ABSTRACT
Major progress in group theory occurred in the nineteenth century but the evolution of group theory began already in the latter part of 18th century. Some characteristic features of 19th century mathematics which had crucial impact on this evolution are concern for rigor and abstraction and the view that mathematics is a human activity without necessarily referring to physical situations. In 1770, Joseph Louis Lagrange (1736-1813) wrote his seminal memoir Reflections on the solution of algebraic equations. He considered ‘abstract’ questions like whether every equation has a root and, if so, how many were real/complex/positive/negative? The problem of algebraically solving 5th degree equations was a major preoccupation (right from the 17th century) to which Lagrange lent his major efforts in this paper. His beautiful idea (now going under the name of Lagrange’s resolvent) is to ‘reduce’ a general equation to auxiliary (resolvent) equations which have one degree less. Later, the theory of finite abelian groups evolved from Carl Friedrich Gauss’s famous “Disquisitiones Arithmeticae”. Gauss (1777-1855) established many of the important properties though he did not use the terminology of group theory. In his work, finite abelian groups
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appeared in different forms like the additive group Zn of integers modulo n, the multiplicative group Z∗n of integers modulo n relatively prime to n, the group of equivalence classes of binary quadratic forms, and the group of n-th roots of unity. In 1872, Felix Klein delivered a famous lecture A Comparative Review of Recent Researches in Geometry. The aim of his (so-called) Erlangen Program was the classification of geometry as the study of invariants under various groups of transformations. So, the groups appear here “geometrically” as groups of rigid motions, of similarities, or as the hyperbolic group etc. During the analysis of the connections between the different geometries, the focus was on the study of properties of figures invariant under transformations. Soon after, the focus shifted to a study of the transformations themselves. Thus the study of the geometric relations between figures got converted to the study of the associated transformations. In 1874, Sophus Lie introduced his “theory of continuous transformation groups” what we basically call Lie groups today. Poincaré and Klein began their work on the so-called automorphic functions and the groups associated with them around 1876. Automorphic functions are generalizations of the circular, hyperbolic, elliptic, and other functions of elementary analysis. They are functions of a complex variable z, analytic in some domain, and invariant under the group of transformations x′ = ax+b
(a, b, c, d real or complex and ad − bc 0), or under some subgroup of this group. We end this introduction with the ancient problem of finding all those positive integers (called congruent numbers) which are areas of right-angled triangles with rational sides. To this date, the general result describing all of them precisely is not proved. However, the problem can be re-stated in terms of certain groups called elliptic curves and this helps in getting a hold on the problem and in obtaining several partial results. Indeed, if n is a positive integer, then the rational numbers x, y satisfying y2 = x3 − n2x form a group law which can be described geometrically. Then, n is a congruent number if and only if, this group is infinite!
