Past exam of the groups and representations course of the University of Oxford 2021 1 c Solution 2026-10-25
Use the conjugacy class order of solution. The defining representation has characterIts character inner product with itself is , proving that it is an irreducible representation. There is also a direct invariant subspace argument: has two distinct coordinate eigenspaces, and exchanges them, so no line is invariant under both.
Let denote the one-dimensional representation with and . Then and . The complete character table isThe four scalar rows obey character orthogonality, and the dimensions exhaust the group order as established in solution.