[Axiom-mail] [axiom] Finitely Presented Groups and Axiom

[root]

Dr Sims,

I've recently purchased your book "Computation with Finitely
Presented Groups".

My particular interest in the book is related to Axiom. Axiom
is a computer algebra system that was developed at IBM, sold
to the Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG), and released as 
free source code in September. I'm leading an effort to bring
the Axiom system back to life as free code. You can find it at:
http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/axiom if you are interested.

Axiom is weak in group theory and really has nothing related to
infinite group theory. I've looked at the algorithms in your book
briefly with the hope of building up strength in infinite group
theory.

The key item for me is the question of the representation of these
groups and the representation of a presentation. The examples in the
book use a matrix but the groups are really infinite objects. It is
unclear what a good computational representation would be for them.
Do you have any guidance you can provide?  I've done work with the
Magnus group (Baumslag) but that code is all C++ and the group
representations are not easily expressed.

I'd like to develop a small set of representations in Axiom that
will work across your set of algorithms. 

Tim Daly
address@hidden