My Little 2021 Mathematics A-to-Z: Addition

John Golden, whom so far as I know doesn’t have an active blog, suggested this week’s topic. It pairs nicely with last week’s. I link to that in text, but if you would like to read all of this year’s Little Mathematics A to Z it should be at this link. And if you’d like to see all of my A-to-Z projects, pleas try this link. Thank you.

Addition

When I wrote about multiplication I came to the peculiar conclusion that it was the same as addition. This is true only in certain lights. When we study [abstract] algebra we look at things that look like arithmetic. The simplest useful thing that looks like arithmetic is a group. It has a set of elements, and a pairwise “group operation”. That group operation we call multiplication, if we don’t have a better name. We give it two elements and it gives us one. Under certain circumstances, this multiplication looks just like addition does.

But we have reason to think addition and multiplication aren’t the same. Where do we get addition?

We can make a meaningful addition by giving it something to interact with. By adding another operation. This turns the group into a ring. As it has two operations, it’s hard to resist calling one of them addition and the other multiplication. The new multiplication follows many of the rules the addition did. Adding two elements together gives you an element in the ring. So does multiplying. Addition is associative: is the same thing as . So it multiplication: is the same thing as .

And then the addition and the multiplication have to interact. If they didn’t, we’d just have a group with two operations. I don’t know anyone who’s found a good use for that. The way addition and multiplication interact we call distribution. This is represented by two rules, both of them depending on elements a, b, and c:

This is where we get something we have to call addition. It’s in having the two interacting group operations.

A problem which would have worried me at age eight: do we know we’re calling the correct operation “addition”? Yes, yes, names are arbitrary. But are we matching the thing we think we’re doing when we calculate 2 + 2 to addition and the thing for 2 x 2 to multiplication? How do we tell these two apart?

For all that they start the same, and resemble one another, there are differences. Addition has an identity, something that works like zero. is always , whatever is. Multiplication … the multiplication we use every day has an identity, that is, 1. Are we required to have a multiplicative identity, something so that is always ? That depends on what it said in the Introduction to Algebra textbook you learned on. If you want to be clear your rings do have a multiplicative identity you call it a “unit ring”. If you want to be clear you don’t care, I don’t know what to say. I’m told some people write that as “rng”, to hint that this identity is missing.

Addition always has an inverse. Whatever element you pick, there is some so that is the additive identity. Multiplication? Even if we have a unit ring, there’s not always a reciprocal. The integers are a unit ring. But there are only two integers that have an integer multiplicative inverse, something you can multiply them by to get 1. If your unit ring does have a multiplicative inverse, this is called a division algebra. Rational numbers, for example, are a division algebra.

So for some rings, like the integers, there’s an obvious difference between addition and multiplication. But for the rational numbers? Can we tell the operations apart?

We can, through the additive identity, which please let me call 0. And the multiplicative identity, which please let me call 1. Is there a multiplicative inverse of 0? Suppose there is one; let me call it , because I need some name. Then of all the things in the world, we know this:

I can replace anything I like with something equal to it. So, for example, I can replace 0 with the sum of an element and its additive inverse. Like, for some element . So then:

And distribute this away!

I don’t know what number is, nor what its inverse is. But I know its sum is zero. And so

This looks like trouble. But, all right, why not have the additive and the multiplicative identities be the same number? Mathematicians like to play with all kinds of weird things; why not this weirdness?

The why not is that you work out pretty fast that every element has to be equal to every other element. If you’re not sure how, consider the starting line of that little proof, but with an element :

So there, finally, is a crack between addition and multiplication. Addition’s identity element, its zero, can’t have a multiplicative inverse. Multiplication’s identity element, its one, must have an additive inverse. We get addition from the thing we can’t un-multiply.

It may have struck you that if all we want is a ring with the lone element of 0 (or 1), then we can have addition and multiplication be indistinguishable again. And have the additive and multiplicative identities be the same thing. There’s nothing else for them to be. This is true, and we can. Unfortunately this ring doesn’t do much that’s interesting, except maybe prove some theorem we were working on isn’t always true. So we usually draw a box around it, acknowledge it once, and then exclude it from division algebras and fields and other things of interest. It’s much the same way we normally rule out 1 as a prime number. It’s an example that is too much bother to include given how unenlightening it is.

You can have groups and attach to them a multiplication and an addition and another binary operation. Those aren’t of such general interest that you study them much as an undergraduate.

And this is what we know of addition. It looks almost like a second multiplication. But it interacts just enough with multiplication to force the two to be distinguishable. From that we can create mathematics structures as interesting as arithmetic is.

My Little 2021 Mathematics A-to-Z: Multiplication

I wanted to start the Little 2021 Mathematics A-to-Z with more ceremony. These glossary projects are fun and work in about equal measure. But an already hard year got much harder about a month and a half back, and it hasn’t been getting much better. I’m even considering cutting down the reduced A-to-Z project I am doing. But I also feel I need to get some structured work under way. And sometimes only ambition will overcome a diminished world. So I begin, and with luck, will keep posting weekly essays about mathematical terms.

Today’s was a term suggested by Iva Sallay, longtime blog friend and creator of the Find The Factors recreational mathematics puzzle. Also a frequent host of the Playful Math Education Blog Carnival, a project quite worth reading and a great hosting challenge too. And as often makes for a delightful A-to-Z topic, it’s about something so commonplace one forgets it can hold surprises.

Multiplication

A friend pondering mathematics said they know you learn addition first, but that multiplication somehow felt more fundamental. I supported their insight. We learn two plus two first. It’s two times two where we start seeing strange things.

Suppose for the moment we’re interested only in the integers. Zero multiplied by anything is zero. There’s nothing like that in addition. Consider even numbers. An even number times anything gives you an even number again. There’s no duplicating that in addition. But this trait isn’t even unique to even numbers. Multiples of three, or four, or 237 assimilate the integers by multiplication the same way. You can find an integer to add to 2 to get 5; you can’t find an integer to multiply by 2 to get 5. Or consider prime numbers. There’s no integer you can make by only one, or only finitely many, different sums. New possibilities, and restrictions, happen in multiplication.

Whether this makes multiplication the foundation of mathematics, or at least arithmetic, is a judgement. It depends how basic your concepts must be, and what you decide is important. Mathematicians do have a field which studies “things that look like arithmetic”, though. We call this algebra. Or call it abstract algebra to clarify it’s not that stuff with the quadratic formula. And that starts with group theory. A group is made of two things. One is a collection of elements. The other is a thing to do with pairs of elements. Generically, we call that multiplication.

A possible multiplication has to follow a couple rules. It has to be a binary operation on your group’s set. That is, it matches two things in the set to something in the set. There has to be an identity, something that works like 1 does for multiplying numbers. It has to be associative. If you want to multiply three things together, you can start with whatever pair looks easier. Every element has to have an inverse, something you can multiply it by to get 1 as the product.

That’s all, and that’s not much. This description covers a lot of things. For example, there’s regular old multiplication, for the set of rational numbers (other than zero and I intend to talk about that later). For another, there’s rotations of a ball. Each axis you could turn the ball around on, and angle you could rotate it, is an element of the set of three-dimensional rotations. Multiplication we interpret as doing those rotations one after the other. There’s the multiplication of square matrices, ones that have the same number of rows and columns.

If you’re reading a pop mathematics blog, you know of , the “imaginary unit”. You know it because . A bit more multiplying of these and you find a nice tight cycle. This forms a group, with four discernible elements: and regular multiplication. It’s a nice example of a “cyclic group”. We can represent the whole thing as multiplying a single element together: . We can think of but that’s got the same value as . Or , which has the same value as . With a little ingenuity we can even think of what we might mean by, say, and realize it has to be the same quantity as . Or which has to equal . You see the cycle.

A cyclic group doesn’t have to have four elements. It needs to be generated by doing the multiplication over and over on one element, that’s all. It can have a single element, or two, or two hundred. Or infinitely many elements. Suppose we have a set built on the powers of an element that we’ll call . This is a common name for “an element and we don’t care what it is”. It has nothing to do with the number called e, or any number. At least it doesn’t have to.

Please let me use the shorthand of to mean times , and to mean times , and so on. Then we have a set that looks like, in part, . They multiply together the way we might multiply x raised to powers. is , and is , and is and so on.

Those exponents suggest something familiar. In this infinite cyclic group is , where j and k are integers. Do we even need to write the e? Why not just write the j and k in a normal-size typeface? Is there a difference between cyclic-group multiplication and regular old addition of integers?

Not an important one. There’s differences in how we write the symbols, and what we think they mean. There’s not a difference in the way they interact. Regular old addition, in this light, we can see as a multiplication.

Calling addition “multiplication” can be confusing. So we deal with that a few ways. One is to say that rather than multiplication what a group has is a group operation. This lets us avoid fooling people into thinking we mean to take this times that. It lacks a good shorthand word, the way we might say “a times b” or “a plus b”. But we can call it “the group operation”, and say “times” or “plus” as fits our sentence and our sentiment.

I’ve left unanswered that mention of multiplication on the rational-numbers-except-zero making a group. If you include zero in the set, though, you don’t have multiplication as a group operation. There’s no inverse to zero. There seems to be an oversight in multiplication not being a multiplication. I hope to address that in the next A-to-Z essay, on Addition.

---

This, and my other essays for the Little 2021 Mathematics A-to-Z, should be at this link. And all my A-to-Z essays from every year should be at this link. Thanks for reading.

My All 2020 Mathematics A to Z: Permutation

Laura, the author of MathSux², offered this week’s A-to-Z term. (I apologize for it being late but the Playful Math Education Blog Carnival 141 work took a lot out of me.) She writes the blog weekly, and hosts a YouTube channel of mathematics videos also. I’m glad to have the topic to discuss.

Art by Thomas K Dye, creator of the web comics Projection Edge, Newshounds, Infinity Refugees, and Something Happens. He’s on Twitter as @projectionedge. You can get to read Projection Edge six months early by subscribing to his Patreon.

Permutation.

We learn to count permutations before we know what they are. There are good reasons to. Counting permutations gives us numbers that are big, and therefore interesting, fast. Counting is easy to motivate. Humans like counting. Counting is useful. Many probability questions are best answered by counting all the ways to arrange things, and how many of those arrangements are desirable somehow.

The count of permutations asks how many ways there are to put some things in order. If some of the things are identical, the number is smaller. Calculating the count may be a little tedious, but it’s not hard. We calculate, rather than “really” count, because — well, list all the possible ways to arrange the letters of the word ‘DEMONSTRATION’. I bet you turn that listing over to a computer too. But what is the computer counting?

If we’re trying to do this efficiently we have some system. Start with ‘DEMONSTRATION’. Then, say, swap the last two letters: ‘DEMONSTRATINO’. Then, mm, move the ‘N’ to the antepenultimate position: ‘DEMONSTRATNIO’. Then, oh, swap the last two letters again: ‘DEMONSTRATNOI’.

Then, oh, move the ‘N’ to the third-to-the-last position: ‘DEMONSTRANTIO’. What next? Oh, swap the last two letters again: ‘DEMONSTRANTOI’. Or, move what been the last letter to the antepenultimate position: ‘DEMONSTRANOTI’. And swap the last two letters once more: ‘DEMONSTRANOIT’.

Enough of that, you and my spellchecker say. I agree. What is it that all this is doing? What does that tell us about what a permutation is?

An obvious thing. Each new variation of the order came from swapping two letters of an earlier one. We needed a sequence of swaps to get to ‘DEMONSTRANOIT’. But each swap was of only two things. It’s a good thing to observe.

Another obvious thing. There’s no letters in ‘DEMONSTRANOIT’ or any of the other variations that weren’t in ‘DEMONSTRATION’. All that’s changed is the order.

This all has listed eight permutations, counting the original ‘DEMONSTRATION’ as one. There are, calculations tell me, 778,377,592 to go.

Would the number of permutations be different if we were shuffling around different things? If instead of the letters in the word ‘DEMONSTRATION’ it were, say, the numerals in the sequence ‘1234567897045’? Or the sequence of symbols ‘!@#$%^&*(&)$%’ instead? No, and that it would not is another clue about what permutations are.

Another thing, obvious in retrospect. Grant that we’ve been making new permutations by taking a sequence of letters (numerals, symbols) and swapping a pair. We got from ‘DEMONSTRATION’ to ‘DEMONSTRATINO’ by swapping the last two letters. What happens if we swap the last two letters again? We get ‘DEMONSTRATION’, a sequence of letters all right, although one already on our list of permutations.

One more thing, obvious once you’ve seen it. Imagine we had not started with ‘DEMONSTRATION’ but instead ‘DEMONSTRATNIO’. But that we followed the same sequences of swappings. Would we have come up with different permutations? … At least for the first couple permutations? Or would they be the same permutations, listed in a different order?

You’ve been kind, letting me call these things “permutations” before I say what a permutation is. It’s relied on a casual, intuitive idea of a permutation. It’s a shuffling around of some set of things. This is the casual idea that mathematicians rely on for a permutation. Sure we can make the idea precise. How hard will that be?

It’s not hard in form. The permutation is the rearranging of things into a new order. The hard part is the concept. It’s not “these symbols in this order” that’s the permutation. It’s the act of putting them in this new order that is. So it’s “swap the 12th and the 13th symbols”. Or, “move the 13th symbol to 11th place, the 11th symbol to 12th, and the 12th symbol to 13th place”.

We can describe each permutation as a function. All the permutation functions have the same domain and the same range. And the range is the domain. The function is a bijection. Every item in the domain matches exactly one item in the range, and vice-versa. There’s some sequence for the elements in the domain. And the rule for the function describes how that sequence changes.

So one permutation is “swap the 12th and the 13th elements”. Another permutation is “swap the 11th and the 12th elements”. Since the range of one function is the domain of another, we can compose the together. That is, we can “swap the 12th and the 13th elements, and then swap the 11th and the 12th elements”. This gets us another permutation. The effect of these two permutations, in this order, is “make the 13th element the 11th, make the 11th element the 12th, and make the 12th element the 13th”. The order we do these permutations in counts. “Swap the 11th and the 12th elements, and then swap the 12th and the 13th” gets us a different net effect. That one is “make the 12th element the 11th, make the 13th element the 12th, and make the 11th element the 13th”. Composition of functions does not commute.

That functions compose is normal enough. That their composition doesn’t commute is normal enough too. These functions are a bit odd in that we don’t care what the domain-and-range is. We only care that we can index the elements in it. That leads us to some new observations.

The big one is that the set of all these permutations is a group. I mean the way mathematicians mean group. That is, we have a set of items. These are the functions, the permutations. The instructions, like, “make the 12th element the 11th and the 13th element the 12th”, or “the 12th element the 13th”. We also need a group action, a thing that works like addition does for real numbers. That’s composition. That is, doing one permutation and then the other, to get a new permutation out of it. That new permutation is itself one of the permutations we’d had. We can’t compose permutations and get something that’s not a permutation. No amount of swapping around the letters of ‘DEMONSTRATION’ will get us ‘DEMONSTRATIONERS’.

When we talk about how permutations as a group work, we want to give individual permutations names. That ends up being letters. These are often Greek letters. I don’t know why we can’t use the ordinary Latin alphabet. I suppose someone who liked Greek letters wrote a really good textbook and everyone copies that. So instead of speaking about x and y, we’ll get α and β. Sometimes σ and τ. Or, quite often π, especially if we need a bunch of permutations. Then we get π₁, π₂, π₃, and so on. π_j. All the way to π_N. For the young mathematics major it might be the first time seeing π used for something not at all circle-related. It’s a weird sensation. Still, αβ is the composition of permutation α with permutation β. This means, do permutation β first, and then permutation α on whatever that result is. This is the same way that f(g(x)) means “evaluate g(x) first, and then figure out what f( that ) is”.

That’s all fine for naming them. But we would also like a good way to describe what a permutation does. There are several good forms. They all rely on indexing the elements, using the counting numbers: 1, 2, 3, 4, and so on. The notation I’ll share is called cycle notation. It’s easy to type. You write it within nice ordinary parentheses: (11 12) means “put the 11th element in slot 12, and the 12th element in slot 11”. (11, 12, 13) means “put the 11th element in slot 12, the 12th element in slot 13, and the 13th element in slot 11”. You can even chain these together: (10, 11)(12, 13) means “put the 10th element in slot 11 and the 11th element in slot 10; also, put the 12th element in slot 13, and the 13th element in slot 12”.

In that notation, writing (9), for example, means “put the 9th element in slot 9”. Or if you prefer, “leave element 9 alone”. Or we don’t mention it at all. The convention is that if something isn’t mentioned, leave it where it is.

This by the way is where we get the identity element. The permutation (1)(2)(3)(4)(etc) doesn’t actually swap anything. It counts as a permutation. Doing this is the equivalent of adding zero to a number.

This cycle notation makes it not hard to figure out the composition of permutations. What does (1 2)(1 3) do? Well, the (1 3) swaps the first and the third items. The (1 2), next, swaps what’s become the first and the second items. The effect is the same as the permutation (2 3 1). You can get pretty good at this sort of manipulation, in time.

You may also consider: if (1 2)(1 3) is the same as (2 3 1), then isn’t (2 3 1) the same as (1 2)(1 3)? Sure. But, like, can we write a longer permutation, like, (1 3 5 2 4), as the product of some smaller permutations? And we can. If it’s convenient, we can write it as a string of swaps, exchanging pairs of elements. This was the first “obvious” thing I had listed. A long enough chain of pairwise swaps will, in time, swap everything.

We call the group made of all these permutations the Symmetric Group of the set. Since it doesn’t matter what the underlying set is, just the number of elements in it, we can abbreviate this with the number of elements. S₂. S₄. S_N. Symmetric Groups are among the first groups you meet in abstract algebra that aren’t, like, integers modulo 12 or symmetries of a triangle. It’s novel enough to be interesting and to not be completely sure you’re doing it right.

You never leave the Symmetric Group, though, not if you stay in algebra. It has powerful consequences. It ties, for example, into the roots of polynomials. The structure of S₅ tells us there must exist fifth-degree polynomials we can’t solve by ordinary arithmetic and root operations. That is, there’s no version of the quadratic equation for high-order polynomials, and never can be.

There are more groups to build from permutations. The next one that you meet in Intro to Abstract Algebra is the Alternating Group. It’s made of only the even permutations. Those are the permutations made from an even number of swaps. (There are also odd permutations, which are what you imagine. They can’t make a group, though. No identity element.) They’re great for recapturing dread and uncertainty once you think you’ve got a handle on the Symmetric Group.

They lead to other groups too, and even rings. The Levi-Civita symbol describes whether a set of indices gives an even or an odd permutation (or neither). It makes life easier when we work on determinants and tensors and Jacobians. These tie in to the geometry of space, and how that affects physics. It also gets a supporting role in cross products. There are many cryptography schemes that have permutations at their core.

So this is a bit of what permutations are, and what they can get us.

---

Today’s and all the other 2020 A-to-Z essays should be at this link. Both the All-2020 and past A-to-Z essays should be at this link. Thanks for reading.

My 2018 Mathematics A To Z: Group Action

I got several great suggestions for topics for ‘g’. The one that most caught my imagination was mathtuition88’s, the group action. Mathtuition88 is run by Mr Wu, a mathematics tutor in Singapore. His mathematics blog recounts his own explorations of interesting topics.

Art by Thomas K Dye, creator of the web comics Newshounds, Something Happens, and Infinity Refugees. His current project is Projection Edge. And you can get Projection Edge six months ahead of public publication by subscribing to his Patreon. And he’s on Twitter as @Newshoundscomic.

Group Action.

This starts from groups. A group, here, means a pair of things. The first thing is a set of elements. The second is some operation. It takes a pair of things in the set and matches it to something in the set. For example, try the integers as the set, with addition as the operation. There are many kinds of groups you can make. There can be finite groups, ones with as few as one element or as many as you like. (The one-element groups are so boring. We usually need at least two to have much to say about them.) There can be infinite groups, like the integers. There can be discrete groups, where there’s always some minimum distance between elements. There can be continuous groups, like the real numbers, where there’s no smallest distance between distinct elements.

Groups came about from looking at how numbers work. So the first examples anyone gets are based on numbers. The integers, especially, and then the integers modulo something. For example, there’s , which has two numbers, 0 and 1. Addition works by the rule that 0 + 0 = 0, 0 + 1 = 1, 1 + 0 = 1, and 1 + 1 = 0. There’s similar rules for , which has three numbers, 0, 1, and 2.

But after a few comfortable minutes on this, group theory moves on to more abstract things. Things with names like the “permutation group”. This starts with some set of things and we don’t even care what the things are. They can be numbers. They can be letters. They can be places. They can be anything. We don’t care. The group is all of the ways to swap elements around. All the relabellings we can do without losing or gaining an item. Or another, the “symmetry group”. This is, for some given thing — plates, blocks, and wallpaper patterns are great examples — all the ways you can rotate or move or reflect the thing without changing the way it looks.

And now we’re creeping up on what a “group action” is. Let me just talk about permutations here. These are where you swap around items. Like, start out with a list of items “1 2 3 4”. And pick out a permutation, say, swap the second with the fourth item. We write that, in shorthand, as (2 4). Maybe another permutation too. Say, swap the first item with the third. Write that out as (1 3). We can multiply these permutations together. Doing these permutations, in this order, has a particular effect: it swaps the second and fourth items, and swaps the first and third items. This is another permutation on these four items.

These permutations, these “swap this item with that” rules, are a group. The set for the group is instructions like “swap this with that”, or “swap this with that, and that with this other thing, and this other thing with the first thing”. Or even “leave this thing alone”. The operation between two things in the set is, do one and then the other. For example, (2 3) and then (3 4) has the effect of moving the second thing to the fourth spot, the (original) fourth thing to the third spot, and the original third thing to the second spot. That is, it’s the permutation (2 3 4). If you ever need something to doodle during a slow meeting, try working out all the ways you can shuffle around, say, six things. And what happens as you do all the possible combinations of these things. Hey, you’re only permuting six items. How many ways could that be?

So here’s what sounds like a fussy point. The group here is made up the ways you can permute these items. The items aren’t part of the group. They just gave us something to talk about. This is where I got so confused, as an undergraduate, working out groups and group actions.

When we move back to talking about the original items, then we get a group action. You get a group action by putting together a group with some set of things. Let me call the group ‘G’ and the set ‘X’. If I need something particular in the group I’ll call that ‘g’. If I need something particular from the set ‘X’ I’ll call that ‘x’. This is fairly standard mathematics notation. You see how subtly clever this notation is. The group action comes from taking things in G and applying them to things in X, to get things in X. Usually other things, but not always. In the lingo, we say the group action maps the pair of things G and X to the set X.

There are rules these actions have to follow. They’re what you would expect, if you’ve done any fiddling with groups. Don’t worry about them. What’s interesting is what we get from group actions.

First is group orbits. Take some ‘g’ out of the group G. Take some ‘x’ out of the set ‘X’. And build this new set. First, x. Then, whatever g does to x, which we write as ‘gx’. But ‘gx’ is still something in ‘X’, so … what does g do to that? So toss in ‘ggx’. Which is still something in ‘X’, so, toss in ‘gggx’. And ‘ggggx’. And keep going, until you stop getting new things. If ‘X’ is finite, this sequence has to be finite. It might be the whole set of X. It might be some subset of X. But if ‘X’ is finite, it’ll get back, eventually, to where you started, which is why we call this the “group orbit”. We use the same term even if X isn’t finite and we can’t guarantee that all these iterations of g on x eventually get back to the original x. This is a subgroup of X, based on the same group operation that G has.

There can be other special groups. Like, are there elements ‘g’ that map ‘x’ to ‘x’? Sure. The has to be at least one, since the group G has an identity element. There might be others. So, for any given ‘x’, what are all the elements in ‘g’ that don’t change it? The set of all the values of g for which gx is x is the “isotropy group” G_x. Or the “stabilizer subgroup”. This is a subgroup of G, based on x.

Yes, but the point?

Well, the biggest thing we get from group actions is the chance to put group theory principles to work on specific things. A group might describe the ways you can rotate or reflect a square plate without leaving an obvious change in the plate. The group action lets you make this about the plate. Much of modern physics is about learning how the geometry of a thing affects its behavior. This can be the obvious sorts of geometry, like, whether it’s rotationally symmetric. But it can be subtler things, like, whether the forces in the system are different at different times. Group actions let us put what we know from geometry and topology to work in specifics.

A particular favorite of mine is that they let us express the wallpaper groups. These are the ways we can use rotations and reflections and translations (linear displacements) to create different patterns. There are fewer different patterns than you might have guessed. (Different, here, overlooks such petty things as whether the repeated pattern is a diamond, a flower, or a hexagon. Or whether the pattern repeats every two inches versus every three inches.)

And they stay useful for abstract mathematical problems. All this talk about orbits and stabilizers lets us find something called the Orbit Stabilization Theorem. This connects the size of the group G to the size of orbits of x and of the stabilizer subgroups. This has the exciting advantage of letting us turn many proofs into counting arguments. A counting argument is just what you think: showing there’s as many of one thing as there are another. here’s a nice page about the Orbit Stabilization Theorem, and how to use it. This includes some nice, easy-to-understand problems like “how many different necklaces could you make with three red, two green, and one blue bead?” Or if that seems too mundane a problem, an equivalent one from organic chemistry: how many isomers of naphthol could there be? You see where these group actions give us useful information about specific problems.

---

If you should like a more detailed introduction, although one that supposes you’re more conversant with group theory than I do here, this is a good sequence: Group Actions I, which actually defines the things. Group actions II: the orbit-stabilizer theorem, which is about just what it says. Group actions III — what’s the point of them?, which has the sort of snappy title I like, but which gives points that make sense when you’re comfortable talking about quotient groups and isomorphisms and the like. And what I think is the last in the sequence, Group actions IV: intrinsic actions, which is about using group actions to prove stuff. And includes a mention of one of my favorite topics, the points the essay-writer just didn’t get the first time through. (And more; there’s a point where the essay goes wrong, and needs correction. I am not the Joseph who found the problem.)

The End 2016 Mathematics A To Z: Monster Group

Today’s is one of my requested mathematics terms. This one comes to us from group theory, by way of Gaurish, and as ever I’m thankful for the prompt.

Monster Group.

It’s hard to learn from an example. Examples are great, and I wouldn’t try teaching anything subtle without one. Might not even try teaching the obvious without one. But a single example is dangerous. The learner has trouble telling what parts of the example are the general lesson to learn and what parts are just things that happen to be true for that case. Having several examples, of different kinds of things, saves the student. The thing in common to many different examples is the thing to retain.

The mathematics major learns group theory in Introduction To Not That Kind Of Algebra, MAT 351. A group extracts the barest essence of arithmetic: a bunch of things and the ability to add them together. So what’s an example? … Well, the integers do nicely. What’s another example? … Well, the integers modulo two, where the only things are 0 and 1 and we know 1 + 1 equals 0. What’s another example? … The integers modulo three, where the only things are 0 and 1 and 2 and we know 1 + 2 equals 0. How about another? … The integers modulo four? Modulo five?

All true. All, also, basically the same thing. The whole set of integers, or of real numbers, are different. But as finite groups, the integers modulo anything are nice easy to understand groups. They’re known as Cyclic Groups for reasons I’ll explain if asked. But all the Cyclic Groups are kind of the same.

So how about another example? And here we get some good ones. There’s the Permutation Groups. These are fun. You start off with a set of things. You can label them anything you like, but you’re daft if you don’t label them the counting numbers. So, say, the set of things 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Start with them in that order. A permutation is the swapping of any pair of those things. So swapping, say, the second and fifth things to get the list 1, 5, 3, 4, 2. The collection of all the swaps you can make is the Permutation Group on this set of things. The things in the group are not 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. The things in the permutation group are “swap the second and fifth thing” or “swap the third and first thing” or “swap the fourth and the third thing”. You maybe feel uneasy about this. That’s all right. I suggest playing with this until you feel comfortable because it is a lot of fun to play with. Playing in this case mean writing out all the ways you can swap stuff, which you can always do as a string of swaps of exactly two things.

(Some people may remember an episode of Futurama that involved a brain-swapping machine. Or a body-swapping machine, if you prefer. The gimmick of the episode is that two people could only swap bodies/brains exactly one time. The problem was how to get everybody back in their correct bodies. It turns out to be possible to do, and one of the show’s writers did write a proof of it. It’s shown on-screen for a moment. Many fans were awestruck by an episode of the show inspiring a Mathematical Theorem. They’re overestimating how rare theorems are. But it is fun when real mathematics gets done as a side effect of telling a good joke. Anyway, the theorem fits well in group theory and the study of these permutation groups.)

So the student wanting examples of groups can get the Permutation Group on three elements. Or the Permutation Group on four elements. The Permutation Group on five elements. … You kind of see, this is certainly different from those Cyclic Groups. But they’re all kind of like each other.

An “Alternating Group” is one where all the elements in it are an even number of permutations. So, “swap the second and fifth things” would not be in an alternating group. But “swap the second and fifth things, and swap the fourth and second things” would be. And so the student needing examples can look at the Alternating Group on two elements. Or the Alternating Group on three elements. The Alternating Group on four elements. And so on. It’s slightly different from the Permutation Group. It’s certainly different from the Cyclic Group. But still, if you’ve mastered the Alternating Group on five elements you aren’t going to see the Alternating Group on six elements as all that different.

Cyclic Groups and Alternating Groups have some stuff in common. Permutation Groups not so much and I’m going to leave them in the above paragraph, waving, since they got me to the Alternating Groups I wanted.

One is that they’re finite. At least they can be. I like finite groups. I imagine students like them too. It’s nice having a mathematical thing you can write out in full and know you aren’t missing anything.

The second thing is that they are, or they can be, “simple groups”. That’s … a challenge to explain. This has to do with the structure of the group and the kinds of subgroup you can extract from it. It’s very very loosely and figuratively and do not try to pass this off at your thesis defense kind of like being a prime number. In fact, Cyclic Groups for a prime number of elements are simple groups. So are Alternating Groups on five or more elements.

So we get to wondering: what are the finite simple groups? Turns out they come in four main families. One family is the Cyclic Groups for a prime number of things. One family is the Alternating Groups on five or more things. One family is this collection called the Chevalley Groups. Those are mostly things about projections: the ways to map one set of coordinates into another. We don’t talk about them much in Introduction To Not That Kind Of Algebra. They’re too deep into Geometry for people learning Algebra. The last family is this collection called the Twisted Chevalley Groups, or the Steinberg Groups. And they .. uhm. Well, I never got far enough into Geometry I’m Guessing to understand what they’re for. I’m certain they’re quite useful to people working in the field of order-three automorphisms of the whatever exactly D₄ is.

And that’s it. That’s all the families there are. If it’s a finite simple group then it’s one of these. … Unless it isn’t.

Because there are a couple of stragglers. There are a few finite simple groups that don’t fit in any of the four big families. And it really is only a few. I would have expected an infinite number of weird little cases that don’t belong to a family that looks similar. Instead, there are 26. (27 if you decide a particular one of the Steinberg Groups doesn’t really belong in that family. I’m not familiar enough with the case to have an opinion.) Funny number to have turn up. It took ten thousand pages to prove there were just the 26 special cases. I haven’t read them all. (I haven’t read any of the pages. But my Algebra professors at Rutgers were proud to mention their department’s work in tracking down all these cases.)

Some of these cases have some resemblance to one another. But not enough to see them as a family the way the Cyclic Groups are. We bundle all these together in a wastebasket taxon called “the sporadic groups”. The first five of them were worked out in the 1860s. The last of them was worked out in 1980, seven years after its existence was first suspected.

The sporadic groups all have weird sizes. The smallest one, known as M₁₁ (for “Mathieu”, who found it and four of its siblings in the 1860s) has 7,920 things in it. They get enormous soon after that.

The biggest of the sporadic groups, and the last one described, is the Monster Group. It’s known as M. It has a lot of things in it. In particular it’s got 808,017,424,794,512,875,886,459,904,961,710,757,005,754,368,000,000,000 things in it. So, you know, it’s not like we’ve written out everything that’s in it. We’ve just got descriptions of how you would write out everything in it, if you wanted to try. And you can get a good argument going about what it means for a mathematical object to “exist”, or to be “created”. There are something like 10⁵⁴ things in it. That’s something like a trillion times a trillion times the number of stars in the observable universe. Not just the stars in our galaxy, but all the stars in all the galaxies we could in principle ever see.

It’s one of the rare things for which “Brobdingnagian” is an understatement. Everything about it is mind-boggling, the sort of thing that staggers the imagination more than infinitely large things do. We don’t really think of infinitely large things; we just picture “something big”. A number like that one above is definite, and awesomely big. Just read off the digits of that number; it sounds like what we imagine infinity ought to be.

We can make a chart, called the “character table”, which describes how subsets of the group interact with one another. The character table for the Monster Group is 194 rows tall and 194 columns wide. The Monster Group can be represented as this, I am solemnly assured, logical and beautiful algebraic structure. It’s something like a polyhedron in rather more than three dimensions of space. In particular it needs 196,884 dimensions to show off its particular beauty. I am taking experts’ word for it. I can’t quite imagine more than 196,883 dimensions for a thing.

And it’s a thing full of mystery. This creature of group theory makes us think of the number 196,884. The same 196,884 turns up in number theory, the study of how integers are put together. It’s the first non-boring coefficient in a thing called the j-function. It’s not coincidence. This bit of number theory and this bit of group theory are bound together, but it took some years for anyone to quite understand why.

There are more mysteries. The character table has 194 rows and columns. Each column implies a function. Some of those functions are duplicated; there are 171 distinct ones. But some of the distinct ones it turns out you can find by adding together multiples of others. There are 163 distinct ones. 163 appears again in number theory, in the study of algebraic integers. These are, of course, not integers at all. They’re things that look like complex-valued numbers: some real number plus some (possibly other) real number times the square root of some specified negative number. They’ve got neat properties. Or weird ones.

You know how with integers there’s just one way to factor them? Like, fifteen is equal to three times five and no other set of prime numbers? Algebraic integers don’t work like that. There’s usually multiple ways to do that. There are exceptions, algebraic integers that still have unique factorings. They happen only for a few square roots of negative numbers. The biggest of those negative numbers? Minus 163.

I don’t know if this 163 appearance means something. As I understand the matter, neither does anybody else.

There is some link to the mathematics of string theory. That’s an interesting but controversial and hard-to-experiment-upon model for how the physics of the universe may work. But I don’t know string theory well enough to say what it is or how surprising this should be.

The Monster Group creates a monster essay. I suppose it couldn’t do otherwise. I suppose I can’t adequately describe all its sublime mystery. Dr Mark Ronan has written a fine web page describing much of the Monster Group and the history of our understanding of it. He also has written a book, Symmetry and the Monster, to explain all this in greater depths. I’ve not read the book. But I do mean to, now.

A Leap Day 2016 Mathematics A To Z: Normal Subgroup

The Leap Day Mathematics A to Z term today is another abstract algebra term. This one again comes from from Gaurish, chief author of the Gaurish4Math blog. Part of it is going to be easy. Part of it is going to need a running start.

Normal Subgroup.

The “subgroup” part of this is easy. Remember that a “group” means a collection of things and some operation that lets us combine them. We usually call that either addition or multiplication. We usually write it out like it’s multiplication. If a and b are things from the collection, we write “ab” to mean adding or multiplying them together. (If we had a ring, we’d have something like addition and something like multiplication, and we’d be able to do “a + b” or “ab” as needed.)

So with that in mind, the first thing you’d imagine a subgroup to be? That’s what it is. It’s a collection of things, all of which are in the original group, and that uses the same operation as the original group. For example, if the original group has a set that’s the whole numbers and the operation of addition, a subgroup would be the even numbers and the same old addition.

Now things will get much clearer if I have names. Let me use G to mean some group. This is a common generic name for a group. Let me use H as the name for a subgroup of G. This is a common generic name for a subgroup of G. You see how deeply we reach to find names for things. And we’ll still want names for elements inside groups. Those are almost always lowercase letters: a and b, for example. If we want to make clear it’s something from G’s set, we might use g. If we want to be make clear it’s something from H’s set, we might use h.

I need to tax your imagination again. Suppose “g” is some element in G’s set. What would you imagine the symbol “gH” means? No, imagine something simpler.

Mathematicians call this “left-multiplying H by g”. What we mean is, take every single element h that’s in the set H, and find out what gh is. Then take all these products together. That’s the set “gH”. This might be a subgroup. It might not. No telling. Not without knowing what G is, what H is, what g is, and what the operation is. And we call it left-multiplying even if the operation is called addition or something else. It’s just easier to have a standard name even if the name doesn’t make perfect sense.

That we named something left-multiplying probably inspires a question. Is there right-multiplying? Yes, there is. We’d write that as “Hg”. And that means take every single element h that’s in the set H, and find out what hg is. Then take all these products together.

You see the subtle difference between left-multiplying and right-multiplying. In the one, you multiply everything in H on the left. In the other, you multiply everything in H on the right.

So. Take anything in G. Let me call that g. If it’s always, necessarily, true that the left-product, gH, is the same set as the right-product, Hg, then H is a normal subgroup of G.

The mistake mathematics majors make in doing this: we need the set gH to be the same as the set Hg. That is, the whole collection of products has to be the same for left-multiplying as right-multiplying. Nobody cares whether for any particular thing, h, inside H whether gh is the same as hg. It doesn’t matter. It’s whether the whole collection of things is the same that counts. I assume every mathematics major makes this mistake. I did, anyway.

The natural thing to wonder here: how can the set gH ever not be the same as Hg? For that matter, how can a single product gh ever not be the same as hg? Do mathematicians just forget how multiplication works?

Technically speaking no, we don’t. We just want to be able to talk about operations where maybe the order does too matter. With ordinary regular-old-number addition and multiplication the order doesn’t matter. gh always equals hg. We say this “commutes”. And if the operation for a group commutes, then every subgroup is a normal subgroup.

But sometimes we’re interested in things that don’t commute. Or that we can’t assume commute. The example every algebra book uses for this is three-dimensional rotations. Set your algebra book down on a table. If you don’t have an algebra book you may use another one instead. I recommend Christopher Miller’s American Cornball: A Laffopedic Guide To The Formerly Funny. It’s a fine guide to all sorts of jokes that used to amuse and what was supposed to be amusing about them. If you don’t have a table then I don’t know what to suggest.

Spin the book clockwise on the table and then stand it up on the edge nearer you. Then try again. Put the book back where it started. Stand it up on the edge nearer you and then spin it clockwise on the table. The book faces a different way this time around. (If it doesn’t, you spun too much. Try again until you get the answer I said.)

Three-dimensional rotations like this form a group. The different ways you can turn something are the elements of its set. The operation between two rotations is just to do one and then the other, in order. But they don’t commute, not most of the time. So they can have a subgroup that isn’t normal.

You may believe me now that such things exist. Now you can move on to wondering why we should care.

Let me start by saying every group has at least two normal subgroups. Whatever your group G is, there’s a subgroup that’s made up just of the identity element and the group’s operation. The identity element is the thing that acts like 1 does for multiplication. You can multiply stuff by it and you get the same thing you started. The identity and the operator make a subgroup. And you’ll convince yourself that it’s a normal subgroup as soon as you write down g1 = 1g.

(Wait, you might ask! What if multiplying on the left has a different identity than multiplying on the right does? Great question. Very good insight. You’ve got a knack for asking good questions. If we have that then we’re working with a more exotic group-like mathematical object, so don’t worry.)

So the identity, ‘1’, makes a normal subgroup. Here’s another normal subgroup. The whole of G qualifies. (It’s OK if you feel uneasy. Think it over.)

So ‘1’ is a normal subgroup of G. G is a normal subgroup of G. They’re boring answers. We know them before we even know anything about G. But they qualify.

Does this sound familiar any? We have a thing. ‘1’ and the original thing subdivide it. It might be possible to subdivide it more, but maybe not.

Is this all … factoring?

Please here pretend I make a bunch of awkward faces while trying not to say either yes or no. But if H is a normal subgroup of G, then we can write something G/H, just like we might write 4/2, and that means something.

That G/H we call a quotient group. It’s a subgroup, sure. As to what it is … well, let me go back to examples.

Let’s say that G is the set of whole numbers and the operation of ordinary old addition. And H is the set of whole numbers that are multiples of 4, again with addition. So the things in H are 0, 4, 8, 12, and so on. Also -4, -8, -12, and so on.

Suppose we pick things in G. And we use the group operation on the set of things in H. How many different sets can we get out of it? So for example we might pick the number 1 out of G. The set 1 + H is … well, list all the things that are in H, and add 1 to them. So that’s 1 + 0, 1 + 4, 1 + 8, 1 + 12, and 1 + -4, 1 + -8, 1 + -12, and so on. All told, it’s a bunch of numbers one more than a whole multiple of 4.

Or we might pick the number 7 out of G. The set 7 + H is 7 + 0, 7 + 4, 7 + 8, 7 + 12, and so on. It’s also got 7 + -4, 7 + -8, 7 + -12, and all that. These are all the numbers that are three more than a whole multiple of 4.

We might pick the number 8 out of G. This happens to be in H, but so what? The set 8 + H is going to be 8 + 0, 8 + 4, 8 + 8 … you know, these are all going to be multiples of 4 again. So 8 + H is just H. Some of these are simple.

How about the number 3? 3 + H is 3 + 0, 3 + 4, 3 + 8, and so on. The thing is, the collection of numbers you get by 3 + H is the same as the collection of numbers you get by 7 + H. Both 3 and 7 do the same thing when we add them to H.

Fiddle around with this and you realize there’s only four possible different sets you get out of this. You can get 0 + H, 1 + H, 2 + H, or 3 + H. Any other numbers in G give you a set that looks exactly like one of those. So we can speak of 0, 1, 2, and 3 as being a new group, the “quotient group” that you get by G/H. (This looks more like remainders to me, too, but that’s the terminology we have.)

But we can do something like this with any group and any normal subgroup of that group. The normal subgroup gives us a way of picking out a representative set of the original group. That set shows off all the different ways we can manipulate the normal subgroup. It tells us things about the way the original group is put together.

Normal subgroups are not just “factors, but for groups”. They do give us a way to see groups as things built up of other groups. We can see structures in sets of things.

A Leap Day 2016 Mathematics A To Z: Isomorphism

Gillian B made the request that’s today’s A To Z word. I’d said it would be challenging. Many have been, so far. But I set up some of the work with “homomorphism” last time. As with “homomorphism” it’s a word that appears in several fields and about different kinds of mathematical structure. As with homomorphism, I’ll try describing what it is for groups. They seem least challenging to the imagination.

Isomorphism.

An isomorphism is a kind of homomorphism. And a homomorphism is a kind of thing we do with groups. A group is a mathematical construct made up of two things. One is a set of things. The other is an operation, like addition, where we take two of the things and get one of the things in the set. I think that’s as far as we need to go in this chain of defining things.

A homomorphism is a mapping, or if you like the word better, a function. The homomorphism matches everything in a group to the things in a group. It might be the same group; it might be a different group. What makes it a homomorphism is that it preserves addition.

I gave an example last time, with groups I called G and H. G had as its set the whole numbers 0 through 3 and as operation addition modulo 4. H had as its set the whole numbers 0 through 7 and as operation addition modulo 8. And I defined a homomorphism φ which took a number in G and matched it the number in H which was twice that. Then for any a and b which were in G’s set, φ(a + b) was equal to φ(a) + φ(b).

We can have all kinds of homomorphisms. For example, imagine my new φ₁. It takes whatever you start with in G and maps it to the 0 inside H. φ₁(1) = 0, φ₁(2) = 0, φ₁(3) = 0, φ₁(0) = 0. It’s a legitimate homomorphism. Seems like it’s wasting a lot of what’s in H, though.

An isomorphism doesn’t waste anything that’s in H. It’s a homomorphism in which everything in G’s set matches to exactly one thing in H’s, and vice-versa. That is, it’s both a homomorphism and a bijection, to use one of the terms from the Summer 2015 A To Z. The key to remembering this is the “iso” prefix. It comes from the Greek “isos”, meaning “equal”. You can often understand an isomorphism from group G to group H showing how they’re the same thing. They might be represented differently, but they’re equivalent in the lights you use.

I can’t make an isomorphism between the G and the H I started with. Their sets are different sizes. There’s no matching everything in H’s set to everything in G’s set without some duplication. But we can make other examples.

For instance, let me start with a new group G. It’s got as its set the positive real numbers. And it has as its operation ordinary multiplication, the kind you always do. And I want a new group H. It’s got as its set all the real numbers, positive and negative. It has as its operation ordinary addition, the kind you always do.

For an isomorphism φ, take the number x that’s in G’s set. Match it to the number that’s the logarithm of x, found in H’s set. This is a one-to-one pairing: if the logarithm of x equals the logarithm of y, then x has to equal y. And it covers everything: all the positive real numbers have a logarithm, somewhere in the positive or negative real numbers.

And this is a homomorphism. Take any x and y that are in G’s set. Their “addition”, the group operation, is to multiply them together. So “x + y”, in G, gives us the number xy. (I know, I know. But trust me.) φ(x + y) is equal to log(xy), which equals log(x) + log(y), which is the same number as φ(x) + φ(y). There’s a way to see the postive real numbers being multiplied together as equivalent to all the real numbers being added together.

You might figure that the positive real numbers and all the real numbers aren’t very different-looking things. Perhaps so. Here’s another example I like, drawn from Wikipedia’s entry on Isomorphism. It has as sets things that don’t seem to have anything to do with one another.

Let me have another brand-new group G. It has as its set the whole numbers 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. Its operation is addition modulo 6. So 2 + 2 is 4, while 2 + 3 is 5, and 2 + 4 is 0, and 2 + 5 is 1, and so on. You get the pattern, I hope.

The brand-new group H, now, that has a more complicated-looking set. Its set is ordered pairs of whole numbers, which I’ll represent as (a, b). Here ‘a’ may be either 0 or 1. ‘b’ may be 0, 1, or 2. To describe its addition rule, let me say we have the elements (a, b) and (c, d). Find their sum first by adding together a and c, modulo 2. So 0 + 0 is 0, 1 + 0 is 1, 0 + 1 is 1, and 1 + 1 is 0. That result is the first number in the pair. The second number we find by adding together b and d, modulo 3. So 1 + 0 is 1, and 1 + 1 is 2, and 1 + 2 is 0, and so on.

So, for example, (0, 1) plus (1, 1) will be (1, 2). But (0, 1) plus (1, 2) will be (1, 0). (1, 2) plus (1, 0) will be (0, 2). (1, 2) plus (1, 2) will be (0, 1). And so on.

The isomorphism matches up things in G to things in H this way:

In G	φ(G), in H
0	(0, 0)
1	(1, 1)
2	(0, 2)
3	(1, 0)
4	(0, 1)
5	(1, 2)

I recommend playing with this a while. Pick any pair of numbers x and y that you like from G. And check their matching ordered pairs φ(x) and φ(y) in H. φ(x + y) is the same thing as φ(x) + φ(y) even though the things in G’s set don’t look anything like the things in H’s.

Isomorphisms exist for other structures. The idea extends the way homomorphisms do. A ring, for example, has two operations which we think of as addition and multiplication. An isomorphism matches two rings in ways that preserve the addition and multiplication, and which match everything in the first ring’s set to everything in the second ring’s set, one-to-one. The idea of the isomorphism is that two different things can be paired up so that they look, and work, remarkably like one another.

One of the common uses of isomorphisms is describing the evolution of systems. We often like to look at how some physical system develops from different starting conditions. If you make a little variation in how things start, does this produce a small change in how it develops, or does it produce a big change? How big? And the description of how time changes the system is, often, an isomorphism.

Isomorphisms also appear when we study the structures of groups. They turn up naturally when we look at things called “normal subgroups”. The name alone gives you a good idea what a “subgroup” is. “Normal”, well, that’ll be another essay.

A Summer 2015 Mathematics A To Z: ring

Ring.

Early on in her undergraduate career a mathematics major will take a class called Algebra. Actually, Introduction to Algebra is more likely, but another Algebra will follow. She will have to explain to her friends and parents that no, it’s not more of that stuff they didn’t understand in high school about expanding binomial terms and finding quadratic equations. The class is the study of constructs that work much like numbers do, but that aren’t necessarily numbers.

The first structure studied is the group. That’s made of two components. One is a set of elements. There might be infinitely many of them — the real numbers, say, or the whole numbers. Or there might be finitely many — the whole numbers from 0 up to 11, or even just the numbers 0 and 1. The other component is an operation that works like addition. What we mean by “works like addition” is that you can take two of the things in the set, “add” them together, and get something else that’s in the set. It has to be associative: something plus the sum of two other things has to equal the sum of the first two things plus the third thing. That is, 1 + (2 + 3) is the same as (1 + 2) + 3.

Also, by the rules of what makes a group, the addition has to commute. First thing plus second thing has to be the same as second thing plus first thing. That is, 1 + 2 has the same value as 2 + 1 does. Furthermore, there has to be something called the additive identity. It works like zero does in ordinary arithmetic. Anything plus the additive identity is that original thing again. And finally, everything in the group has something that’s its additive inverse. The thing plus the additive inverse is the additive identity, our zero.

If you’re lost, that’s all right. A mathematics major spends as much as four weeks in Intro to Algebra feeling lost here. But this is an example. Suppose we have a group made up of the elements 0, 1, 2, and 3. 0 will be the additive identity: 0 plus anything is that original thing. So 1 plus 0 is 1. 1 plus 1 is 2. 1 plus 2 will be 3. 1 plus 3 will be … well, make that 0 again. 2 plus 0 is 2. 2 plus 1 will be 3. 2 plus 2 will be 0. 2 plus 3 will be 1. 3 plus 0 will be 3. 3 plus 1 will be 0. 3 plus 2 will be 1. 3 plus 3 will be 2. Plus will look like a very strange word at this point.

All the elements in this have an additive inverse. Add 3 to 1 and you get 0. Add 2 to 2 and you get 0. Add 1 to 3 and you get 0. And, yes, add 0 to 0 and you get 0. This means you get to do subtraction just as well as you get to do addition.

We’re halfway there. A “ring”, introduced just as the mathematics major has got the hang of groups, is a group with a second operation. Besides being a collection of elements and an addition-like operation, a ring also has a multiplication-like operation. It doesn’t have to do much, as a multiplication. It has to be associative. That is, something times the product of two other things has to be the same as the product of the first two things times the third. You’ve seen that, though. 1 x (2 x 3) is the same as (1 x 2) x 3. And it has to distribute: something times the sum of two other things has to be the same as the sum of the something times the first thing and the something times the second. That is, 2 x (3 + 4) is the same as 2 x 3 plus 2 x 4.

For example, the group we had before, 0 times anything will be 0. 1 times anything will be what we started with: 1 times 0 is 0, 1 times 1 is 1, 1 times 2 is 2, and 1 times 3 is 3. 2 times 0 is 0, 2 times 1 is 2, 2 times 2 will be 0 again, and 2 times 3 will be 2 again. 3 times 0 is 0, 3 times 1 is 3, 3 times 2 is 2, and 3 times 3 is 1. Believe it or not, this all works out. And “times” doesn’t get to look nearly so weird as “plus” does.

And that’s all you need: a collection of things, an operation that looks a bit like addition, and an operation that looks even more vaguely like multiplication.

Now the controversy. How much does something have to look like multiplication? Some people insist that a ring has to have a multiplicative identity, something that works like 1. The ring I described has one, but one could imagine a ring that hasn’t, such as the even numbers and ordinary addition and multiplication. People who want rings to have multiplicative identity sometimes use “rng” to speak — well, write — of rings that haven’t.

Some people want rings to have multiplicative inverses. That is, anything except zero has something you can multiply it by to get 1. The little ring I built there hasn’t got one, because there’s nothing you can multiply 2 by to get 1. Some insist on multiplication commuting, that 2 times 3 equals 3 times 2.

Who’s right? It depends what you want to do. Everybody agrees that a ring has to have elements, and addition, and multiplication, and that the multiplication has to distribute across addition. The rest depends on the author, and the tradition the author works in. Mathematical constructs are things humans find interesting to study. The details of how they’re made will depend on what work we want to do.

If a mathematician wishes to make clear that she expects a ring to have multiplication that commutes and to have a multiplicative identity she can say so. She would write that something is a commutative ring with identity. Or the context may make things clear. If you’re not sure, then you can suppose she uses the definition of “ring” that was in the textbook from her Intro to Algebra class sophomore year.

It may seem strange to think that mathematicians don’t all agree on what a ring is. After all, don’t mathematicians deal in universal, eternal truths? … And they do; things that are proven by rigorous deduction are inarguably true. But the parts of these truths that are interesting are a matter of human judgement. We choose the bunches of ideas that are convenient to work with, and give names to those. That’s much of what makes this glossary an interesting project.