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Confused about FreeAlgebra quotients

asked 9 years ago

qw gravatar image

I think I'm misunderstanding how quotients of free algebras work. I tried to make a free algebra on two generators x, y and mod out by xy = yx, so you get a polynomial algebra -- but that's not what happened.

sage: R.<x,y> = FreeAlgebra(QQ)
sage: I = R*[x*y-y*x]*R
sage: Q.<a,b> = R.quo(I)
sage: a*b is b*a
False
sage: Q.is_commutative()
False

Relatedly, the documentation for free_module_quotient gives an example (constructing the quaternions as a free quotient):

sage: n = 2
sage: A = FreeAlgebra(QQ,n,'x')
sage: F = A.monoid()
sage: i, j = F.gens()
sage: mons = [ F(1), i, j, i*j ]
sage: r = len(mons)
sage: M = MatrixSpace(QQ,r)
sage: mats = [M([0,1,0,0, -1,0,0,0, 0,0,0,-1, 0,0,1,0]), M([0,0,1,0, 0,0,0,1, -1,0,0,0, 0,-1,0,0]) ]
sage: H2.<i,j> = A.quotient(mons,mats)

but I'm confused exactly how the matrices in the penultimate line describe the (multiplication) action? I.e. if I have some relation, say x^2 = 0, that I want to mod out by, how do I accomplish that using matrices?

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small remark: you should not use "is" for testing equality as it does something else

sage: (3*2) is (3*2)
False
vdelecroix gravatar imagevdelecroix ( 9 years ago )

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answered 9 years ago

vdelecroix gravatar image

updated 9 years ago

It looks like a bug to me. However it seems to work as follows (the example in the documentation uses it)

sage:  R.<x,y> = FreeAlgebra(QQ, implementation='letterplace')
sage: I = R*[x*y-y*x]*R
sage: Q.<a,b> = R.quo(I)
sage: a*b
b*a
sage: a*a*b == a*b*a == b*a*a
True
sage: Q.is_commutative()
True
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letterplace is a completely different implementation of FreeAlgebras which emulates noncommutative homogeneous polynomials as commutative polynomials using Singular. It sure works well, but it has some limitations, for instance the elements of the FreeAlgebra aren't callable and hence substitutions won't work. On the other hand, if the described behaviour of the non letterplace implementation is not a bug, then one might ast what are such quotients good for? In any case, it is desirable that both implementations maintained a good compatibility level with each other.

Waldeck gravatar imageWaldeck ( 8 years ago )

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Asked: 9 years ago

Seen: 1,000 times

Last updated: Jan 13 '16