Wednesday, 19 March 2008

examples - On using field extensions to prove the impossiblity of a straightedge and compass construction

I think they're equivalent. Clearly 3 ==> 2. To see 2 ==> 3, say an extension E/L of fields is 2-filtered if it has a tower of subextensions each of degree 2 over the next. Then note firstly that if E/L and E'/L are 2-filtered, then so is the compositum of E and E' in any extension of L containing both (induct on the length of the tower of, say, E); and secondly for any map f:E-->E' of extensions of L, if E is 2-filtered then so is f(E). Together these two facts imply that in 2 we may assume that K is Galois over Q, say with group G. Then Q(z)/Q corresponds to a subgroup H, and by Galois theory we just need to prove the following group-theoretic lemma:



Lemma: Let G be a 2-group and H a subgroup. Then there is a chain of subgroups connecting H to G where each is index 2 in the next.



Proof: Recall that we can find a central order two subgroup Z of G. If Hcap Z=1, then HZ gets us one up in the filtration. Otherwise Hcap Z=Z, i.e. Z is in H, and we can use induction on |G|, replacing G by G/Z.

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