This section develops the aspects of group theory that are needed in this work, bringing together a fundamental selection of abstract ideas and concrete examples that are used repeatedly throughout the rest of the project. To start, I present an abstract formulation of the basic concepts of group theory, beginning from a very general setting in the theory of relations and proceeding in quick order to the definitions of groups and their representations. After that, I describe a couple of concrete examples that are designed mainly to illustrate the abstract features of groups, but that also appear in different guises at later stages of this discussion. | This section develops the aspects of group theory that are needed in this work, bringing together a fundamental selection of abstract ideas and concrete examples that are used repeatedly throughout the rest of the project. To start, I present an abstract formulation of the basic concepts of group theory, beginning from a very general setting in the theory of relations and proceeding in quick order to the definitions of groups and their representations. After that, I describe a couple of concrete examples that are designed mainly to illustrate the abstract features of groups, but that also appear in different guises at later stages of this discussion. |