Computations involving symbolic powers

Abstract

Symbolic powers are a classical commutative algebra topic that relates to primary decomposition, consisting, in some circumstances, of the functions that vanish up to a certain order on a given variety. However, these are notoriously difficult to compute, and there are seemingly simple questions related to symbolic powers that remain open even over polynomial rings. In this paper, we describe a Macaulay2 software package that allows for computations of symbolic powers of ideals and which can be used to study the equality and containment problems, among others.