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Symmetry in biology refers to the symmetry observed in organisms, including plants, animals, fungi, and bacteria. External symmetry can be easily seen by just looking at an organism. For example, the face of a human being has a plane of symmetry down its centre, or a pine cone displays a clear symmetrical spiral pattern.
In group theory, the symmetry group of a geometric object is the group of all transformations under which the object is invariant, endowed with the group operation of composition. Such a transformation is an invertible mapping of the ambient space which takes the object to itself, and which preserves all the relevant structure of the object.
The symmetric group on a set of size n is the Galois group of the general polynomial of degree n and plays an important role in Galois theory. In invariant theory, the symmetric group acts on the variables of a multi-variate function, and the functions left invariant are the so-called symmetric functions.
When comparing the symmetry type of two objects, the origin is chosen for each separately, i.e., they need not have the same center. Moreover, two objects are considered to be of the same symmetry type if their symmetry groups are conjugate subgroups of O(3) (two subgroups H 1, H 2 of a group G are conjugate, if there exists g ∈ G such that H 1 = g −1 H 2 g).
Bilateria (/ ˌ b aɪ l ə ˈ t ɪər i ə /) [5] is a large clade or infrakingdom of animals called bilaterians (/ ˌ b aɪ l ə ˈ t ɪər i ə n /), [6] characterised by bilateral symmetry (i.e. having a left and a right side that are mirror images of each other) during embryonic development.
In a symmetry group, the group elements are the symmetry operations (not the symmetry elements), and the binary combination consists of applying first one symmetry operation and then the other. An example is the sequence of a C 4 rotation about the z-axis and a reflection in the xy-plane, denoted σ(xy) C 4 .
Finite spherical symmetry groups are also called point groups in three dimensions. There are five fundamental symmetry classes which have triangular fundamental domains: dihedral, cyclic, tetrahedral, octahedral, and icosahedral symmetry. This article lists the groups by Schoenflies notation, Coxeter notation, [1] orbifold notation, [2] and order.
The alternating group, symmetric group, and their double covers are related in this way, and have orthogonal representations and covering spin/pin representations in the corresponding diagram of orthogonal and spin/pin groups. Explicitly, S n acts on the n-dimensional space R n by permuting coordinates (in matrices, as permutation matrices).