An introduction to constructive algebraic analysis and its applications

Abstract

This text is an extension of lectures notes I prepared for les Journees Nationales de Calcul Formel held at the CIRM, Luminy (France) on May 3-7, 2010. The main purpose of these lectures was to introduce the French community of symbolic computation to the constructive approach to algebraic analysis and particularly to algebraic D-modules, its applications to mathematical systems theory and its implementations in computer algebra systems such as Maple or GAP4. Since algebraic analysis is a mathematical theory which uses different techniques coming from module theory, homological algebra, sheaf theory, algebraic geometry, and microlocal analysis, it can be difficult to enter this fascinating new field of mathematics. Indeed, there are very few introducing texts. We are quickly led to Bjork's books which, at first glance, may look difficult for the members of the symbolic computation community and for applied mathematicians. I believe that the main issue is less the technical difficulty of the existing references than the lack of friendly introduction to the topic, which could have offered a general idea of it, shown which kind of results and applications we can expect and how to handle the different computations on explicit examples. To a very small extent, these lectures notes were planned to fill this gap, at least for the basic ideas of algebraic analysis. Since, we can only teach well what we have clearly understood, I have chosen to focus on my work on the constructive aspects of algebraic analysis and its applications.