In mathematics, an action of a group on a set is, loosely speaking, an operation that takes an element of and an element of and produces another element of More formally, it is a group homomorphism from to the automorphism group of X (the set of all bijections on along with group operation being function composition). One says that acts on
Many sets of transformations form a group under function composition; for example, the rotations around a point in the plane. It is often useful to consider the group as an abstract group, and to say that one has a group action of the abstract group that consists of performing the transformations of the group of transformations. The reason for distinguishing the group from the transformations is that, generally, a group of transformations of a structure acts also on various related structures; for example, the above rotation group also acts on triangles by transforming triangles into triangles.