The term "representation of a group" is also used in a more general sense to mean any "description" of a group as a group of transformations of some mathematical object. More formally, a "representation" means a homomorphism from the group to the automorphism group of an object. If the object is a vector space we have a "linear representation". Some people use "realization" for the general notion and reserve the term "representation" for the special case of linear representations. The bulk of this article describes linear representation theory; see the last section for generalizations.