Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2013 ia Paper 3 7D a Solution Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-10-07
Use the dihedral group presentation . Every element is or . A nonidentity rotation has order two only when its exponent is , while for every . Thus the complete list isThe half-turn is central, so its conjugacy class is the singleton and its normal closure is .
For reflections, and . Hence the conjugacy class is exactly the reflections whose exponents have the same parity as :The subgroup generated by this class contains , as the product of two consecutive listed reflections, and contains . Conversely those two generators contain every listed reflection. Their subgroup is invariant under conjugation by both and , so the smallest normal subgroup containing isof order and index two. This involutions in an even dihedral group classification distinguishes the two reflection classes from the central half-turn.