Cuspidal Modular Symbols are Transportable

Modular symbols of weight 2 for a congruence subgroup Γ satisfy the identity {α,γ,(α)}={β,γ(β)} for all α,β in the extended upper half plane and γ ∊ Γ. The analogue of this identity is false for modular symbols of weight greater than 2. This paper provides a definition of transportable modular symbols, which are symbols for which an analogue of the above identity holds, and proves that every cuspidal symbol can be written as a transportable symbol. As a corollary, an algorithm is obtained for computing periods of cuspforms.