Progress report for St Andrews

Steve Linton

Reporting period from March 2017 to January 2018

Finance and administration

• Participated in the OpenDreamKit midterm review (April 2017, Brussels)

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Hiring

• No activity in this period, but are we are considering taking on a programmer soon

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Achievements

• numerous contributions to GAP included in three minor releases (4.8.7-4.8.9), and the beta version of the next major release of GAP 4.9 (WP3)

• regular maintenance and extending of the nomenclature of Docker containers for GAP (WP3,WP4)

• GAP interface for Pari/GAP (WP3), and code for galois groups enabled by this interface

• New release of GAP package SCSCP (WP3)

• Native GAP Jupyter interface, and GAP packages needed to support it (crypting, uuid, ZeroMQInterface) (WP4)

• Francy - a Framework for Interactive Discrete Mathematics on GAP (Markus, Manuel Martins, supervised by Markus)

• Incorporating HPC-GAP (a code for shared memory parallel programming in GAP) into GAP 4.9 (WP5)

• James Mitchell collaborated with Nicolas Thiery on Semigroups package and libsemigroups library, with contributions from Markus (see https://github.com/gap-packages/Semigroups/wiki)

• Improvements of type/filter/category information in GAP (outcome of the work carried out under WP6)

• Published paper at MACIS 2017 (Markus, intern Victor Vasiliev). Maths in the Middle architecture (WP6) Docker container with Python, Singular, GAP and MMT

• Work with Michael Kohlhase (WP6), including visit of Markus to Erlangen in June and Paris in November, MathInTheMiddle package

• Implementation of Schreier-Sims algorithm in HPC-GAP (Markus, intern Lucas Jones)

• Implementation of Parallel Froidure-Pin (Markus, intern Alasdair MacIndoe). Paper with James Mitchell and Julius Jonasus in “Portugaliae Mathematicae”

• Paper “New refiners for permutation group search” and implementation (Markus, Chris Jefferson and Rebecca Waldecker)

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Work in progress

• Ongoing GAP developments in the areas relevant to WP3-WP6)

• Impact Acceleration Account grant application for a project to use Jupyter GAP interface in teaching

• GAP Syntax Tree Work and Optimiser, Pragmas

• LibGAP API specification

• Fully functional MathInTheMiddle server for GAP, Singular, and Pari

• Madeleine Whybrow and Markus Pfeiffer computed all previously known Majorana Representations with an independent implementation of Seress’ algorithm, now computing previously unknown ones

• The meataxe64 GAP package and contributions to the underlying meataxe64 libraries, providing a major advance on the state of the art in linear algebra and computational representation theory in high dimensions over finite fields on multicore computers

• p-adic solutions to systems of equations over the rationals using meataxe64 (as a package)

• Anticipated sabbatical of Nathan Carter (Bentley University, USA) in 2018-2019 to work on topics related to WP6

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Workshops and dissemination activities

• Sage/GAP Days 85 (March 13-17, 2017, Cernay, https://wiki.sagemath.org/days85) - Olexandr, Markus

• GAP Days Spring 2017 (May 29 - June 2, 2017, Aachen, http://gapdays.de/gapdays2017-spring/) - Markus

• OSCAR Kickoff & Coding Sprint (May 2017) - Markus

• GAP Days Fall 2017 (August 30 - September 8, 2017, Siegen, http://gapdays.de/gapdays2017-fall/) - Markus

• Docker Containers for Reproducible Research Workshop (27-28 June, Cambridge, https://www.software.ac.uk/c4rr) - Olexandr (steering commitee member)

• 28th OpenMath Workshop at CICM 2017 (Edinburgh, July 17, 2017, https://www.cicm-conference.org/2017/cicm.php?event=openmath&menu=general) - Olexandr, Markus

• 8th International Workshop on Parallel Symbolic Computation (PASCO 2017, Kaiserslautern, Juky 23-24, 2017, http://sigsam.org/PASCO/2017/) - Olexandr (steering commitee member)

• Markus Pfeiffer took part in Groups St Andrews 2017 in Birmingham (http://www.groupsstandrews.org/2017/) and presented there a poster about the OpenDreamKit project, and ongoing work on permutation group search (paper submitted). After the conference, he lectured at the satellite event - a GAP Tutorial (https://www.codima.ac.uk/gsta2017/) and presented there the Jupyter GAP interface

• GAP Days Fall 2017 (August 30th - September 8th, 2017, Siegen, https://gapdays.de/gapdays2017-fall/) - Markus

• Nikolaus conference 2017 (Aachen, 8-9 December 2017, www.math.rwth-aachen.de/Nikolaus2017/) - Markus

Future events:

• “Jupyter in GAP and other CAS” workshop (June 4th - June 8th 2018, University of St Andrews, http://gapdays.de/gap-jupyter-days2018/)

• Demonstrating Jupyter GAP interface at the 20th Postgraduate Group Theory Conference (St Andrews, 17-20th July, 2018, https://en-gb.facebook.com/pgtc2018/)

• Markus sent two session proposals to the International Congress on Mathematical Software (ICMS 2018, University of Notre Dame, 24-27 July 2018, http://icms-conference.org/2018/), one for interoperability in mathematical software, one for permutation group search methods

• Proposal for a workshop on dependent types in mathematical software at 11th Conference on Intelligent Computer Mathematics (CICM 2018, August 13-17, 2018, RISC, Hagenberg, https://www.cicm-conference.org/2018/cicm.php), to be submitted in February 2018

Other

Collaboration/synergy with other projects:

• CoDiMa (CCP in Computational Discrete Mathematics, http://www.codima.ac.uk/) is a EPSRC-funded community building project centred around GAP and SageMath. It enhances dissemination of OpenDreamKit results in the UK through its traning events and research visits programme

• Symbolic Tools in Mathematics and their Application (https://www.computeralgebra.de/sfb/) is a new DFG-funded project which develops a computer algebra system called OSCAR (Open Source Computer Algebra Resource) which is based on GAP, Singular, Polymake and ANTIC systems

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