Progress report for St Andrews

Steve Linton, Olexandr Konovalov

Reporting period from March 2017 to October 2018

Finance and administration

Participated in the OpenDreamKit midterm review (April 2017, Brussels)
Participated in the 2nd OpenDreamKit midterm review (October 2018, Luxembourg)

Hiring

Nathan Carter and Michael Torpey started to work for OpenDreamKit on casual contracts
Markus switched to another project and will continue to work on ODK on a very small part-time amount of hours
We are expecting some further developments on the hiring side shortly and are going to advertise a position of a programmer very soon to fill in this vacancy

Achievements

numerous contributions to GAP included in three minor releases (4.8.7-4.8.10), the next major release of GAP 4.9.1 and subsequent GAP 4.9.2-GAP 4.9.3 releases (WP3)
work on the next major release of GAP 4.10 which is planned in November 2018 (WP3)
regular maintenance and extending of the nomenclature of Docker containers for GAP (WP3,WP4)
extending the nomenclature of Docker-based services for continuous integration for GAP packages (WP3)
GAP interface for Pari/GAP (WP3), and code for Galois groups enabled by this interface
New releases of GAP package SCSCP (WP3)
Native GAP Jupyter interface, and GAP packages needed to support it (crypting, uuid, ZeroMQInterface) (WP4) submitted for the redistribution with GAP and became included in it starting from the GAP 4.9.2 release
Francy - a Framework for Interactive Discrete Mathematics on GAP (Markus, Manuel Martins, supervised by Markus) (WP4)
JupyterVis - a package for visualisations in GAP by Nathan Carter (WP4)
Incorporating HPC-GAP (a code for shared memory parallel programming in GAP) into GAP starting from the major release of GAP 4.9.1 (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)
Paper “Minimal and Canonical Images” and implementation (Markus, Eliza Jonauskyte, Chris Jefferson and Rebecca Waldecker)
Paper “Constructing Majorana Representations” (Markus and Madeleine Whybrow)
Paper “Francy - An Interactive Discrete Mathematics Framework for GAP” (Markus and Manuel Martins)
Paper “Experimenting with braces” (Olexandr, Agata Smoktunowicz and Leandro Vendramin) accepted in Experimental Mathematics
Sabbatical of Nathan Carter (Bentley University, USA) for a year, starting from August 2018 to work on topics related to WP4 and WP6

Work in progress

Ongoing GAP developments in the areas relevant to WP3-WP6
GAP Syntax Tree Work and Optimiser, Pragmas
LibGAP API to appear in GAP 4.10 release
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)
Chinese remaindering to solve equations over the rationals using meataxe64 (Markus and Kirill Rodrigues (intern))
A new approach to proving hyperbolicity GAP package anatph (Markus, Colva Roney-Dougal, Derek Holt, close to submission); Markus also is working on a better version of the algorithm
Solving equations over the free group using constraint methods (Markus, Daphne Bogosian (Student), Peter Nightingale)

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, July 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
Olexandr became Software/Data Carpentry Trainer to be able to new Software/Data Carpentry Instructors
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
“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/) - Olexandr
Two sessions at the International Congress on Mathematical Software (ICMS 2018, University of Notre Dame, 24-27 July 2018, http://icms-conference.org/2018/), one on interoperability in mathematical software, one on backtrack search methods in group theory and combinatorics) - Markus
Workshop “Computer Algebra in the Age of Types (CAAT)” 11th Conference on Intelligent Computer Mathematics (CICM 2018, August 13-17, 2018, RISC, Hagenberg, https://www.cicm-conference.org/2018/cicm.php) - Markus
Software Tools for Mathematics (24-28 September 2018, Koper, Slovenia, http://stm.famnit.upr.si/) - Olexandr
Michael undertook Software/Data Carpentry Instructor training in October 2018, and is expected to become certified instructor soon
GAP Days Fall 2018 in Siegen - Markus, Michael

Future events:

GAP Days Spring 2019 (18-22 March 2019, University of Halle (Saale)) as an outreach event to potential users and students - Markus

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 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