ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Dihedral group of order 8

Okay, imagine you have 8 toys that you can twist and turn around. Let's call them blocks, and each block has two sides, a front and a back.

Now, let's say you want to play with these blocks and make different shapes out of them. You can stack them up, line them up, and twist them around in different ways. Some shapes might look the same when you turn them, and some might look different.

The dihedral group of order 8 is like a way of keeping track of all the different shapes you can make with these blocks. It's like a big list that tells you which shapes are the same and which ones are different.

In this list, each shape is called an element, and each element has a special name. For example, imagine you take two blocks and stack them on top of each other. This shape is called "flip," because you can flip it over and it still looks the same.

Another shape might be called "rotate" because you can turn the blocks around in a circle and it still looks the same.

The dihedral group of order 8 is just a list of all these different shapes you can make with your blocks, and how they relate to each other. For example, if you take "flip" and "rotate" shapes, you can combine and make a new shape, "flip-rotate."

It might sound complicated, but it's really just a fun way of playing with your blocks and seeing how many different shapes you can make!