Group action
In mathematics, groups often arise as (a subsets of) the set of permutations of some mathematical object (where the group multiplication law is just composition). Some examples of this would be the symmetric group , the alternating group
, or the dihedral group
.
We can formalize this notion with the concept of a group action. Loosely speaking, a group action of a group on a set
is an assignment of a bijection
to each element
.
More formally, we can define a group action of a group on a set
as a function
, (where we denote the image of
by
) which satisfies the following properties:
for all
and all
for all
(where
is the identity element of
).
Typically, we call a
-set, and we say that
acts on
.
Notice that any indeed gets associated with a function
, specifically the function
. The first property means that the multiplication of two group elements
and
is indeed just the composition of their corresponding functions, and the second property states that the function associated to the identity element it's just the identity function. Notice also that the function associated to
always has an inverse, specifically the function associated to
. It follows that each group element is in fact associated to a bijection
.
Notice that this assignment is not necessarily one-to-one, that is it is possible that two distinct elements of will be associated to the same function (for instance, it is possible that we would have
for all
and
, and so every element of
would be associated to the identity function). If this assignment is one-to-one (i.e. if for every
, there is some
for which
) then we say
acts faithfully on
.
Now since the symmetric group is the group of all bijections
we can think of a group action as a homomorphism from
to
. This homomorphism is injective iff the action is faithful.
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