Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-mathematics-course-of-the-year-2-of-the-natural-sciences-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2001/paper-2/8/solution

Cosets and Lagrange. A left coset is . The left cosets of a subgroup partition a group, each with elements. Lagrange's theorem states for a finite group, so every subgroup order divides the group order.
The 64-element group. Work in the commutative ring , which has zero divisors. Denote the displayed lower triangular matrix by , where are its three entries below the diagonal. Direct matrix multiplication gives
All arithmetic is modulo four, so the set is closed. Associativity comes from matrix multiplication, the identity element is , and
The formula works in either multiplication order and requires no division. Hence these matrices form a group of order . This is the lower triangular version of the Heisenberg group over a commutative ring.
The abelian subgroup. If , write . Then
The identity is and the inverse is , proving an abelian subgroup. Its two independent entries give and , in accordance with Lagrange's theorem. This is the abelian plane subgroup of the Heisenberg group modulo four.
More explicitly, is a surjective group homomorphism to the additive group of , with kernel . The four left cosets are exactly the four sets with fixed , ; representatives are . Thus is also a normal subgroup.
Matrices squaring to the identity. The product formula gives
The first and third coordinates vanish only when . Then modulo four, so the middle coordinate vanishes exactly when . Therefore the complete set is
It is a subgroup: multiplying two such elements keeps all three entries even, and their cross term vanishes modulo four, so the product simply adds the three even coordinates. The identity is included and each element is its own inverse. In fact is isomorphic to the direct product of groups . The seven nonidentity elements are involutions.
Finally, the last subset in the PDF is defined by , with no restriction on . It has elements, which cannot be a subgroup because does not divide . It also excludes the identity element. Thus

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