Dihedral Group of the Square

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In mathematics, a dihedral group is the group of symmetries of a regular polygon with
sides, including both rotations and reflections. This Demonstration shows the subgroups of
, the dihedral group of a square.
Contributed by: Gerard Balmens (January 2014)
Open content licensed under CC BY-NC-SA
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A group is a set together with a binary operation
on
, i.e., a function
to
(called the group law of
) that combines any two elements
and
to form another element, denoted
or
. To qualify as a group, the set and operation, (
,
), must satisfy four requirements known as the group axioms: closure, associativity, identity element, and inverse element. If
, then the group is commutative or Abelian.
In this Demonstration, the group law is the composition of permutations of the set . For example,
.
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