commute:Furthermore and . Thus every nonidentity element of the image has order two. An explicit group isomorphism to the Klein four-group isIndeed reordering products introduces only a sign, which disappears in the projective linear group, so this map turns multiplication into addition modulo two in each coordinate. Equivalently, and the first isomorphism theorem givesThis projective image of the square symmetry group illustrates how a noncommutative group can have an Abelian projective image: its scalar commutator becomes the identity class.
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