The free group in R"

In freegroup: The Free Group

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The freegroup package

This package provides some functionality for manipulating the free group on a finite list of symbols.

There is an excellent wikipedia page.

Informally, the free group $\left(X,\circ\right)$ on a set $S={a,b,c,...,z}$ is the set $X$ of words that are objects like $W=c^{-4}bb^2aa^{-1}ca$, with a group operation of string juxtaposition. Usually one works only with words that are in reduced form, which has successive powers of the same symbol combined, so $W$ would be equal to $c^{-4}b^3ca$; see how $b$ appears to the third power and the $a$ term in the middle has vanished.

The group operation of juxtaposition is formally indicated by $\circ$, but this is often omitted in algebraic notation; thus, for example $a^2b^{-3}c^2\circ c^{-2}ba =a^2b^{-3}c^2c{^-2}ba =a^2b^{-2}ba$.

In R package freegroup, a word is represented by a two-row integer matrix: The top row is the integer representation of the symbol and the second row is the corresponding power. For example, say we want to represent $a^2b^{-3}ac^2a^{-2}$ we would identify $a$ as 1, $b$ as 2, etc and write

(M <- rbind(c(1,2,3,3,1),c(2,-3,2,3,-2)))

(see how negative entries in the second row correspond to negative powers). Then to convert to a more useful form we would have

library("freegroup")
(x <- free(M))

The representation for R object x is still a two-row matrix, but the print method is active and uses a more visually appealing scheme.

We can coerce strings to free objects:

(y <- as.free("aabbbcccc"))

The free group operation is simply juxtaposition, represented here by the plus symbol, "+":

x+y

(see how the $a$ "cancels out" in the juxtaposition). One motivation for the use of "+" rather than "*" is that Python uses + for appending strings:

>>> "a" + "abc"
'aabc'
>>> 

However, note that the + symbol is usually reserved for commutative operations; note that string juxtaposition is associative. Multiplication by integers---denoted in freegroup idiom by *---is also defined. Suppose we want to concatenate 5 copies of x:

x*5

The package is vectorized:

x*(0:3)

There are a few methods for creating free objects, for example:

abc(1:9)

And we can also generate random free objects:

rfree(10,4)

Inverses are calculated using unary or binary minus:

(u <- rfree(10,4))
-u
u-u

We can take the "sum" of a vector of free objects simply by juxtaposing the elements:

sum(u)

Powers are defined as per group conjugation: x^y == y^{-1}xy (or, written in additive notation, -y+x+y):

u
z <- alpha(26)
u^z

Thus:

sum(u^z) == sum(u^z)

If we have more than 26 symbols the print method runs out of letters:

free(rbind(1:30,1))

If this is a problem (it might not be: the print method might not be important) it is possible to override the default symbol set:

options(symbols = state.abb)
free(rbind(1:50,1))

freegroup documentation built on Dec. 28, 2022, 2:14 a.m.