CONSTRUCTING MATRIX REPRESENTATIONS OF FINITELY PRESENTED GROUPS

The Todd-Coxeter coset enumeration algorithm is one of the most important tools of computational group theory. It may be viewed as a means of constructing permutation representations of finitely presented groups. In this paper we present an analogous algorithm for directly constructing matrix representations over various fields. In fact the algorithm is more general than this, and can be used to construct matrix representations of finitely generated algebras. The algorithm (with some restrictions) has been implemented as a C program and some results obtained with this implementation are described. © 1991, Academic Press Limited. All rights reserved.