Then, by the Principle of Inclusion and Exclusion, we obtain for the desired number of surjective fixed points of the following expression:
Now we recall that
This set can be identified with , where denotes the product of the cyclic factors of the numbers of which lie in , and where is the set of points contained in these cyclic factors. Thus
We can make this more explicit by an application of which yields:
Putting these things together we conclude
. Corollary The number of surjective fixed points of is
where the middle sum is taken over all
the sequences of
natural numbers
such that (they correspond to all possible choices of out of , where
of the chosen cyclic factors of are -cycles).
Hence the numbers of surjective fixed points of and of amount to:
and
where the sum is taken over all the sequences ,
and .
An application of the Cauchy-Frobenius Lemma finally yields the desired numbers of surjective symmetry classes:
. Theorem The number
of surjective -classes is
where the inner sum is taken over the sequences described in the corollary above. This implies, by
restriction, the equations
and
where the last sum is to be
taken over all the sequences such that and .
Try to compute the number of surjective symmetry classes for various group actions.
Exercises