Abstract Algebra - History - Early Group Theory

Early Group Theory

There were several threads in the early development of group theory, in modern language loosely corresponding to number theory, theory of equations, and geometry.

Leonhard Euler considered algebraic operations on numbers modulo an integer, modular arithmetic, in his generalization of Fermat's little theorem. These investigations were taken much further by Carl Friedrich Gauss, who considered the structure of multiplicative groups of residues mod n and established many properties of cyclic and more general abelian groups that arise in this way. In his investigations of composition of binary quadratic forms, Gauss explicitly stated the associative law for the composition of forms, but like Euler before him, he seems to have been more interested in concrete results than in general theory. In 1870, Leopold Kronecker gave a definition of an abelian group in the context of ideal class groups of a number field, generalizing Gauss's work; but it appears he did not tie his definition with previous work on groups, particularly permutation groups. In 1882, considering the same question, Heinrich M. Weber realized the connection and gave a similar definition that involved the cancellation property but omitted the existence of the inverse element, which was sufficient in his context (finite groups).

Permutations were studied by Joseph Lagrange in his 1770 paper Réflexions sur la résolution algébrique des équations (Thoughts on Solving Algebraic Equations) devoted to solutions of algebraic equations, in which he introduced Lagrange resolvents. Lagrange's goal was to understand why equations of third and fourth degree admit formulae for solutions, and he identified as key objects permutations of the roots. An important novel step taken by Lagrange in this paper was the abstract view of the roots, i.e. as symbols and not as numbers. However, he did not consider composition of permutations. Serendipitously, the first edition of Edward Waring's Meditationes Algebraicae (Meditations on Algebra) appeared in the same year, with an expanded version published in 1782. Waring proved the main theorem on symmetric functions, and specially considered the relation between the roots of a quartic equation and its resolvent cubic. Mémoire sur la résolution des équations (Memoire on the Solving of Equations) of Alexandre Vandermonde (1771) developed the theory of symmetric functions from a slightly different angle, but like Lagrange, with the goal of understanding solvability of algebraic equations.

Kronecker claimed in 1888 that the study of modern algebra began with this first paper of Vandermonde. Cauchy states quite clearly that Vandermonde had priority over Lagrange for this remarkable idea, which eventually led to the study of group theory.

Paolo Ruffini was the first person to develop the theory of permutation groups, and like his predecessors, also in the context of solving algebraic equations. His goal was to establish the impossibility of an algebraic solution to a general algebraic equation of degree greater than four. En route to this goal he introduced the notion of the order of an element of a group, conjugacy, the cycle decomposition of elements of permutation groups and the notions of primitive and imprimitive and proved some important theorems relating these concepts, such as

if G is a subgroup of S₅ whose order is divisible by 5 then G contains an element of order 5.

Note, however, that he got by without formalizing the concept of a group, or even of a permutation group. The next step was taken by Évariste Galois in 1832, although his work remained unpublished until 1846, when he considered for the first time what is now called the closure property of a group of permutations, which he expressed as

... if in such a group one has the substitutions S and T then one has the substitution ST.

The theory of permutation groups received further far-reaching development in the hands of Augustin Cauchy and Camille Jordan, both through introduction of new concepts and, primarily, a great wealth of results about special classes of permutation groups and even some general theorems. Among other things, Jordan defined a notion of isomorphism, still in the context of permutation groups and, incidentally, it was he who put the term group in wide use.

The abstract notion of a group appeared for the first time in Arthur Cayley's papers in 1854. Cayley realized that a group need not be a permutation group (or even finite), and may instead consist of matrices, whose algebraic properties, such as multiplication and inverses, he systematically investigated in succeeding years. Much later Cayley would revisit the question whether abstract groups were more general than permutation groups, and establish that, in fact, any group is isomorphic to a group of permutations.