Connection With Reflection Groups
For more details on this topic, see Reflection group.Coxeter groups are deeply connected with reflection groups. Simply put, Coxeter groups are abstract groups (given via a presentation), while reflection groups are concrete groups (given as subgroups of linear groups or various generalizations). Coxeter groups grew out of the study of reflection groups — they are an abstraction: a reflection group is a subgroup of a linear group generated by reflections (which have order 2), while a Coxeter group is an abstract group generated by involutions (elements of order 2, abstracting from reflections), and whose relations have a certain form (, corresponding to hyperplanes meeting at an angle of, with being of order k abstracting from a rotation by ).
The abstract group of a reflection group is a Coxeter group, while conversely a reflection group can be seen as a linear representation of a Coxeter group. For finite reflection groups, this yields an exact correspondence: every finite Coxeter group admits a faithful representation as a finite reflection group of some Euclidean space. For infinite Coxeter groups, however, a Coxeter group may not admit a representation as a reflection group.
Historically, (Coxeter 1934) proved that every reflection group is a Coxeter group (i.e., has a presentation where all relations are of the form or ), and indeed this paper introduced the notion of a Coxeter group, while (Coxeter 1935) proved that every finite Coxeter group had a representation as a reflection group, and classified finite Coxeter groups.
Read more about this topic: Coxeter Group
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