The sign (or parity) of a permutation is a group-homomorphism from to
1 that appears in the definition of the determinant. Proving that the sign defines a group-homomorphism is not difficult, but the (very short) standard proof2 that is given is fairly unintuitive. Therefore:
This post describes a more visual proof of the fact that the sign of a permutation is a homomorphism and gives some interesting facts relating to the sign.
Permutations – a visual description
Let be a permutation. Then we can write
explicitly using two line notation, for example
is the permutation that sends 1 to 2, and 2 to 1, 3 to 5 and so on.
The parity, or sign of a permutation is defined as where
is the non-identity element in
(it is easy to see that
has two elements, one of which is the identity, denoted by
) and
. Basically
looks at whether the number of inversions in
is even or odd. A nice way of visualising permuations is by drawing which elements get sent where. In this way, the permutation
corresponds to the following picture:
Crossings and the sign
The number of lines that cross3 gives the number of so that
and this number is
. Whether or not this number is even or odd determines the sign. In this case, we see immediately that
.
The graphical representation (called picture for this post) also tells us that the sign of the identity is 1 and that inverting an element does not change the sign (just flip the picture).
Compositions of permutations can be drawn graphically:
Even if the lines drawn are not straight and cross each other multiple times, we can still use the parity of the number of crossings to calculate the sign. This is because as long as the lines are reasonably well behaved (such as not going above/under the top/bottom row, each crossing consisting only of two lines), adding one crossing means we need to add another one to compensate for it on the way back. If we define $latex C(\pi)$ to be the number of crossings in a particular picture of , then this number might be different for a different picture of
. However, we do know that
, by the argument above.
From this fact, it follows that is a homomorphism. For if we draw the pictures of
and
over each other, we obtain a picture of
. The total number of crossings is the number of crossings in
plus the number of crossings in
. Calling
the number of crossings in this picture of
(and similarly for
and
we have that
which finishes the proof.
A more formal way of phrasing this is that if is an inversion in
(i.e. taking
then
), then either it is an inversion in
or
is an inversion in
, but not both. If both are inversions, or neither of them is, then
is not inversion in
. Hence the parity of the number of inversions in
is the sum (modulo 2) of the number of inversions in
and
.
Signs in the wild
Apart from being used in the formula for calculating determinants, the sign of a permutation is also useful in other contexts. For example, for every we can define
as the alternating group over
elements. Because
is a homomorphism it follows that
is normal subgroup. For
it can be shown that
is the only nontrivial4 normal subgroup of
.
Permutations also are used to define orientations of objects in differential geometry. Here it is useful to say that the triangle with vertices is
times the triangle with vertices
, where
. The vertices of both triangles are of course the same, but they are treated as different objects depending on how their vertices are ordered.
Lastly, looking at a permutation in one line notation is fairly clear that by observing that one line crosses all of the other ones. Knowing that elements with same cycle type are conjugate and that
is a homomorphism, this gives the following formula if
is composed of
disjoint cycles of length
:
-
A group can be thought of as some set of bijective functions over some set that is non-empty and contains all inverses and compositions of elements of the set. Groups tend to encode information about symmetries. The usual definition of a group follows from the one given here by Cayley’s theorem. A group homomorphism between groups G and H is a function
so that for all
it holds that
.
is the group of all permutations over a set of
objects. ↩
- I have seen a proof in two separate linear algebra classes so far in which the sign is calculated in terms of a quotient of two products. See also this for a proof that goes along similar lines. ↩
- We need to arrange the objects so that no more than 2 lines cross at one point. ↩
-
A normal subgroup is a subgroup that is the kernel of a homomorphism. A subgroup
of a group
is trivial if
or
. ↩