An Introduction to Automatic Groups (11/3/04)

This curious talk was much more technical than it should have been. I didn't even have time to talk much about the proof that the braid group is automatic, which was my main goal. I think I spent most of the time going over technical points of the definition of an automatic group, which is kinda gross. My reference was Epstein et al.'s Word Processing in Groups, and I admit that this would have been a much better talk if I had known about Benson Farb's Automatic groups: A guided tour beforehand.