Internal Direct Products and the Universal Property of Direct Product Groups

This is a “quality of life” article concerning product groups, using the Mizar system [2], [4]. Like a Sonata, this article consists of three movements.

The first act, the slowest of the three, builds the infrastructure necessary for the rest of the article. We prove group homomorphisms map arbitrary finite products to arbitrary finite products, introduce a notion of “group yielding” families, as well as families of homomorphisms. We close the first act with defining the inclusion morphism of a subgroup into its parent group, and the projection morphism of a product group onto one of its factors.

The second act introduces the universal property of products and its consequences as found in, e.g., Kurosh [7]. Specifically, for the product of an arbitrary family of groups, we prove the center of a product group is the product of centers. More exciting, we prove for a product of a finite family groups, the commutator subgroup of the product is the product of commutator subgroups, but this is because in general: the direct sum of commutator subgroups is the subgroup of the commutator subgroup of the product group, and the commutator subgroup of the product is a subgroup of the product of derived subgroups. We conclude this act by proving a few theorems concerning the image and kernel of morphisms between product groups, as found in Hungerford [5], as well as quotients of product groups.

The third act introduces the notion of an internal direct product. Isaacs [6] points out (paraphrasing with Mizar terminology) that the internal direct product is a predicate but the external direct product is a [Mizar] functor. To our delight, we find the bulk of the “recognition theorem” (as stated by Dummit and Foote [3], Aschbacher [1], and Robinson [11]) are already formalized in the heroic work of Nakasho, Okazaki, Yamazaki, and Shimada [9], [8]. We generalize the notion of an internal product to a set of subgroups, proving it is equivalent to the internal product of a family of subgroups [10].