Any body have any ideas???? I'm lost.
I don't know either. I looked in the back of the book, but I don't see how what they're saying has anything to do with the problem. The back of the book is talking about how $ \phi_{a^{n}}=1 $, but I thought that we basically needed to show that $ \phi_{a}^{n}=1 $. All I can show is that $ \phi_{a}^{n}(x)=ax^{n}a^{-1} $, and that $ \phi_{a}^{n}(x)=x $ if G is abelian.
