proof of fundamental theorem of Galois theory
The theorem is a consequence of the following lemmas, roughlycorresponding to the various assertions in the theorem. We assume to be a finite-dimensional Galois extension of fields withGalois group
The first two lemmas establish the correspondence between subgroups of and extension fields
of contained in .
Lemma 1.
Let be an extension field of contained in . Then isGalois over , and is a subgroup of .
Proof.
Note that is normal and separable because it is a Galoisextension; it remains to prove that is also normal andseparable. Since is normal and finite over , it is thesplitting field
of a polynomial
over . Now is alsothe splitting field of over (because ),so is normal.
To see that is also separable, suppose , and let be its minimal polynomial over . Then theminimal polynomial of over divides, which has no double roots in its splitting field by theseparability of . Therefore has no double roots inits splitting field for any , so is separable over.
The assertion that is a subgroup of is clear from thefact that .∎
Lemma 2.
The function from the set of extension fields of containedin to the set of subgroups of defined by
is an inclusion-reversing bijection. The inverse is given by
where is the fixed field of in .
Proof.
The definition of makes sense because of Lemma 1.The
for all subgroups and all fields with follow from the properties of the Galois group. The fixedfield of is precisely ; on the other hand, since is the fixed field of in , is the Galois group of .
For extensions and of with , we have
so . This shows that isinclusion-reversing.∎
The following lemmas show that normal subextensions of areGalois extensions and that their Galois groups are quotient groups of.
Lemma 3.
Let be a subgroup of . Then the following are equivalent:
- 1.
is normal over .
- 2.
for all .
- 3.
for all .
In particular, is normal over if and only if is a normalsubgroup of .
Proof.
: Since for all and , is a zero of the minimal polynomial of over, we have by the of .
: For all the equality
holds for all (from the assumption it follows that, which is fixed by ). This implies that
for all .
: Let , and let be the minimalpolynomial of over . Since is normal, splitsinto linear factors in . Suppose is another zeroof , and let be such that (such a always exists). By assumption, for all we have , so that
This shows that lies in as well, so splits in. We conclude that is normal over .∎
Lemma 4.
Let be a normal subgroup of . Then is a Galois extensionof , and the homomorphism
induces a natural identification
Proof.
By Lemma 3, is normal over , and because asubextension of a separable extension is separable, is aGalois extension.
The map is well-defined by the implication fromLemma 3. It is surjective since every automorphism of that fixes can be extended to an automorphism of (if, for example, we can choose an such that using the primitive element theorem, and wecan extend to by putting). The kernel of is clearly equal to ,so the first isomorphism theorem
gives the claimed identification.∎