Words in SL(n,Z) (5/9/05)

This was a fun talk. I multiplied some matrices together and my committee made me a PhD candidate. The result that I discussed is really nice, though; in "Navigating the Cayley Graphs in SL_N(Z) and SL_N(F_p)", Tim Riley gives a constructive proof of a result by Lubotzky, Mozes, and Ragunathan, and this was the topic of my oral exam. I decided against comparing it with the proof by LMR in "The word and Riemannian metrics on lattices of semisimple groups" because I only had 50 minutes.