CARMA SEMINAR Speaker: George Havas, The University of Queensland Title: Group theoretic proofs by coset enumeration Location: Room V205, Mathematics Building (Callaghan Campus) The University of Newcastle Time and Date: 3:00 pm, Wed, 23rd Sep 2015 Abstract: Given a finite presentation of a group, proving properties of the group can be difficult. Indeed, many questions about finitely presented groups are unsolvable in general. Algorithms exist for answering some questions while for other questions algorithms exist for verifying the truth of positive answers. An important tool in this regard is the Todd-Coxeter coset enumeration procedure. It is possible to extract formal proofs from the internal working of coset enumerations. We give examples of how this works, and show how the proofs produced can be mechanically verified and how they can be converted to alternative forms. We discuss these automatically produced proofs in terms of their size and the insights they offer. We compare them to hand proofs and to the simplest possible proofs. We point out that this technique has been used to help solve a longstanding conjecture about an infinite class of finitely presented groups. [Permanent link]