Let be the Galois group of a polynomial of the irreducible quartic. Irreducibility makes a transitive subgroup of . The three roots of the given cubic resolvent of a quartic correspond to the three partitions of the four quartic roots into two unordered pairs, and the kernel of the -action on these partitions is the Klein four-group . If the resolvent has Galois group , the image of in this action is all of . Among the transitive subgroups of the symmetric group on four points, only has this image. Hence
Now put . The Eisenstein criterion at proves that is an irreducible polynomial, and its cubic resolvent is
Its discriminant of a depressed cubic is
For odd , the -adic valuation of is three because ; for , . Thus is never a square in .
By the rational root theorem, a reducible has an integer root among . Reduction modulo shows that the root is divisible by ; writing it as , with , gives
The only possibilities are and , corresponding to roots and . For every other prime, is irreducible with nonsquare discriminant, so its Galois group is and the criterion above gives the quartic group . For or , the reducible resolvent makes the quartic group a proper subgroup. Therefore
Up to conjugacy, the transitive subgroups of the symmetric group on four points are
Representatives are , the normal Klein four group of double transpositions, , , and .
If an irreducible quartic over a field of characteristic zero has a cubic resolvent of a quartic whose Galois group of a polynomial is , then the quartic has Galois group . Irreducibility places the quartic group among the transitive subgroups of the symmetric group on four points, while the action on its three root pairings is surjective onto . Of the possibilities , only has this image.