Computing the fine structure of real reductive symmetric spaces (Q2455739)

Much of the structure of Lie groups has been implemented in several computer algebra packages including LiE, GAP4, Chevie, Magma and Maple. The structure of reductive symmetric spaces is very similar to that of the underlying Lie group and a computer algebra package for computations related to symmetric spaces would be an important tool for researchers in many areas of mathematics. Until recently only very few algorithms existed for computations in symmetric spaces due to the fact that their structure is much more complicated than that of the underlying group. In recent work Daniel and Helminck gave a number of algorithms for computing the fine structure of Riemannian symmetric spaces. In this paper a first step is made in extending these results to general real reductive symmetric spaces. For a reductive group \(G\) defined over a field \(k\) of characteristic \(\not =2\), let \(\sigma \) and \(\theta \) be two commuting \(k\)-involutions, with \(\theta \) a Cartan involution. The associated reductive symmetric space is the variety \(P_{\sigma }=\{g\sigma (g)^{-1}\mid g\in G\}\). The classification of these pairs \((\sigma ,\theta )\) of commuting involutions has been given by Helminck (1998). To an isomorphy class corresponds a \((\sigma ,\theta )\)-diagram. These are 171 types of local symmetric spaces, and the authors developed algorithms to compute the corresponding structures, which can be derived from the \((\sigma ,\theta )\)-diagrams. In this paper they give an outline of the algorithms, they used.