An introduction to computing modular forms using modular symbols

William A. Stein

Abstract

In this survey paper, we explain how weight-two modular forms on Gamma₀(N) are related to modular symbols, and how to use this to explicitly compute spaces of modular forms. I also gave a talk on this material, which resulted in some fun slides.

msri-intro.pdf is a PDF version of the paper.
msri-intro.ps is a postscript version of the paper.
msri-intro.dvi is a DVI version of the paper, which will be missing two figures.
msri-intro.tex is the LaTeX source for the paper, and the diagrams are here.
msri-intro.tgz contains everything you need to build the paper (the latex file and the diagrams).