Group Isomorphisms - Some Intuition
Group Isomorphisms - Some Intuition The idea of an \isomorphism" is central to algebra. It's our version of equality - two objects are considered isomorphic if they are essentially the same. Before studying the technical definitions, consider a (slightly mathematical) example from language. We'll define a few finite sets: 1. f I, II, III, IV, V, VI g 2. f uno, dos, tres, cuatro, cinco, seis g 3. f 一, 二, 三, 四, 五, m g 4. f one, two, three, four, five, six g 5. f 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 g 6. f un, deux, trois, quatre, cinq, six g 7. f I, II, III, IV, V, VI g Even if you don't recognize all of them, hopefully at least one or two sets look familiar. Based on that, you might make a conjecture about a set you don't recognize. They are, in fact, all the same - the first element of each set is used to represent the idea of a single entity, or the first object in an arrangement. The second element of each set represents a pair, and so on. The fact that each set has the same number of elements is not the important part; rather, it's that we can replace one set with another, without changing the inherent meaning. Regardless of the language or symbols we use for them, numbers are the same - the number systems we use are isomorphic, and the map between them is the isomorphism (in this case, a multi-language dictionary would make a good map).
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