Arthur Cayley and the 'Gruppen Pest'

摘要

The original contributions of Arthur Cayley to the Philosophical Magazine on group theory and his trees' are revisited and to some extend reinterpreted. Both topics were and are of enormous importance not only in physics (group theory, graph theory), but also in quite a few other disciplines as diverse as information technology or, for example, linguistics (trees, graph theory). In order to show that these two topics originally arose from interests in the theory of permutations also Cayley's Mousetrap' game is briefly mentioned.