David Cook II wrote:
> A special case of what you want is already implemented: The LocalRings
> package implements localisation of a ring at a maximal ideal.
Thanks for pointing this out. I hadn't noticed this package.
Unfortunately, it seems that this package does not have a very detailed documentation, so I'm not really sure how to use it. It seems that the local ring obtained by localizing at a maximal ideal is more or less encoded simply by keeping the original ring and the maximal ideal. It is not completely clear to me how to compute in this ring.
I was actually trying to use M2 while teaching some intersection theory to students. I wanted to compute multiplicities of intersections for curves. If A and B are polynomials defining curves in k[x,y], one can always compute the dimension of k[x,y]/(a,b) by using degree(k[x,y]/ideal(a,b)), but it only gives the sum of multiplicities of intersections of the various points of intersection. One would like to be able to isolate each point, and compute the multiplicity of intersection at this point. Localizing would be great for that...