Abelian group


In mathematics, an abelian group, also called a commutative group, is a group in which the result of applying the group operation to two group elements does not depend on the order in which they are written. That is, the group operation is commutative. With addition as an operation, the integers and the real numbers form abelian groups, and the concept of an abelian group may be viewed as a generalization of these examples. Abelian groups are named after early 19th century mathematician Niels Henrik Abel.
The concept of an abelian group underlies many fundamental algebraic structures, such as fields, rings, vector spaces, and algebras. The theory of abelian groups is generally simpler than that of their non-abelian counterparts, and finite abelian groups are very well understood and [|fully classified].

Definition

An abelian group is a set,, together with an operation that combines any two elements and of to form another element of denoted. The symbol is a general placeholder for a concretely given operation. To qualify as an abelian group, the set and operation,, must satisfy five requirements known as the abelian group axioms:
;Closure: For all, in, the result of the operation is also in.
;Associativity: For all,, and in, the equation holds.
;Identity element: There exists an element in, such that for all elements in, the equation holds.
;Inverse element: For each in there exists an element in such that, where is the identity element.
;Commutativity: For all, in,.
A group in which the group operation is not commutative is called a "non-abelian group" or "non-commutative group".

Facts

Notation

There are two main notational conventions for abelian groups – additive and multiplicative.
ConventionOperationIdentityPowersInverse
Addition0
Multiplicationor1

Generally, the multiplicative notation is the usual notation for groups, while the additive notation is the usual notation for modules and rings. The additive notation may also be used to emphasize that a particular group is abelian, whenever both abelian and non-abelian groups are considered, some notable exceptions being near-rings and partially ordered groups, where an operation is written additively even when non-abelian.

Multiplication table

To verify that a finite group is abelian, a table – known as a Cayley table – can be constructed in a similar fashion to a multiplication table. If the group is under the the entry of this table contains the product. The group is abelian if and only if this table is symmetric about the main diagonal.
This is true since if the group is abelian, then. This implies that the entry of the table equals the entry, thus the table is symmetric about the main diagonal.

Examples

In general, matrices, even invertible matrices, do not form an abelian group under multiplication because matrix multiplication is generally not commutative. However, some groups of matrices are abelian groups under matrix multiplication – one example is the group of rotation matrices.

Historical remarks

named abelian groups after Norwegian mathematician Niels Henrik Abel, because Abel found that the commutativity of the group of a polynomial implies that the roots of the polynomial can be calculated by using radicals. See Section 6.5 of Cox for more information on the historical background.

Properties

If is a natural number and is an element of an abelian group written additively, then can be defined as and. In this way, becomes a module over the ring of integers. In fact, the modules over can be identified with the abelian groups.
Theorems about abelian groups can often be generalized to theorems about modules over an arbitrary principal ideal domain. A typical example is the classification of finitely generated abelian groups which is a specialization of the structure theorem for finitely generated modules over a principal ideal domain. In the case of finitely generated abelian groups, this theorem guarantees that an abelian group splits as a direct sum of a torsion group and a free abelian group. The former may be written as a direct sum of finitely many groups of the form for prime, and the latter is a direct sum of finitely many copies of.
If are two group homomorphisms between abelian groups, then their sum, defined by, is again a homomorphism. The set of all group homomorphisms from to thus turns into an abelian group in its own right.
Somewhat akin to the dimension of vector spaces, every abelian group has a rank. It is defined as the maximal cardinality of a set of linearly independent elements of the group. The integers and the rational numbers have rank one, as well as every subgroup of the rationals.
The center of a group is the set of elements that commute with every element of. A group is abelian if and only if it is equal to its center. The center of a group is always a characteristic abelian subgroup of. If the quotient group of a group by its center is cyclic then is abelian.

Finite abelian groups

Cyclic groups of integers modulo,, were among the first examples of groups. It turns out that an arbitrary finite abelian group is isomorphic to a direct sum of finite cyclic groups of prime power order, and these orders are uniquely determined, forming a complete system of invariants. The automorphism group of a finite abelian group can be described directly in terms of these invariants. The theory had been first developed in the 1879 paper of Georg Frobenius and Ludwig Stickelberger and later was both simplified and generalized to finitely generated modules over a principal ideal domain, forming an important chapter of linear algebra.
Any group of prime order is isomorphic to a cyclic group and therefore abelian. Any group whose order is a square of a prime number is also abelian. In fact, for every prime number there are exactly two groups of order, namely and.

Classification

The [|fundamental theorem] of finite abelian groups states that every finite abelian group can be expressed as the direct sum of cyclic subgroups of prime-power order; it is also known as the basis theorem for finite abelian groups. This is generalized by the fundamental theorem of finitely generated abelian groups, with finite groups being the special case when G has zero rank; this in turn admits numerous further generalizations.
The classification was proven by Leopold Kronecker in 1870, though it was not stated in modern group-theoretic terms until later, and was preceded by a similar classification of quadratic forms by Carl Friedrich Gauss in 1801; see history for details.
The cyclic group of order is isomorphic to the direct sum of and if and only if and are coprime. It follows that any finite abelian group is isomorphic to a direct sum of the form
in either of the following canonical ways:
For example, can be expressed as the direct sum of two cyclic subgroups of order 3 and 5:. The same can be said for any abelian group of order 15, leading to the remarkable conclusion that all abelian groups of order 15 are isomorphic.
For another example, every abelian group of order 8 is isomorphic to either , , or.
See also list of small groups for finite abelian groups of order 30 or less.

Automorphisms

One can apply the fundamental theorem to count the automorphisms of a given finite abelian group. To do this, one uses the fact that if splits as a direct sum of subgroups of coprime order, then.
Given this, the fundamental theorem shows that to compute the automorphism group of it suffices to compute the automorphism groups of the Sylow -subgroups separately. Fix a prime and suppose the exponents of the cyclic factors of the Sylow -subgroup are arranged in increasing order:
for some. One needs to find the automorphisms of
One special case is when, so that there is only one cyclic prime-power factor in the Sylow -subgroup. In this case the theory of automorphisms of a finite cyclic group can be used. Another special case is when is arbitrary but for. Here, one is considering to be of the form
so elements of this subgroup can be viewed as comprising a vector space of dimension over the finite field of elements. The automorphisms of this subgroup are therefore given by the invertible linear transformations, so
where is the appropriate general linear group. This is easily shown to have order
In the most general case, where the and are arbitrary, the automorphism group is more difficult to determine. It is known, however, that if one defines
and
then one has in particular,, and
One can check that this yields the orders in the previous examples as special cases.

Finitely generated abelian groups

An abelian group is finitely generated if it contains a finite set of elements such that every element of the group is a linear combination with integer coefficients of elements of.
Let be a free abelian group with basis
There is a unique group homomorphism
such that
This homomorphism is surjective, and its kernel is finitely generated. Consider the matrix with integer entries, such that the entries of its th column are the coefficients of the th generator of the kernel. Then, the abelian group is isomorphic to the cokernel of linear map defined by. Conversely every integer matrix defines a finitely generated abelian group.
It follows that the study of finitely generated abelian groups is totally equivalent with the study of integer matrices. In particular, changing the generating set of is equivalent with multiplying on the left by a unimodular matrix. Changing the generating set of the kernel of is equivalent with multiplying on the right by a unimodular matrix.
The Smith normal form of is a matrix
where and are unimodular, and is a matrix such that all non-diagonal entries are zero, the non-zero diagonal entries are the first ones, and is a divisor of for. The existence and the shape of the Smith normal proves that the finitely generated abelian group is the direct sum
where is the number of zero rows at the bottom of . This is the fundamental theorem of finitely generated abelian groups.
The existence of algorithms for Smith normal form shows that the fundamental theorem of finitely generated abelian groups is not only a theorem of abstract existence, but provides a way for computing expression of finitely generated abelian groups as direct sums.

Infinite abelian groups

The simplest infinite abelian group is the infinite cyclic group. Any finitely generated abelian group is isomorphic to the direct sum of copies of and a finite abelian group, which in turn is decomposable into a direct sum of finitely many cyclic groups of prime power orders. Even though the decomposition is not unique, the number, called the rank of, and the prime powers giving the orders of finite cyclic summands are uniquely determined.
By contrast, classification of general infinitely generated abelian groups is far from complete. Divisible groups, i.e. abelian groups in which the equation admits a solution for any natural number and element of, constitute one important class of infinite abelian groups that can be completely characterized. Every divisible group is isomorphic to a direct sum, with summands isomorphic to and Prüfer groups for various prime numbers, and the cardinality of the set of summands of each type is uniquely determined. Moreover, if a divisible group is a subgroup of an abelian group then admits a direct complement: a subgroup of such that. Thus divisible groups are injective modules in the category of abelian groups, and conversely, every injective abelian group is divisible. An abelian group without non-zero divisible subgroups is called reduced.
Two important special classes of infinite abelian groups with diametrically opposite properties are torsion groups and torsion-free groups, exemplified by the groups and .

Torsion groups

An abelian group is called periodic or torsion, if every element has finite order. A direct sum of finite cyclic groups is periodic. Although the converse statement is not true in general, some special cases are known. The first and second Prüfer theorems state that if is a periodic group, and it either has a bounded exponent, i.e., for some natural number, or is countable and the -heights of the elements of are finite for each, then is isomorphic to a direct sum of finite cyclic groups.
The cardinality of the set of direct summands isomorphic to in such a decomposition is an invariant of. These theorems were later subsumed in the Kulikov criterion. In a different direction, Helmut Ulm found an extension of the second Prüfer theorem to countable abelian -groups with elements of infinite height: those groups are completely classified by means of their Ulm invariants.

Torsion-free and mixed groups

An abelian group is called torsion-free if every non-zero element has infinite order. Several classes of torsion-free abelian groups have been studied extensively:
An abelian group that is neither periodic nor torsion-free is called mixed. If is an abelian group and is its torsion subgroup, then the factor group is torsion-free. However, in general the torsion subgroup is not a direct summand of, so is not isomorphic to. Thus the theory of mixed groups involves more than simply combining the results about periodic and torsion-free groups. The additive group of integers is torsion-free -module.

Invariants and classification

One of the most basic invariants of an infinite abelian group is its rank: the cardinality of the maximal linearly independent subset of. Abelian groups of rank 0 are precisely the periodic groups, while torsion-free abelian groups of rank 1 are necessarily subgroups of and can be completely described. More generally, a torsion-free abelian group of finite rank is a subgroup of. On the other hand, the group of -adic integers is a torsion-free abelian group of infinite -rank and the groups with different are non-isomorphic, so this invariant does not even fully capture properties of some familiar groups.
The classification theorems for finitely generated, divisible, countable periodic, and rank 1 torsion-free abelian groups explained above were all obtained before 1950 and form a foundation of the classification of more general infinite abelian groups. Important technical tools used in classification of infinite abelian groups are pure and basic subgroups. Introduction of various invariants of torsion-free abelian groups has been one avenue of further progress. See the books by Irving Kaplansky, László Fuchs, Phillip Griffith, and David Arnold, as well as the proceedings of the conferences on Abelian Group Theory published in Lecture Notes in Mathematics for more recent findings.

Additive groups of rings

The additive group of a ring is an abelian group, but not all abelian groups are additive groups of rings. Some important topics in this area of study are:
Many large Abelian groups possess a natural topology, which turns them into topological groups.
The collection of all Abelian groups, together with the homomorphisms between them, forms the category, the prototype of an Abelian category.
proved that the first order theory of Abelian groups, unlike its non-Abelian counterpart, is decidable. Most algebraic structures other than Boolean algebras are undecidable.
There are still many areas of current research:
Moreover, Abelian groups of infinite order lead, quite surprisingly, to deep questions about the set theory commonly assumed to underlie all of mathematics. Take the Whitehead problem: are all Whitehead groups of infinite order also free Abelian groups? In the 1970s, Saharon Shelah proved that the Whitehead problem is:
Among mathematical adjectives derived from the proper name of a mathematician, the word "abelian" is rare in that it is often spelled with a lowercase a, rather than an uppercase A, indicating how ubiquitous the concept is in modern mathematics.