Small groups of
prime power order
pn are given as follows: • Order
p: The only group is cyclic. • Order
p2: There are just two groups, both abelian. • Order
p3: There are three abelian groups, and two non-abelian groups. One of the non-abelian groups is the semidirect product of a normal cyclic subgroup of order
p2 by a cyclic group of order
p. The other is the quaternion group for and
the Heisenberg group modulo p for . • Order
p4: The classification is complicated, and gets much harder as the exponent of
p increases. Most groups of small order have a Sylow
p subgroup
P with a
normal p-complement N for some prime
p dividing the order, so can be classified in terms of the possible primes
p,
p-groups
P, groups
N, and actions of
P on
N. In some sense this reduces the classification of these groups to the classification of
p-groups. Some of the small groups that do not have a normal
p-complement include: • Order 24: The symmetric group S4 • Order 48: The binary octahedral group and the product • Order 60: The alternating group A5. The smallest order for which it is
not known how many nonisomorphic groups there are is 2048 = 211. == Small Groups Library ==