How statement and proof provenance work
The first chip identifies the source of the statement or construction; the second identifies the source of its local proof or verification.
- Literature-sourced: the exact statement appears in a cited source; only wording and notation differ.
- AI-adapted: a semantically identical restatement of literature-sourced material, modulo indexing, notation, and boundary cases adopted by the library.
- AI-generated: a genuinely novel statement formulated by AI, with no source for the claim itself.
These labels describe origin, not correctness: citations and verification chips remain separate evidence.
The conjugacy classes of : sizes and the split -cycles
Example
The five conjugacy classes of have representatives and sizes
The last two classes are the two halves of the class of -cycles.
Facts & Assumptions
Given: The alternating group .
-classes are indexed by the tuples with (The conjugacy classes of are indexed by the tuples with ); a permutation of type has centralizer cardinality (If has cycles of length , then ); and over those tuples, the summand indexed by being the size of the corresponding class (The class equation of is ).
A -cycle has sign , and when fixed points are included as -cycles (A -cycle has sign , and when fixed points are counted as cycles).
For and , the -class of splits into two -classes of equal size exactly when all cycle lengths in its decomposition, including -cycles for fixed points, are odd and no two are equal (For , an -class of an even permutation splits in exactly when all cycle lengths, including -cycles, are odd and distinct).
Verification
By [F1] and [F2], the even types are , , , and , with symmetric class sizes .
By [F3], the first three stay single classes, while the -cycle class splits into two equal classes of size .
Put . The permutation satisfies and is odd by [F2]. Every other conjugator from to differs from by an element centralizing ; such a centralizer element is determined by the image of and is therefore a power of the even -cycle . Thus every conjugator is odd, so and lie in the two different halves from step 2.1.
The total agrees with [F4].
Depends on
- The conjugacy classes of $S_n$ are indexed by the tuples $(c_1,\ldots,c_n)$ with $\sum k c_k=n$
- The class equation of $S_n$ is $n!=\sum_{\sum k c_k=n} n!/\prod_k k^{c_k}c_k!$
- If $\sigma\in S_n$ has $c_k$ cycles of length $k$, then $|C_{S_n}(\sigma)|=\prod_{k=1}^n k^{c_k}c_k!$
- A $k$-cycle has sign $(-1)^{k-1}$, and $\operatorname{sgn}(\sigma)=(-1)^{n-c(\sigma)}$ when fixed points are counted as cycles
- For $n\ge2$, an $S_n$-class of an even permutation splits in $A_n$ exactly when all cycle lengths, including $1$-cycles, are odd and distinct
- $A_n$ is normal in $S_n$; for $n\ge2$, $2\,|A_n|=n!$, while $A_n=S_n$ for $n=0,1$
Used by
Nothing in the library uses this result yet.
Dependency tree · next 3 levels
Direct dependencies and their dependencies through the next three levels: 82 results over 17 levels. An arrow runs from a result to what uses it, and this result sits at the bottom with a heavier outline. Click the chart to enlarge it.
Sources
- K. Conrad, Conjugacy Classes (standard reference, not scraped)