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In answering Classify all groups of order 182 I realized that I don't actually know any good general results that will allow me to determine whether or not two given semidirect products are isomorphic without resorting to various ad-hoc methods (like in that question where I counted elements of order $2$, which by a lucky coincidence was easy and sufficient).

To make the question more specific, let $G$ be a group and $H_1$ and $H_2$ be subgroups of $\rm{Aut}(G)$. What are necessary and/or sufficient conditions for the semidirect products $G \rtimes H_1$ and $G\rtimes H_2$ to be isomorphic?

Clearly if all the groups are finite, we must have $|H_1| = |H_2|$ for them to be isomorphic, but it is not clear to me that we need $H_1\simeq H_2$ unless we further assume that their orders are coprime with $|G|$.

Results that can be applied in a more general setup than the above would also be interesting, as well as results that require a few extra assumptions (like one or more of the groups being abelian or similar).

  • @DonAntonio You linked this question. – Tobias Kildetoft May 29 '13 at 14:14
  • Wow, am I a genius or what! Sorry about that, here it is: http://www.jmilne.org/math/CourseNotes/gt.html – DonAntonio May 29 '13 at 14:16
  • @TobiasKildetoft: by the way, I believe ad hoc and randomized methods are used at the end of most "classify all groups of order" questions due to there not existing a good answer to this question. However, it still would be nice to have a big list of necessary and sufficient conditions. I spent all my years studying the cases where G is specified functorially to avoid any surprise isomorphisms. – Jack Schmidt Jun 09 '13 at 00:59

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