Revision as of 14:26, 9 September 2008 by Robertsr (Talk)

Question: Show that if H is a subgroup of $ S_n $, then either every member of H is an even permutation or exactly half of the members are even.

Answer: Suppose H contains at least one odd permutation, say $ \sigma $. For each odd permutation $ \beta $, the permutation $ \sigma \beta $ is even.

Note:

$ \sigma $ = odd

$ \beta $ = odd

$ \sigma \beta $ = even

Different $ \beta $ give different $ \sigma \beta $. Thus there are as many even permutations as there are odd ones.

Alumni Liaison

Ph.D. 2007, working on developing cool imaging technologies for digital cameras, camera phones, and video surveillance cameras.

Buyue Zhang