Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-mathematics-course-of-the-year-2-of-the-natural-sciences-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2023/paper-2/9/a/solution

Act on the four labelled vertices. A proper rotation gives an even permutation, identifying the rotational tetrahedral symmetry group with , an alternating group. Geometrically there are one identity, three half-turns about opposite-edge midpoint axes, and two nontrivial rotations about each of four vertex-face axes. Therefore
The tetrahedral rotation conjugacy classes are
To justify the splitting, the centralizer of a 3-cycle within is its three-element cyclic subgroup, so its conjugacy class has size . Its inverse is not conjugate to it in : the permutations that reverse that cycle while preserving its fixed vertex are odd. Conjugating by the even permutations produces the displayed , and taking inverses gives . The three half-turns are conjugate, since rotations move their axes into one another. Their centralizer has order four and their class therefore has size three.

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