People interested

John Voight, David Roe, Xavier Caruso, Kiran Kedlaya

Progress

We had a discussion Monday afternoon. The short summary:

• We agree that objects like matrices, vectors and subspaces should be stored as an approximation and a separate precision object (rather than as a "array" of p-adic entries).
• Things like kernels should give the maximum kernel. If A is a singular matrix, then any ball around A contains invertible matrices. So when a user asks for the rank we should give them the minimum rank among all matrices equivalent to the given approximation modulo the precision; if they ask for the kernel we give them the linear space containing all possible kernels.
• Precision objects for subspaces can be thought of as balls in the tangent space to the corresponding Grassmanian.
• We should use the templates being developed for Qp and Zp in the linear algebra context as well.