Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2002 iii Paper 2 3 b Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-14
Let be the intersection under consideration. The family is nonempty since it contains , and is invariant under conjugation: conjugating an irreducible inducing pair gives another such pair. Hence is a normal subgroup of .
For any , monomiality gives with a linear character of some . This belongs to the family, so . Because is normal, for every . In the induced representation oneach coset line is therefore invariant under : for ,Thus the restriction to is a direct sum of one-dimensional group representations. All representing matrices of commute, and the derived subgroup acts as the identity. Equivalently,The intersection of the character kernels is trivial: the regular representation is faithful and is a direct sum of irreducible representations. It follows that .
This proves the abelian intersection of irreducible inducing subgroups without assuming that every subgroup of an M-group is itself monomial.