HCSSiM Workshop, day 13
This is a continuation of this, where I take notes on my workshop at HCSSiM.
Permutation notation
Using a tetrahedron as inspiration, we found the group of rotational symmetries as a subgroup of the permutation group We then spent a lot of time discussing how to write good notation for permutations, coming up finally with the standard form but complaining about how multiplication is in a weird direction, stemming from the composition rule
Quadratic Reciprocity
Today we proved quadratic reciprocity, which totally rocks. In order to get there we needed three lemmas, which were essentially a bunch of different formulas for computing the Jacobi symbol.
The first was that, modulo we have:
The second one was that we could write as -1 to the
, where
is the number of negative numbers you get when you write the numbers
modulo
with a number of absolute value less than
In the third one we assume is odd (we deal with
separately). We prove we can write
as -1 to the
, where
is (also) the sum of the greatest integers
for
Each of these lemmas, in other words, gave us different ways to compute the symbol . They are each pretty easy to prove:
The first one uses the fact that if is not a square, then the product of all nonzero numbers mod
can be paired up into
pairs of different numbers whose product is
, so we get altogether
but on the other hand we already know by Wilson’s Theorem that that product is -1.
The second one just uses the fact that, ignoring negative signs, is the same list as
but paying attention to negative signs we can take out an
and also a
Since we already know the first lemma we’re done.
The third lemma follows from repeatedly applying the division algorithm to and
, so writing
for all . We replace the remainders by the previous form of “small representatives” which we call
modulo
, making the remained positive or negative but smaller than
this replacement requires that we add
. We add all the division formulas up and realize that we only need to care about the parity of
so in other words we work modulo 2. It looks like this:
Since is odd, we can ignore it modulo 2. Since
is odd same there. We get:
Up to signs, so we can conclude our lemma.
Incidentally, using the formula above (before we ignore ) it’s also easy to see that
Finally, we show that the sum is just the number of lattice points in the region above the x-axis, to the left of the line
and below the line
But, letting some other odd prime, we can do the same exact thing and we find that
is just the number of lattice points in the region above the x-axis, to the left of the line
and below the line
Flipping the second triangle over the line
demonstrates that we have two halves of the rectangle with
lattice points. Here’s the picture for
and
(ignore the dotted lines):
Alternating Group
We introduced cyclic notation, showing everything is a product of transpositions, then we introduced the sign function and showed that can only be written as a product of an even number of transpositions. This means the sign function is well defined, and it’s easy to see then that it’s a homomorphism, so we can define its kernel to be the alternating group.
Transformation of the Plane
We discussed rotations, shears, shrinks, reflections, and translations of the plane and demonstrated them in Mathematica using this.
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July 18, 2012 at 7:00 amHCSSiM Workshop, day 14 « mathbabe