Talk:Projective unitary group

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Referring to "Therefore PU(1) = U(1)/U(1) = 0"

'0' is a weird name for the trivial group. Is that conventional? Sigfpe 20:47, 23 May 2006 (UTC)

Yes. The motivation I think comes from the fact that for an abelian group (like the trivial group) the group multiplication is often considered to be addition, and so the identity is called 0. The trivial group is abelian and it contains a single element, the identity, aka 0. So it's the group whose only element is 0, and thus 0 is a common name for it. JarahE 17:06, 29 May 2006 (UTC)
I'd have used 1 here simply because multiplicative notation is more common when talking about unitary groups. It's not all that important though... Sigfpe 21:13, 31 May 2006 (UTC)