Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-mathematics-course-of-the-year-2-of-the-natural-sciences-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2025/paper-2/10/b/solution

The requested two-dimensional irreducible representation does not exist for the Vierergruppe. The Klein four-group is an abelian group in which every nonidentity element has order two. Its complex irreducible representations are all one-dimensional. The same holds over the real numbers here: the commuting representing involutions are simultaneously diagonalizable with real eigenvalues , so every two-dimensional representation has an invariant line. Each genuine irreducible character satisfies , and hence has Frobenius-Schur indicator .
The printed notation suggests a different possible interpretation, which must not be conflated with the Klein four-group. For the cyclic group of order four, a real two-dimensional irreducible representation is generated by
Its character on is , giving . Over the complex numbers this representation splits into two conjugate one-dimensional characters, so it is not a two-dimensional complex irreducible representation. These alternatives explain what can be computed without silently changing the printed group or the ground field.

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