Lecture 28 Parity of a Permutation

In this lecture we introduce the notion of parity of a permutation and study its properties. In particular we prove that the parity of the product of permutations is equal to the product of parities of factors. As an application we prove that for the 15 puzzle, the challenge of swapping 14 and 15 is not solvable. This is a lecture in the "Linear Algebra" course for students specializing in mathematics.