August 4, 2005
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Visible Mathematics, continued
Today’s mathematical birthdays:
Saunders Mac Lane, John Venn,
and Sir William Rowan Hamilton.It is well known that the quaternion group
is a subgroup of GL(2,3), the general linear group on the 2-space over GF(3), the 3-element Galois field.The figures below illustrate this fact.
Related material: Visualizing GL(2,p)
“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.”– J. L. Alperin, book review,
Bulletin (New Series) of the American
Mathematical Society 10
(1984), 121
