UW Combinatorics Talk
Title: Counting in Thompson's group F - enumeration and experimentation
Andrew Rechnitzer
University of British Columbia
December 7, 4:00pm
Padelford C-401
refreshments at 3:30pm
Pre-Seminar at 2:30pm in Padelford C-401
ABSTRACT
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Richard Thompson's group F is a widely studied group which has
provided examples of and counter-examples to a variety of conjectures
in group theory. It is also an extremely combinatorially appealing
object which has a beautiful description in terms of binary trees.
In this talk I will describe two important enumerative problems
associated with F. The first is the problem of computing the
growth-series of F - the number of elements with geodesic length n. I
will describe the polynomial time algorithm that "solves" the problem
and a couple of associated conjectures. The second problem is the
cogrowth series - the number of words of length n equivalent to the
identity. This second problem important because of its connections to
the amenability of F and I will describe some of our recent
experimental explorations of this problem using techniques from
enumeration and statistical mechanics.
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Speaker's Contact Info:
http://www.math.ubc.ca/~andrewr/
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