Geodesic rewriting systems and pregroups

In this paper we study rewriting systems for groups and monoids, focusing on situations where finite convergent systems may be difficult to find or do not exist. We consider systems which have no length increasing rules and are confluent and then systems in which the length reducing rules lead to geodesics. Combining these properties we arrive at our main object of study which we call geodesically perfect rewriting systems. We show that these are well-behaved and convenient to use, and give several examples of classes of groups for which they can be constructed from natural presentations. We describe a Knuth-Bendix completion process to construct such systems, show how they may be found with the help of Stallings' pregroups and conversely may be used to construct such pregroups.Comment: 44 pages, to appear in "Combinatorial and Geometric Group Theory, Dortmund and Carleton Conferences". Series: Trends in Mathematics. Bogopolski, O.; Bumagin, I.; Kharlampovich, O.; Ventura, E. (Eds.) 2009, Approx. 350 p., Hardcover. ISBN: 978-3-7643-9910-8 Birkhause

String Rewriting and Gröbner Bases - A General Approach to Monoid and Group Rings

The concept of algebraic simplification is of great importance for the field of symbolic computation in computer algebra. In this paper we review some fundamental concepts concerning reduction rings in the spirit of Buchberger. The most important properties of reduction rings are presented. The techniques for presenting monoids or groups by string rewriting systems are used to define several types of reduction in monoid and group rings. Grobner bases in this setting arise naturally as generalizations of the corresponding known notions in the commutative and some noncommutative cases. Several results on the connection of the word problem and the congruence problem are proven. The concepts of saturation and completion are introduced for monoid rings having a finite convergent presentation by a semi-Thue system. For certain presentations, including free groups and context-free groups, the existence of finite Gröbner bases for finitely generated right ideals is shown and a procedure to com..