This article states and proves a fact about a particular group, or kind of group, (i.e., Symmetric group (?)) having a particular presentation (or kind of presentation), i.e., where the generic name for such presentations or groups having such presentations is: Coxeter presentation (?)
View other facts about presentations for particular groups
Statement
Suppose
is a nonnegative integer and
is the symmetric group on the set
. Then,
is isomorphic to a Coxeter group with
generators
, where
and
for
and
differing by more than one.
In other words:
.
The isomorphism identifies
with the transposition
.
Facts used
- Transpositions of adjacent elements generate the symmetric group on a finite set
Proof
The Coxeter group described admits a surjective homomorphism to the symmetric group
Consider a map:
given by:
.
To check that the map is well-defined, we need to check that all the Coxeter relations are satisfied by the images of the
. This is direct: the square of any transposition is the identity element, the product of two adjacent transpositions has order three, and the product of two disjoint transpositions has order two.
Next, the map is surjective because by fact (1), elements of the form
generate
.
The size of the Coxeter group is at most 
Let
be the Coxeter group for
letters.
First observe that the subgroup
of
generated by
satisfies all the relations for the Coxeter group for
generators, hence is a homomorphic image of
. Hence, by induction,
.
We now show that
has at most
left cosets in
. In fact, we can show that the every left coset of
in
has a representative among these:
.
To do so, we use the fact that every word in
can be written with
appearing at most once (using relations in the Coxeter group). Therefore, for
we have
where
and
. The relation
then allows us to conclude that
.
Thus,
. Using Lagrange's theorem, we get
.