The rotations in three dimensions preserving a dodecahedron form a group of order . There are nonidentity rotations about the six axes through opposite face centres, about the ten axes through opposite vertices, and half-turns about the fifteen axes through opposite edge midpoints. Its nonidentity conjugacy classes have sizes : the centralizer of a rotation of order five or three consists of rotations about its oriented axis and has order five or three, respectively, while all edge half-turns are conjugate. A normal subgroup is a union of whole conjugacy classes containing the identity. No proper nontrivial sum of these class sizes plus one divides , proving that it is a simple group. The centralizers of the fifteen involutions are five distinct Klein four-groups, each containing three involutions. Conjugation permutes these five subgroups nontrivially. The kernel is a normal subgroup, so simplicity makes this nontrivial action injective. Its sign map to a group of order two must be trivial, since simplicity would otherwise force an impossible injection of sixty elements into two. Thus its image lies in the alternating group , and equality of orders makes the image all of .
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