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 .