Meditation on the Sylow theorems I

As an undergraduate the proofs I saw of the Sylow theorems seemed very complicated and I was totally unable to remember them. The goal of this post is to explain proofs of the Sylow theorems which I am actually able to remember, several of which use our old friend

The -group fixed point theorem (PGFPT): If is a finite -group and is a finite set on which acts, then the subset of fixed points satisfies . In particular, if then this action has at least one fixed point.

There will be some occasional historical notes taken from Waterhouse’s The Early Proofs of Sylow’s Theorem.

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Drawing subgroups of the modular group

Previously we learned how to count the finite index subgroups of the modular group . The worst thing about that post was that it didn’t include any pictures of these subgroups. Today we’ll fix that.

The pictures in this post can be interpreted in at least two ways. On the one hand, they are graphs of groups in the sense of Bass-Serre theory, and on the other hand, they are also dessin d’enfants (for the rest of this post abbreviated to “dessins”) in the sense of Grothendieck. But you don’t need to know that to draw and appreciate them.

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