Given n strands, a braid is a sequence of crossings in which adjacent strands are passed over or under each other. The braid group, Bn, is the group of all braids on n strands. Given any group G, and a conjugacy class C of G, the braid group Bn permutes the set of n-tuples of Cn. This is the Hurwitz action. Our goal was to determine an integer n such that the braid group Bn generates all possible permutations of Cn where C is the conjugacy class of the 5-cycle (1,2,3,4,5) in the alternating group A5.
We approached this task by using SAGE to do calculations with the
Hurwitz action. We have also written code to draw nice figures of
colored braids that represent the Hurwitz action.
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