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Tuesday, November 27, 2012

Counterexample

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 12:25 pm

The non-Coxeter simple reflection group of order 168
is a counterexample to the statement that
"Every finite reflection group is a Coxeter group."

The counterexample is based on a definition of "reflection group"
that includes reflections defined over finite fields.

Today I came across a 1911 paper that discusses the counterexample.
Of course, Coxeter groups were undefined in 1911, but the paper, by
Howard H. Mitchell, discusses the simple order-168 group as a reflection group .

(Naturally, Mitchell's definition of "reflection" and his statement that

"The discussion of the binary groups
applies also to the case p = 2."

should be approached with care.)

A review of this topic might be appropriate for Jessica Fintzen's 2012 fall tutorial at Harvard
on reflection groups and Coxeter groups. The syllabus for the tutorial states that
"finite Coxeter groups correspond precisely to finite reflection groups." This statement
is based on Fintzen's definition of "reflection group"—

"Reflection groups are— as their name indicates—
groups generated by reflections across
hyperplanes of Rn which contain the origin."

For some background, see William Kantor's 1981 paper "Generation of Linear Groups"
(quoted at the finitegeometry.org page on the simple order-168 counterexample).
Kantor discusses Mitchell's work in some detail, but does not mention the
simple order-168 group explicitly.

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