BN-pair
Let be a group. Then has a -pair or a Tits system if the following conditions hold:
- 1.
and are subgroups

of such that .
- 2.
and is a group generated by a set .
- 3.
for all and .
- 4.
for all .
Where is a double coset with respect to . It can be proven that is in fact made up of elements of order 2, and that is a Coxeter group![]()
.
Example: Let where is some field. Then, if we let be the subgroup of upper triangular matrices![]()
and be the subgroup of monomial matrices (i.e. matrices having one nonzero entry in each row and each column, or more precisely the stabilizer
![]()
of the lines ). Then, it can be shown that and generate and that is the subgroup of diagonal matrices
![]()
. In turn, it follows that in this case is isomorphic
to the symmetric group
![]()
on letters, .
For more, consult chapter 5 in the book Buildings, by Kenneth Brown