In group theory, a branch of mathematics, a subset of a group G is a subgroup of G if the members of that subset form a group with respect to the group operation in G.
Formally, given a group G under a binary operation ∗, a subset H of G is called a subgroup of G if H also forms a group under the operation ∗. More precisely, H is a subgroup of G if the restriction of ∗ to H × H is a group operation on H. This is often denoted H ≤ G, read as "H is a subgroup of G".