Let be a subgroup of a group . A left coset of in is a subset of that is of the form , where and .
Similarly a right coset of in is a subset of that is of the form , where .
Lemma
Let be a subgroup of a group , and let and be elements of . Suppose that is non-empty. Then .
Proof
Let be some element of . Then for some , and for some . If is any element of then and , since is a subgroup of . But and for all . Therefore and , and thus . Similarly , and thus , as required.
Lemma
Let be a finite subgroup of a group . Then each left coset of in has the same number of elements as .
Proof
Let , where are distinct, and let be an element of . Then the left coset consists of the elements for . Suppose that and are integers between and for which . Then , and thus , since are distinct. It follows that the elements are distinct. We conclude that the subgroup and the left coset both have elements, as required.
Theorem
(Lagrange’s Theorem). Let be a finite group, and let be a subgroup of . Then the order of divides the order of .
Proof
Each element of belongs to at least one left coset of in (namely the coset ), and no element can belong to two distinct left cosets of in (see Lemma 1). Therefore every element of belongs to exactly one left coset of . Moreover each left coset of contains elements (Lemma 2). Therefore , where is the number of left cosets of in . The result follows.
Corollary
Let be an element of a finite group . Then the order of divides the order of .
Problems?
Maybe the notation should be different than the Latex counterparts, but these do not seem to be rendering correctly (JD: They look fine to me. A font problem in your browser?) (JB: That was exactly the problem, thanks for the suggestion. The braces weren’t stretching correctly with my old fonts.):
SVG:
Mixing
Complicated commutative diagrams (equations in SVG)
I want to cut and paste a bunch of stuff in here, just to see how well it works. Unfortunately, this doesn’t recognise ‘\(’ and ‘\)’, which I always use instead of single dollar signs, so it will all break rather trivially. I don’t know why ‘\’ and ‘\’ caught on (as a replacement for double dollar signs) while ‘\(’ and ‘\)’ didn’t catch on, but it means that nobody ever supports the latter (unless they’re actually doing LaTeX, of course). —Toby Bartels
foo
You can also refer to it as (2). Chacun à son goût!.