Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-mathematics-course-of-the-year-2-of-the-natural-sciences-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2021/paper-2/9/c/solution

Let be prime. Any subgroup contained in is either or the whole rotation subgroup. Both are normal: the trivial subgroup always is, and the rotation subgroup has index two, or equivalently is preserved by .
If a normal subgroup contains any reflection, it contains its entire conjugacy class. Part (b) shows that this is every reflection for odd . Products of reflections include a generator of the rotations, since . Such a normal subgroup must therefore be the whole dihedral group.
Thus the complete list of proper normal subgroups, including the trivial subgroup, is
This also agrees with classification of subgroups of a dihedral group: the reflection subgroups of order two are proper but are not normal when is odd.

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