SYNOPSIS

magnus

DESCRIPTION

The MAGNUS Computational Group Theory Package is an innovative symbolic algebra package providing facilities for doing calculations in and about infinite groups. Almost all symbolic algebra systems are oriented toward finite computations that are guaranteed to produce answers, given enough time and resources. By contrast, MAGNUS is concerned with experiments and computations on infinite groups which in some cases are known to terminate, while in others are known to be generally recursively unsolvable.

Features include:

A graphical object and method based user interface which is easy and intuitive to use and naturally reflects the underlying C++ classes;

A kernel comprised of a ``session manager", to communicate between the user interface or front-end and the back-end where computations are carried out, and ``computation managers" which direct the computations which may involve several algorithms and ``information centers" where information is stored;

Facilities for performing several procedures in parallel and allocating resources to each of several simultaneous algorithms working on the same problem;

Enumerators which generate sizable finite approximations to both finite and infinite algebraic objects and make it possible to carry out searches for answers even when general algorithms may not exist;

Innovative genetic algorithms;

A package manager to ``plug in" more special purpose algorithms written by others.

AUTHOR

Magnus was written by Dmitri Bormotov <[email protected]>, Gilbert Baumslag, C.F. Miller III, Hamish Short and many others.
This manual page was prepared by Ben Burton <[email protected]>, for the Debian GNU/Linux system (but may be used by others).