Algebra seminar by Colva Roney-Dougal

On Wednesday the 20th of November, Colva Roney-Dougal (University of St Andrews) will be visiting the Charlotte Scott Centre for Algebra and giving a talk at 3pm in JUN0001. The details of her talk are as follows:

Title: Polynomial-time proofs that groups are hyperbolic.

Abstract: A finitely-presented group G is hyperbolic if there is a linear bound on the number of relators required to prove that a word of length n is equal to the identity in G. The word problem in a group that is known to be hyperbolic is solvable in linear time. However, it is undecidable in general whether a group is, in fact, hyperbolic.

This talk will present some efficient, low-degree polynomial-time procedures which seek to prove that a given finitely-presented group is hyperbolic. If successful, they can also often construct, in low-degree polynomial time, a linear time word problem solver and a quadratic time conjugacy problem solver.

This is joint work with Derek Holt, Steve Linton, Max Neunhoffer, Richard Parker and Markus Pfeiffer.