Mod-p Group Cohomology Package¶

This is the documentation for our Sage package on the computation of modular cohomology rings of finite groups.

Summary¶

The source code consists of

• Python and Cython extension modules as well as Singular and GAP functions written by Simon King.
• C-programs and Gap functions created by David Green and modified by Simon King.

The package comprises a data base of the cohomology rings of all groups of order 64, and can access a repository of the cohomology rings of all groups of order 128, all but 6 groups of order 243, of the Sylow 2-subgroup of the Higman-Sims group, and of the Sylow 2-subgroup of the third Conway group. These data were produced with our package.

Since version 2.0, it can also compute the modular cohomology rings of non prime power groups. In particular, it allows for the computation of the modular cohomology for various primes of the first three Janko groups, of Mathieu groups 11, 12, 22 and 23, of the McLaughlin group, of SuzukiGroup(8), of the Higman-Sims group and of the third Conway group. Here are the computational results. It is planned (but not done yet) to include these cohomology rings in our repository.

The standard way of creating cohomology rings is documented in pGroupCohomology. More details on the available methods can be found in the factory, cohomology and modular_cohomology modules. There are also five other modules used in the background, which may be less interesting to a casual user.

The computation of the modular cohomology rings of non prime power groups is reduced to the case of prime power groups, possibly in several steps, by virtue of the stable element method. The cohomology computation for prime power groups is based on the construction of a minimal free resolution.

In both cases, we follow Jon Carlson’s basic approach to compute an approximation of the cohomology ring in increasing degree, and to use criteria to prove that at some point the approximation is actually isomorphic to the cohomology ring.

We use completeness criteria proposed by Dave Benson, David Green, Simon King and Peter Symonds. The construction of minimal free resolutions is based on an algorithm of David Green.

Installation¶

The current version of our cohomology package is supposed to work both in the python-2 and python-3 versions of SageMath. As a runtime dependency, it relies on the Small Groups library of Hans Ulrich Besche, Bettina Eick and Eamonn O’Brien. Since this is a standard package for SageMath sind 2018, there is no special installation step needed to provide this dependeny.

Prior to version 3.0, the cohomology package comprised a copy of an old version of MeatAxe. Now, the package links against a MeatAxe fork, SharedMeatAxe. It is a build-time dependency and can be installed in Sage by doing

sage -i meataxe
sage -b


By trac ticket 28414, the cohomology package can then be installed in your copy of Sage by

sage -i p_group_cohomology


Testing¶

The package has an extensive test suite. It is recommended to run the tests, although this can take a considerable amount of time (easily one hour if a single thread is used). If the environment variable SAGE_CHECK is set to yes, the test script is launched right after installing the package. The same effect can be achieved by

sage -i -c p_group_cohomology


Documentation¶

If the environment variable SAGE_SPKG_INSTALL_DOCS is set to yes, then the documentation of our spkg is automatically created and put into SAGE_ROOT/local/share/doc/p_group_cohomology/.

Acknowledgements¶

The development of the initial version of this SPKG was funded by by the German Science Foundation, DFG project GR 1585/4–1, and mainly accomplished at Friedrich Schiller University Jena.

Since version 1.0.1, the further work on this SPKG was funded by Marie Curie grant MTKD-CT-2006-042685 and was pursued at the National University of Ireland, Galway. Since version 2.1.2, the project has returned to Jena and was funded by DFG project KI 861/2–1.

We thank William Stein for giving us access to various computers on which we could build test the SPKG and on which some huge computations could be completed, and acknowledge the support by National Science Foundation Grant No. DMS-0821725.

We are also grateful to William Stein and David Joyner for critical comments and for testing the installation of our package on a large variety of platforms. Suggestions of Mikael Vejdemo Johansson and John Palmieri were very valuable for verifying the code on the computation of Massey products.

We thank Mathieu Dutour Sikirić for his explanations how to keep track of large lists of double cosets in GAP. We are also grateful to the GAP support group for solving various technical problems that became imminent when dealing with non prime power groups.

We thank Peter Symonds for interesting discussions, in particular for suggesting to use the Poincaré series in a completeness criterion.

We are greatful to John Palmieri for his help on making p_group_cohomology work with python-3.

Versions¶

See SPKG.txt for a more detailed account.

• v3.3 (September 2019):
• Python-3 support.
• Cleaner code and tests for the mechanism that updates moved data.
• Use proper isomorphism tests in unit_test_64.
• v3.2 (July 2019):
• Detection of graded non-induced isomorphisms of cohomology rings.
• Easier creation of a cohomology ring from a tower of subgroups.
• Kernels and preimage representatives of induced maps.
• Stop hard-coding MTXLIB environment variable.
• v3.1 (December 2018):
• Hilbert series computation by using a new implementation in SageMath.
• Vastly improved computation of filter degree type (now relying on Hilbert series).
• Use libgap instead of the GAP pexpect interface.
• v3.0.1 (August 2018):
• Add a routine to compute filter regular parameters in small degrees by enumeration.
• More self-consistency checks.
• A routine to compute a cohomology ring from a tower of subgroups.
• v3.0 (February 2018):
• Turn the cohomology package into a “new style spkg”. It is split into several smaller parts that are either using an autotoolized build system or are pip installable.
• Replace the old custom test and doc-build scripts by standard tools.
• v2.1.5 (Mai 2015):
• Improved computation of the nil-radical, including a degree-wise computation.
• Methods is_nilpotent and nilpotency_degree for cohomology ring elements.
• Various improvements for the computation of depth and filter degree type.
• v2.1.4 (April 2013):
• Consequently compute parameters for the complete cohomology ring rather than only for the ring approximation.
• Improved heuristics to speed-up computations.
• Better portability.
• Improved logging.
• v2.1.3 (July 2012):
• Improved heuristics to choose between Hilbert-Poincaré and Symonds criteria, and to deal with lower bounds for the depth.
• Allow storing of “permanent results” that are indexed in terms of data in Gap.
• Switch to a new location for the public web repository.
• v2.1.2 (March 2012):
• Use Sage’s coercion model more properly.
• Build the documentation locally.
• v2.1.1 (September 2010):
• Make it so that write permission in SAGE_DATA are only needed during installation of the package, but not for using it.
• Restructuring the code.
• v2.1 (September 2010):
• Support for big endian machines.
• 100% doctest coverage, parallel testing.
• New: Essential and depth essential ideals, kernels and preimages of induced homomorphisms.
• Improved completion tests.
• v2.0 (April 2010):
• Modular cohomology rings for arbitrary finite groups (not just prime power groups).
• Improved portability.
• v1.2.p0 (March 2010):
• Improved test for the presence of the Small Groups library (thanks to Dima Pasechnik).
• v1.2 (October 2009):
• Minor bug fixes and code improvements.
• Persistent Group Cohomology (bar codes), based on ideas of Graham Ellis and Simon King.
• v1.1 (August 2009):
• Yoneda cocomplex.
• Restricted Massey powers and general Massey products.
• v1.0.2 (July 2009):
• Minor fixes to prevent a regression.
• v1.0.1 (July 2009):
• First public version in GPL 2 or later

Licence¶

This document and our data bases of cohomology rings are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.