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Symmetry occurs not only in geometry, but also in other branches of mathematics. Symmetry is a type of invariance: the property that a mathematical object remains unchanged under a set of operations or transformations. [1] Given a structured object X of any sort, a symmetry is a mapping of the object onto itself which preserves the structure.
Aside from polynomial functions, tensors that act as functions of several vectors can be symmetric, and in fact the space of symmetric -tensors on a vector space is isomorphic to the space of homogeneous polynomials of degree on . Symmetric functions should not be confused with even and odd functions, which have a different sort of symmetry.
One context in which symmetric polynomial functions occur is in the study of monic univariate polynomials of degree n having n roots in a given field.These n roots determine the polynomial, and when they are considered as independent variables, the coefficients of the polynomial are symmetric polynomial functions of the roots.
Even functions are those real functions whose graph is self-symmetric with respect to the y-axis, and odd functions are those whose graph is self-symmetric with respect to the origin. If the domain of a real function is self-symmetric with respect to the origin, then the function can be uniquely decomposed as the sum of an even function and an ...
Examples include even and odd functions in calculus, symmetric groups in abstract algebra, symmetric matrices in linear algebra, and Galois groups in Galois theory. In statistics, symmetry also manifests as symmetric probability distributions, and as skewness—the asymmetry of distributions. [16]
In statistics, a symmetric probability distribution is a probability distribution—an assignment of probabilities to possible occurrences—which is unchanged when its probability density function (for continuous probability distribution) or probability mass function (for discrete random variables) is reflected around a vertical line at some ...
The derivative of an integrable function can always be defined as a distribution, and symmetry of mixed partial derivatives always holds as an equality of distributions. The use of formal integration by parts to define differentiation of distributions puts the symmetry question back onto the test functions , which are smooth and certainly ...
Function composition is always associative. The trivial bijection that assigns each element of X to itself serves as an identity for the group. Every bijection has an inverse function that undoes its action, and thus each element of a symmetric group does have an inverse which is a permutation too.