The identity commutes with every group element, so it lies in the center of a group. If are central and , then implies . ConsequentlyThus is central. The subgroup test provesEquivalently, the centre is nonempty, closed under products, and closed under inverses. This proof does not require finiteness. In fact the centre is an Abelian subgroup, and it is normal because for each central element.
Denote a matrix by , with the upper-right entry. Direct matrix multiplication givesThis proves closure. Associativity is inherited from matrix multiplication. The identity is , and the inverse isBoth products with this matrix are the identity. Thus these real matrices form the Heisenberg group, in the coordinate convention with central coordinate .
Let . Its multiplication adds , its identity is and its inverse negates , so it is a subgroup. MoreoverThus every element of is central, and . Therefore is a normal subgroup. In fact it is the full center of a group, as described by the center quotient of the real Heisenberg group.
The center of a group contains . If lie in the center, then for every ,It is therefore closed under the group operation and inverse elements, and inherits associativity, proving it is a subgroup. Each of its elements commutes with every element of , in particular with every other central element. HenceThus the center is an abelian subgroup.
Factor the group order as . The Sylow theorems say that the number of Sylow subgroups for the prime seven divides and is congruent to one modulo seven. Among , only one qualifies. Thus there is a unique normal subgroup of order .
Every group of prime-square order is Abelian. Indeed its center of a group is nontrivial, and a cyclic quotient by the center of a group forces the whole group to be abelian. Consequently is either or , and in either case it has two composition factors, both .
It remains to consider , of order twelve. Its number of Sylow subgroups for the prime three is either one or four:
- If it is one, the normal order-three subgroup has factor , and the remaining quotient has order four. An order-four group is abelian and has two factors .
- If it is four, these order-three subgroups have disjoint nonidentity elements and account for eight elements. Any Sylow subgroup for the prime two, of order four, must consist of the four remaining elements, since its nonidentity elements have power-of-two orders. It is therefore unique and normal. Its two factors are , and the quotient has order three, giving .
Lift the composition series of to using the subgroup correspondence theorem, and join it to a composition series inside . This givesas the multiset of composition factors. The Jordan–Hölder theorem makes this independent of the chosen series. In particular every group of order is a solvable group, with composition length five; that is a statement about composition length, not necessarily its derived length.
Put , the normal subgroup of order . By Cauchy's theorem for finite groups, contains an element of order two. Such an element cannot belong to the odd-order subgroup . Thus and , giving the semidirect productEvery automorphism of a finite cyclic group sends to for a unit modulo . The relation forces the conjugation action of to square to the identity:The Chinese remainder theorem identifies a congruence class modulo with its pair of classes modulo and . In each of these prime fields, the factorization forces or . The choices are independent, giving exactly four homomorphisms from a finite cyclic group . Explicitly,The factors and of are preserved by every automorphism, since each is its unique subgroup of that order. The four conjugation actions therefore give:
- : the action is trivial on both factors, so , by cyclicity of a product of two finite cyclic groups.
- : the action inverts both factors, so is the dihedral group .
- : it is the identity modulo and inversion modulo , so the factor commutes with the other factors and .
- : it is inversion modulo and the identity modulo , giving .
Here has group order , as in the paper. The center of a group distinguishes these four groups of order seventy: its orders are , respectively, so the four groups are pairwise nonisomorphic. Each construction is a semidirect product with elements, so every listed possibility occurs.
Let . The allowed center of a group theorem gives . By Lagrange's theorem its order is or . In the first case has order and is a cyclic group. A cyclic quotient by the center forces to be Abelian: if , write arbitrary elements as with , and commute them directly. Hence in every caseFor two examples at prime-cube order, take the dihedral group of a square, , and the quaternion group . Both have order . They are nonabelian because and , respectively. They are distinct examples even up to group isomorphism: the dihedral group has five elements of order two and the quaternion group has only one. The request asks for two examples; it does not require the prime to be arbitrary.
P-group Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-09-24
Real Heisenberg quotient has no faithful finite-dimensional representation Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-09-24
Let be the real upper unitriangular three-by-three group, let be its centre, and let be the integer subgroup of . Every finite-dimensional continuous complex representation of kills the central circle , and hence is not faithful.
Schrödinger representation of the Heisenberg group Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-10-14
On , translations and multiplication by phases give the Schrödinger representation of the Heisenberg group. The central coordinate acts by an overall phase.
Two-step nilpotent group 2026-10-03
A group is two-step nilpotent whenEquivalently, its commutator subgroup is contained in the center of a group of . This allows every word to be collected into powers of generators followed by powers of their pairwise commutators.
Upper central series 2026-10-14
Repeatedly take the center of a group after quotienting by the preceding term. A group is a nilpotent group exactly when a finite term is the whole group. This yields the normalizer condition for nilpotent groups.