First CoDiMa Training School in Computational Discrete Mathematics
We have just finalised the date and location for the First CoDiMa Training School in Computational Discrete Mathematics which will take place at the University of Manchester on November 16th-20th, 2015. This school is intended for PhD students and researchers from UK institutions. It will start with the 2-days hands-on Software Carpentry workshop covering basic concepts and tools, including working with the command line, version control and task automation, continued with introductions to GAP and SageMath systems, and followed by the series of lectures and exercise classes on a selection of topics in computational discrete mathematics. The school will finish at Friday lunchtime, with an option to stay for the NBSAN (North British Semigroups and Applications Network) meeting on Friday afternoon.
Travel updates – Summer 2015
Our short research visits programme successfully continues. Since the beginning of the project, we have received 14 applications for travel support, and 12 visits already took place. This is an overview of summer travel activities which were fully or partially funded by CoDiMa after the publication of the previous travel update.
In June, (more…)
Release of Sage 6.8
Sage 6.8 was released on 26 July 2015 and is available for download from the SageMath website. This release closes 351 tickets and incorporates changes made by 95 contributors, including 13 first making their first contribution to Sage. Among other improvements and bugfixes, this Sage release includes also the latest GAP 4.7.8 (June 2015) and some fixes in Sage’s interface to GAP and its packages. Please see the release announcement for further details.
Average order of group elements: a demo of test-driven development in GAP
By Olexandr Konovalov, Research Fellow in the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Computational Algebra, University of St Andrews (reproduced from the original post here)
This blog post is based on an improvised demo that I gave at the Newcastle University on May 21st, 2015 during a short visit supported by the CoDiMa project.
Let’s consider the following exercise: for a finite group G, calculate the average order of its element (that is, the sum of orders of its elements divided by the order of the group). We begin with a very straightforward approach, iterating over all elements of the group in question:
gap> S:=SymmetricGroup(10);
Sym( [ 1 .. 10 ] )
gap> sum:=0;
0
gap> for g in S do
> sum := sum + Order(g);
> od;
gap> sum/Size(S);
39020911/3628800
Now assume that we would like to save this fragment of the GAP code and later repeat this calculation for some other groups. (more…)
Short research visits programme begins
We have already funded several trips under our short research visits programme.
Mark Kambites (Manchester) visited St Andrews on 21-23 April 2015 for the initial planning meeting and discussing further collaboration on implementing a tropical algebra/geometry package for GAP, based on his earlier work with Markus Pfeiffer (St Andrews).
Olexandr Konovalov visited Newcastle University on May 21st, 2015 to meet the members of the algebra research group in Newcastle: (more…)
GAP 4.7.8 release
GAP 4.7.8 release, dated 9th June 2015, is now publicly available. It fixes several bugs reported since the previous release (February 2015), and also includes 2 new and 17 updated GAP packages. Furthermore, this is the first release since the establishing of the official development repository for GAP on GitHub, so it also checks that everything (GAP codebase, release wrapping scripts, infrastructure for regression tests, etc.) has been migrated properly and works as expected.
Please see downloads, release announcement and changes overview for further details.
Welcome to the CoDiMa website
Welcome to the new website of the EPSRC-funded Collaborative Computational Project EP/M022641/1 CoDiMa (CCP in the area of Computational Discrete Mathematics).
CoDiMa is centred on two open source software systems: GAP and SageMath which are widely used for research and teaching in abstract algebra, number theory, cryptography, combinatorics, graph theory, coding theory, optimisation and search, among other areas.
The CCP aims to support the ecosystem of users, extenders and developers of these systems and encourage best practice in their use, and to support the more rapid uptake of new features such as parallel programming support.
The project will run for 5 years starting from March 1st, 2015.