4 Direct Products & Finitely Generated Abelian Groups
In this short chapter we see a straightforward way to create new groups from old using the Cartesian
product.
Example 4.1. Given Z
2
= {0, 1}, the Cartesian product
Z
2
×Z
2
=
(0, 0), (0, 1), (1, 0), ( 1, 1)
has four elements. This set inherits a group structure in a natural way by adding co-ordinates
(x, y) + (v, w) := (x + v, y + w)
where x + v and y + w are computed in (Z
2
, +
2
). This is a binary operation on Z
2
× Z
2
, with a
familiar-looking table: it has exactly the same structure as the Cayley table for the Klein four-group!
+ (0, 0) (0, 1) (1, 0) (1, 1)
(0, 0) (0, 0) (0, 1) (1, 0) (1, 1)
(0, 1) (0, 1) (0, 0) (1, 1) (1, 0)
(1, 0) (1, 0) (1, 1) (0, 0) (0, 1)
(1, 1) (1, 1) (1, 0) (0, 1) (0, 0)
↭
◦ e a b c
e e a b c
a a e c b
b b c e a
c c b a e
We conclude that Z
2
×Z
2
∼
=
V is indeed a group.
This construction works in general.
Theorem 4.2 (Direct product). The natural component-wise operation on the Cartesian product
n
∏
k=1
G
k
= G
1
×··· × G
n
, (x
1
, . . . , x
n
) ·(y
1
, . . . , y
n
) := (x
1
y
1
, . . . , x
n
y
n
)
defines a group structure: the direct product. This is abelian if each G
k
is abelian.
The proof is a simple exercise. Being a Cartesian product, a direct product has order equal to the
product of the orders of its components
n
∏
k=1
G
k
=
n
∏
k=1
|
G
k
|
Examples 4.3. 1. Consider the direct product of groups (Z
2
, +
2
) and (Z
3
, +
3
):
Z
2
×Z
3
=
(0, 0), (0, 1), (0, 2), ( 1, 0), (1, 1), (1, 2)
This is abelian and has order 6, so we might guess that it is isomorphic to (Z
6
, +
6
). To see this
we need a generator: choose (1, 1) and observe that
⟨
(1, 1)
⟩
=
(1, 1), (0, 2), (1, 0), ( 0, 1), (1, 2), (0, 0)
= Z
2
×Z
3
The map ϕ(x) = (x, x) is therefore an isomorphism ϕ : Z
6
∼
=
Z
2
×Z
3
.
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