Subgroup

https://arbital.com/p/subgroup

by Dylan Hendrickson Jul 7 2016

A group that lives inside a bigger group.


A subgroup of a Group is a group of the form , where . We usually say simply that is a subgroup of .

For a subset of a group to be a subgroup, it needs to satisfy all of the group axioms itself: closure, associativity, identity, and [inverse_element inverse]. We get associativity for free because is a group. So the requirements of a subgroup are:

  1. Closure: For any in , is in .
  2. Identity: The identity of is in .
  3. [inverse_element Inverses]: For any in , is also in .

A subgroup is called normal if it is closed under conjugation.

The subgroup Relation is transitive: if is a subgroup of , and is a subgroup of , then is a subgroup of .

Examples

Any group is a subgroup of itself. The [-trivial_group] is a subgroup of every group.

For any Integer , the set of multiples of is a subgroup of the integers (under [-addition]).