Main goals
The main goals were to finish OpenDreamKit related developer tasks as well as to introduce beginners to GAP and Singular, present computer algebra–related work, and share ideas through workshops.
OpenDreamKit implication
The event was fully funded by OpenDreamKit. Costs are still pending due to overseas travel claims.
Event summary
The event consisted of three parts:
- School: a sequence of workshops to introduce beginners to GAP, Singular, and open-source development principles.
- Mini-conference: talks to allow participants to present computer algebra–related work to each other.
- Workshops: a set of workshops dedicated to specific computer algebra problems.
Demographics
The workshop had just under 50 registered participants, not all of which were able to attend (VISA delays). The participants came from more than 10 countries on 4 continents. We had a total of 8 women attending.
Results and impact
In the School, tutorials were given that introduced participants to:
- Best practices in software development (Max Horn);
- Basic use of GAP (Michael Torpey);
- Advanced Topics in GAP (Thomas Breuer);
- Basic use of Singular (Christian Eder, Andreas Steenpaß, Isabel Stenger);
- Parallel modular algorithms in Singular (Christian Eder, Andreas Steenpaß, Isabel Stenger);
- CAP: Categories, algorithms, programming (Sebastian Posur).
These tutorials were complemented by informal discussions, and chances for
learners to answer questions. The Best practices'' andBasic use of GAP’’
sessions followed material from appropriate Software Carpentry courses
(https://software-carpentry.org/lessons/): Version Control with Git''
andProgramming with GAP’’ respectively.
The workshops of basic Singular and GAP were well received - several participants were either novices in GAP or Singular. For the non-beginners, the advanced workshops on modular algorithms in Singular and on CAP (a GAP package for categories, in particular in, but not restricted to, algebraic geometry) proved very intersting.
The next part, contributed talks, covered only a single day. However the talks originated in many different areas of mathematics and covered many successful challenging applications of components (GAP, Singular) of OpenDreamKit.
The final part, comprised of workshops on GAP, Singular and CAP
allowed us to close off remaining issues with regard
to the integration of the OpenDreamKit work into the various packages, e.g.
improvements to the integration of the fast multivariate polynomial
arithmetic in Singular. The workshop was in particular extremely useful in
bringing participants together to discuss some of the remaining technical
challenges and in understanding the mathematical challenges real world
researchers were facing and how they could be solved using tools developed
during OpenDreamKit. For example, it was discovered during the workshop that a
bottleneck experienced by one of the participants was down to fast
multivariate polynomial arithmetic (via rational functions) which was then
directly worked on by participants of the meeting. There was also a project
to improve integration of Singular into the Singular.
subsystem of the
Oscar computer algebra system specifically so that Gr"{o}ber bases could
be computed over coefficient fields implemented by OpenDreamKit components. This
project was finalized and merged at the workshop after months of
unsuccessful previous attempts.
The GAP workshop was part of the GAP 4.11 release process which is critical for the dissemination of OpenDreamKit components such as \libGAP. At the workshop, changes to the \libGAP system were documented and significant progress was made towards rapping up the release to reach users. This included dissemination of GAP into the Debian distribution. There were also lively discussions about the GAP-Jupyter integration.
GAP–Singular meeting, PfalzAkademie, Lambrecht, Germany