Under enumerative aspects is essentially the same as
.
This leads to the question of a suitable concept of
morphism between actions of groups.
To begin with, two actions will be
called isomorphic
iff they differ only by an isomorphism
of the groups and a bijection
between the sets which satisfy
.
In this case we shall write
in order to indicate the existence of such a pair of mappings. If
we call
and
similar actions,
if and only if they are isomorphic by
, where moreover
, the identity mapping (cf.
exercise
). We indicate this by
An important
special case
follows directly from the proof of :
.
Lemma
If
is transitive then, for any
,
we have that
A weaker concept is that of - homomorphy.
We shall write
if and only if there exists a mapping which is
compatible with the action of
Later on we shall see
that the use of
-homomorphisms is one of the most important tools in the
constructive theory of discrete structures which can be defined as orbits of
groups on finite sets. A characterization of
-homomorphy gives
.
Lemma
Two actions
and
are
-homomorphic if and
only if for each
there exist
such that
Proof: In the case when is a
-homomorphism, then
since, for each
On the other hand, if for each there exist
such that
we can construct a
-homomorphism in the following way:
Assume a transversal
of the orbits, and choose, for each
element
of this transversal, an element
such that
An easy check shows that
is a well defined mapping and also a -homomorphism.
Exercises
E .
Check that the
-isomorphy
(and hence also the
-similarity
) is an equivalence relation on group actions.
E .
Consider the following definition: We call actions
and
inner isomorphic
if and only if there exists a pair
such that
and where
is an inner automorphism
, which means that
for a suitable . Show that this equivalence relation has the same
classes as
.