Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-groups-and-representations-course-of-the-university-of-oxford/2022/3/a/solution

The identity commutes with every , so the centralizer is nonempty. If , then for every ,
Thus it is closed under multiplication. From , multiplication by on both sides gives , so . These are exactly the subgroup conditions; hence
The proof works for the centralizer of a subset as well; it does not require that itself be a subgroup.

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