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Finite group

In mathematics, a finite group is a group which has finitely many elements. Some aspects of the theory of finite groups were investigated in great depth in the twentieth century, in particular the local theory, and the theory of solvable groups and nilpotent groups. It is too much to hope for a complete determination of the structure of all finite groups: the number of possible structures soon becomes overwhelming. However, the twentieth century saw the classification of the finite simple groups, which may be viewed as the determination of the "building blocks" for all finite groups, as each finite group has a composition series.

Thanks to the work of mathematicians such Chevalley and Steinberg, the second half of the twentieth century also saw increased understanding of finite analogs of classical groups, and other related groups. One such family of groups is the family of general linear groups over finite fields. The group theorist J. L. Alperin has written that "The typical example of a finite group is GL(n,q), the general linear group of n dimensions over the field with q elements. The student who is introduced to the subject with other examples is being completely misled.

Finite groups often occur when considering symmetry of mathematical or physical objects, when those objects admit just a finite number of structure preserving transformations. The theory of Lie groups, which may be viewed as dealing with "continuous symmetry", is strongly influenced by the associated Weyl groups. These are finite groups generated by reflections which act on a finite dimensional Euclidean space. Thus properties of finite groups can play a role in subjects such as theoretical physics.

Number of groups of a given order

Given a positive integer n, it is not at all a routine matter to determine how many isomorphism types of groups of order n there are. Every group of prime order is cyclic, since Lagrange's theorem implies that the cyclic subgroup generated by any of its non-identity elements is the whole group. If n is the square of a prime, then there are exactly two possible isomorphism types of group of order n, both of which are abelian. If n is a higher power of a prime, then results of Graham Higman and Charles Sims give asymptotically correct estimates for the number of isomorphism types of groups of order n, and the number grows very rapidly as the power increases.

Depending on the prime factorization of n, some restrictions may be placed on the structure of groups of order n, as a consequence, for example, of results such as the Sylow theorems. For example, every group of order pq is cyclic when q < p are primes with p-1 not divisible by q. If n is squarefree, then any group of order n is solvable. A theorem of William Burnside, proved using group characters, states that every group of order n is solvable when n is divisible by fewer than three distinct primes. By the Feit-Thompson theorem, which has a long and complicated proof, every group of order n is solvable when n is odd.

There is a meaningful sense in which for every positive integer n, most groups of order n are solvable. To see this for any particular order is usually not difficult (for example, there is (up to isomorphism) only one non-solvable group of order 60, while there are two non-isomorphic abelian groups of order 60 and several more isomorphism types of non-abelian solvable groups of order 60) but to make such a statement precise for all n requires the classification of finite simple groups. Without the classification theorem, it is not clear whether there is a constant bounding the number of isomorphism types of simple groups of order n (with the benefit of the classification, it is known that the constant 2 is an upper bound for all n. Prior to the classification, it had long been known that there were infinitely many values of n for which two non-isomorphic simple groups of order n existed).