We study solutions of difference equations in the rings of sequences and, more generally, solutions of equations with a monoid action in the ring of sequences indexed by the monoid. This framework includes, for example, difference equations on grids (for example, standard difference schemes) and difference equations in functions on words. On the universality side, we prove a version of strong Nullstellensatz for such difference equations under the assumption that the cardinality of the ground field is greater than the cardinality of the monoid and construct an example showing that this assumption cannot be omitted. On the undecidability side, we show that the following problems are undecidable:

This paper discusses several algorithmic problems related to rings of rational matrices. It provides solutions to these problems in the commutative case and points out some of the difficulties to be overcome in the general case. A connection with attempts to construct Gröbner bases for ideals in free rings is also illustrated.

In this paper we show that any system of equations over a free nilpotent group of class c is either unitary or miliary. In fact, such a system either has a most general solution (akin to the most general solution of a system of linear dipohantine equations), or every solution has a proper generalization. In principle we provide an algorithm for determining whether or not a most general solution exists, and exhibiting it if it does.

A general theory for Grôbner basis in path algebras is introduced which extends the known theory for commutative polynomial rings and free associative algebras.

An invariant Φ of a tree T under a k-state Markov model, where the time parameter is identified with the edges of T, allows us to recognize whether data on N observed species can be associated with the N terminal vertices of T in the sense of having been generated on T rather than on any other tree with N terminals. The invariance is with respect to the (time) lengths associated with the edges of the tree. We propose a general method of finding invariants of a parametrized functional form. It involves calculating the probability f of all kN data possibilities for each of m edge-length configurations of T, then solving for the parameters using the m equations of form Φ (f) = 0. We apply this to the case of quadratic invariants for unrooted binary trees with four terminals, for all k, using the Jukes–Cantor type of Markov matrix. We report partial results on finding the smallest algebraically independent set of invariants.