COMPUTATIONAL PROBLEMS IN ABSTRACT ALGEBRA.

.,.
Vlll Foreword
could ever be, Mr. C. L. Roberts and the staff of the Atlas Laboratory
Administration Group ensured that the mechanics went without a hitch
and the whole of the general organization was carried out with great
efficiency by Miss Synolda Butler. I am most grateful to them all, and to
Pergamon Press for undertaking the publication of the Proceedings: and
finally, to Mr. John Leech for so willingly agreeing to be Editor.
J. HOWLETT
Preface
DR. HOWLETT has described the genesis of the Conference; here I need
only describe the compilation of this volume of Proceedings. Speakers at
the Conference were invited to deliver manuscripts at or soon after the
Conference, and this volume is based on these manuscripts, substantially
as received. Most authors prepared their papers without reference to the
papers of other authors. This has the result that their notation is not uniform
and there are overlaps; no attempt has been made to coordinate
papers in this respect. So each paper is a substantially independent account
of its topics, and is capable of being read without reference to other
papers. Readers may find it an advantage to have different authors’
accounts where these overlap. A disadvantage, however, is that crossreferences
between papers in this volume are far from complete; the
reader of a paper may check which other papers in the volume are also
relevant.
The sequence of papers in this volume is based on that of the lectures
at the Conference, with minor changes; the large body of papers on group
theory are placed first, beginning with Dr. Neubtiser’s comprehensive
survey, and subsequent papers are placed in roughly the order of distance
of the subject from group theory. To complete the record of the Conference,
I add that Mr. M. J. T. Guy and Professors D. G. Higman, W. 0. J.
Moser, T. S. Motzkin and J. L. Selfridge also delivered lectures at the
Conference, but did not submit manuscripts for publication; this accounts
for a few allusions to topics absent from this volume. The correspondence
between the subject matter of the other lectures and the present papers is
not always close. Professor Mendelsohn’s first paper is based on points
made in discussion and not on a lecture of his own, while the paper by
Professors Krause and Weston was not presented at the Conference.
A bibliography on applications of computers to problems on algebra was
prepared by Dr. D&es and distributed at the Conference; this is not
reproduced here as all relevant items have been included by Dr. Neubtiser
in the bibliography to his survey paper.
The editorial policy has been that the subject matter and style of papers
are wholly the responsibility of the authors. Editing has been confined to
points of typography, uniformity of style of references, divisions ofpapers,
etc., and, at the request of certain authors whose native language is not
English, some minor changes of wording. (This is a refined way of saying
that I have done as little as I could get away with.)
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