Reciprocity laws for representations of finite groups

Sunil K. Chebolu, Jan Minac, Clive Reis

Published 2009-11-19, updated 2009-12-28Version 3

Much has been written on reciprocity laws in number theory and their connections with group representations. In this paper we explore more on these connections. We prove a "reciprocity Law" for certain specific representations of semidirect products of two cyclic groups which is in complete analogy with classical reciprocity laws in number theory. In fact, we show that the celebrated quadratic reciprocity law is a direct consequence of our main theorem applied to a specific group. As another consequence of our main theorem we also recover a classical theorem of Sylvester. Our main focus is on explicit constructions of representations over sufficiently small fields. These investigations give further evidence that there is still much unexplored territory in connections between number theory and group representations, even at an elementary level.