Seminar series
Date
Wed, 23 Oct 2013
11:30
11:30
Location
Queen's College
Speaker
Tara Brough
Organisation
St Andrews
The word problem of a group $G$ with respect to a generating
set $X$ is the set of all words in elements of $X$ and their inverses
which represent the identity in $G$. A formal language is a set of words over a finite alphabet, and so word problems of groups can be viewed as formal languages.
In this talk I will give an introduction to formal
languages, concentrating on context-free languages and several related
classes. I will define these languages by means of automata. I will
then give a survey of research on groups whose word problem belongs to
the language classes I have introduced, beginning with the
classification of groups with context-free word problem (Muller and
Schupp, 1983). I will also discuss some of the open problems in this
area.