Graduate Students Seminar

3pm Wednesday 15 September 2004
Brett Witty
MSI

Computational approach to Higman's PORC conjecture

There are several classes of algebraic objects depending on finite fields that we would like to count in a simple or efficient way. In 1960 G. Higman proved that we can obtain, what he called, PORC solutions for some of these problems. In other words, the set of finite fields can be partitioned into finitely many classes such that the number of objects in a class is polynomial in the size of the associated field. This talk will explain a proposed algorithm that gives explicit PORC solutions to these problems.




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