Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-groups-and-representations-course-of-the-university-of-oxford/2021/2/c/solution

The two invariant subspaces are
Coordinate permutations preserve both equal coordinates and the coordinate sum. Their dimensions add to three and their intersection is zero, so . On , the basis gives for every transposition.
On choose the basis , . Directly permuting their entries gives
Thus, taking images as columns, the matrices of the matrix representation are
Each has trace zero and squares to . Their three-cycle products have trace , so this is exactly the two-dimensional irreducible representation of solution. These are all nonzero invariant subspaces affording individual irreducible representations, since each occurs once in solution.

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