'Scuola Normale Superiore - Edizioni della Normale'
Abstract
The object of this thesis is the automated computation of the rational (co)homology
of the moduli spaces of smooth marked Riemann surfaces Mg;n. This is achieved by
using a computer to generate a chain complex, known in advance to have the same
homology as Mg;n, and explicitly spell out the boundary operators in matrix form.
As an application, we compute the Betti numbers of some moduli spaces Mg;n.
Our original contribution is twofold. In Chapter 3, we develop algorithms for the
enumeration of fatgraphs and their automorphisms, and the computation of the
homology of the chain complex formed by fatgraphs of a given genus g and number
of boundary components n.
In Chapter 4, we describe a new practical parallel algorithm for performing Gaussian
elimination on arbitrary matrices with exact computations: projections indicate
that the size of the matrices involved in the Betti number computation can easily
exceed the computational power of a single computer, so it is necessary to distribute
the work over several processing units. Experimental results prove that our
algorithm is in practice faster than freely available exact linear algebra codes.
An effective implementation of the fatgraph algorithms presented here is available
at http://code.google.com/p/fatghol. It has so far been used to compute the Betti
numbers of Mg;n for (2g + n) 6 6.
The Gaussian elimination code is likewise publicly available as open-source software
from http://code.google.com/p/rheinfall
