On Wed, Jun 30, 2010 at 9:37 AM, Niles Johnson <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> I have a proposal for implementing basic multivariate power series in
> sage.  Looking through the sage-devel history, I can see that this has
> come up before, and that a number of people have thought hard about
> this.  What I have in mind is something of a stop-gap, but there are
> two reasons I think it's valuable; I'd like to see if some others of
> you agree:
>
> 1. I already have working code, and some other code that uses this to
> do universal formal group law calculations (relevant for algebraic
> topologists)
>
> 2. William Stein has noted that multivariate power series usually
> don't get off the ground because people find out that they can do what
> they want with multivariate polynomials.  This happened to me, and the
> way I handled it has, I believe, the potential to be useful for
> everyone else in this position.
>
>
> Here's the proposal:  for power series in x,y,z over a base ring R,
> use a dummy variable t and the ring
>
> R[x,y,z] [[t]]
>
> as a substitute for
>
> R[[x,y,z]]
>
> That is, I work with total-degree power series precision, and replace
>
> \sum a_ijk x^i y^j z^k + O(x,y,z)^n
>
> with
>
> \sum a_ijk (x*t)^i (y*t)^j (z*t)^k+ O(t)^n.
>
> Then most of the operations for multivariable power series can be
> reduced to operations for multivariate polynomials or univariate power
> series.
>
> The only thing left to do is build functions which translate nicely
> between these different representations, so that multivariate power
> series can be constructed and printed without the user having to think
> about the dummy variable t.
>
>
> This is probably not a new idea, but I haven't seen it mentioned here
> before.  I have seen suggestions of using Maxima, Axiom, or something
> else to implement multivariate power series . . . I can't deny that
> seems like a better way,

I can.

> but it has the disadvantage of not being done
> already and that I don't know those languages already.  Let me know if
> the idea above seems worth finishing.

It does to me.  It would be way better than nothing, which is what we have now.

William

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-- 
William Stein
Professor of Mathematics
University of Washington
http://wstein.org

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