Ákos Seress - Böcker

This volume contains contributions by the participants of the conference "Groups and Computation", which took place at The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, in June 1999. This conference was the successor of two workshops on "Groups and Computation" held at DIMACS in 1991 and 1995.There are papers on permutation group algorithms, finitely presented groups, polycyclic groups, and parallel computation, providing a representative sample of the breadth of Computational Group Theory. On the other hand, more than one third of the papers deal with computations in matrix groups, giving an in-depth treatment of the currently most active area of the field.The points of view of the papers range from explicit computations to group-theoretic algorithms to group-theoretic theorems needed for algorithm development.

Following an initiative of the late Hans Zassenhaus in 1965, the Departments of Mathematics at The Ohio State University and Denison University organize conferences in combinatorics, group theory, and ring theory. Between May 18-21, 2000, the 25th conference of this series was held. Usually, there are twenty to thirty invited 20-minute talks in each of the three main areas. However, at the 2000 meeting, the combinatorics part of the conference was extended, to honor the 65th birthday of Professor Dijen Ray-Chaudhuri. This volulme is the proceedings of this extension. Most of the papers are in coding theory and design theory, reflecting the major interest of Professor Ray-Chaudhuri, but there are articles on association schemes, algebraic graph theory, combinatorial geometry, and network flows as well. There are four surveys and seventeen research articles, and all of these went through a thorough refereeing process. The volume is primarily recommended for researchers and graduate students interested in new developments in coding theory and design theory.