Alternating group in the context of "Icosahedral symmetry"

In hyperbolic geometry, the Klein quartic, named after Felix Klein, is a compact Riemann surface of genus 3 with the highest possible order automorphism group for this genus, namely order 168 orientation-preserving automorphisms, and 168 × 2 = 336 automorphisms if orientation may be reversed. As such, the Klein quartic is the Hurwitz surface of lowest possible genus; see Hurwitz's automorphisms theorem. Its (orientation-preserving) automorphism group is isomorphic to PSL(2, 7), the second-smallest non-abelian simple group after the alternating group A₅. The quartic was first described in (Klein 1878b).

Klein's quartic occurs in many branches of mathematics, in contexts including representation theory, homology theory, Fermat's Last Theorem, and the Stark–Heegner theorem on imaginary quadratic number fields of class number one; see (Levy 1999) for a survey of properties.

A regular tetrahedron has 12 rotational (or orientation-preserving) symmetries, and a symmetry order of 24 including transformations that combine a reflection and a rotation.

The group of all (not necessarily orientation preserving) symmetries is isomorphic to the group S₄, the symmetric group of permutations of four objects, since there is exactly one such symmetry for each permutation of the vertices of the tetrahedron. The set of orientation-preserving symmetries forms a group referred to as the alternating subgroup A₄ of S₄.