Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-mathematics-course-of-the-year-2-of-the-natural-sciences-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2019/paper-2/8/b/solution

By Lagrange's theorem, the possible values of the order of a group element are
These are possibilities across groups of order eight; they need not all occur in one group.
If every element has order at most two, every element equals its own inverse. Thus for any ,
so is an abelian group. Choose , and then . The four elements are distinct and form a subgroup : commutativity and prove closure and inverses. Choose . The elements of and are disjoint, since would imply . These two four-element sets therefore exhaust .
Every element consequently has a unique expression , with . The map from triples to these products is bijective and respects multiplication by addition of exponents modulo two. Hence
a direct product of groups and an elementary abelian group.

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