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GAP Tutorial at PGTC 2018 in St Andrews
The 20th Postrgaduate Group Theory Conference (PGTC) takes place in St Andrews on 17th-19th July 2018 (Tuesday-Thursday). We organise a satellite hands-on tutorial on the computational algebra system GAP for PGTC participants on Monday July 16th and Friday July 20th. See the tutorial page for further details.
Nikolaus conference 2016
Yet again I attended the Nikolauskonferenz in Aachen this year, funded by CoDiMa.
At the meeting Chris Jefferson and I presented our work with Rebecca Waldecker, and co-funded by CoDiMa, on search and canonical images in permutation groups. A recent submission can be found here, and a further one is coming out soon.
Another notable talk was given by Mikaël Cavallin from Kaiserslautern: He and Donna Testerman found a bug in a paper by Seitz from 1987 which is widely used in algebraic groups. This reminded me of our CoDiMa event in January, where Carmen Rovi visited us to learn about how GAP computes Schur multipliers, and we suspected that there was a bug in GAP, but it turned out to be a bug in an old paper.
Richard Parker and I met mainly at breakfast and discussed high performance low level algorithms such as his meataxe64, or multiplying permutations on millions of points, making full use of modern computer systems, which according to Richard, humanity is too stupid to program.
Two further talks that caught my attention were Imke Toborg’s talk on An Algebraic View on a Composite Functional Equation on Groups, because I first thought: why would you do that? and then: actually this is really interesting, and Julian Brough’s talk about Central Intersections of Element Centralisers, because I like this kind of group theory.
Of course all the other talks were interesting too, and I very much enjoyed being in Aachen again meeting everyone and doing research – Cambridge style! once more. A special thank you goes to Frank Lübeck for organising the event. I hope to see everyone back in Aachen next year!
Teaching good mathematical software practices at CoDiMa training school
On October 17-21, 2016 we organised the Second CoDiMa training school in Discrete Computational Mathematics in Edinburgh (our first school took place in Manchester in November 2015). This time it was hosted at the International Centre for Mathematical Sciences, and had been attended by 26 learners representing 11 institutions around the UK. The majority of them were PhD students in mathematics and computer science. Their participation was supported by the CoDiMa project, which covered their travel, accommodation and subsistence needed to attend the school.
The school started with the hands-on Software Carpentry workshop covering the UNIX command line and version control (instructed by Alexey Tarutin and Leighton Pritchard), and the Software Carpentry lesson on GAP given by Olexandr Konovalov (for published versions of these lessons, see here, here and there on Zenodo). The 2-days Software Carpentry workshop created the basis for more in-depth explanation of the following topics on GAP and computational algebra during the remaining part of the week:
- debugging and profiling
- advanced GAP programming
- GAP type system
- distributed parallel calculations
- demonstration of the new GAP Jupyter interface
- examples of some algorithms and their implementations
delivered by Christopher Jefferson, Olexandr Konovalov, Steve Linton, Markus Pfeiffer and Wilf Wilson. Furthermore, John Cremona gave a presentation of LMFDB (The L-functions and modular forms database project) which offered interesting insight into the internals of designing and maintaining mathematical database such as LMFDB. Also on Thursday Viviane Pons (Université Paris-Sud) gave an introduction to SageMath, and on the final day we had “Is your research software correct?” talk by the EPSRC Research Software Engineering Fellow Mike Croucher (Sheffield), and a panel discussion joined by Neil Chue Hong, who is the director of the Software Sustainability Institute.
For further details, please see the school webpage which contains links to the presentations and supplementary materials for all school’s programme. You can also find all #codima2016 tweets on Storify (they provide very good day by day coverage of the whole week), and school photos courtesy of ICMS here on Flickr. It was a really exciting event, and it is a great pleasure to thank everyone involved: all participants, speakers, instructors, helpers; Software Sustainability Institute and personally Giacomo Peru who coordinates Software Carpentry activities in the UK; all contributors to Software Carpentry lessons that we taught; ICMS staff for welcoming us and being attentive to all our requests; Blue Sky Catering for nice lunches; and Vittoria on the Bridge for the school dinner!
We plan at least three more such schools in 2017-2019. Besides training events, we also organise annual workshops. The first one was in the form of GAP-SageMath days at St Andrews in January 2016, and the next one is “Computational Mathematics with Jupyter” which we organise jointly with the Horizon 2020 project OpenDreamKit at the International Centre for Mathematical Sciences in Edinburgh on January 17-20, 2017.
Computational Mathematics with Jupyter
Jointly with the Horizon 2020 OpenDreamKit project, we are currently organising the workshop “Computational Mathematics with Jupyter”. It will take place at the International Centre for Mathematical Sciences in Edinburgh on 16-20 January 2017. Please see the workshop website here for further details.
From CoDiMa training activities
We have just came back from the Second CoDiMa Training School in Computational Discrete Mathematics which we run at the International Centre for Mathematical Sciences in Edinburgh on October 17th-21st, 2016. The school webpage contains links to the presentations and supplementary materials for all school’s programme. You can now find all #codima2016 tweets on Storify. We will also publish a blog post about the school soon.
Announcing Second Training School
Our Second Training School in Computational Discrete Mathematics will take place at the International Centre for Mathematical Sciences in Edinburgh on October 17th-21st, 2016. It is intended for PhD students and researchers from UK institutions. It will start with the 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. It will have a similar structure to the First Training School that we organised in Manchester in 2015 (to get an impression of this previous event, see its webpage and the report on Storify).
For further details on the 2016 School, please check its webpage here.
Nikolaus conference 2015
Just like every year since about 2004 I have attended the Nikolauskonferenz in Aachen in December 2015.
Nikolaus is a relatively small meeting of mathematicians interested in group- or representation theory, and computational methods in these fields in particular. As such this meeting is a good venue to meet users of the GAP system, hear about their experiences and do some advertising work for HPC-GAP.
One particular highlight to be mentioned here was my conversation with Sergio Siccha, who just started his PhD in Aachen and wants to use HPC-GAP, and Jürgen Müller, one of the authors of the Orb GAP package. Sergio is going to attend our first joint GAP and SageMath days in January and we will work on a HPC version of the orbit-by-suborbit algorithm.
I also sat down with Rebecca to discuss our recently funded project.
Thanks to Frank Lübeck, who has been organising this meeting for as long as I can remember, to all the speakers who gave interesting talks, and all attendees who made this meeting a memorable experience.
Last but not least, thanks to CoDiMa for making this visit possible for me!
CoDiMa training school: week in tweets
The First CoDiMa Training School in Computational Discrete Mathematics (Manchester, 16th-20th) November) was a success. We will publish a detailed blog post about it shortly. In the meantime, please have a look at this collection of #codima2015 tweets on Storify!
First Joint GAP-SageMath Days
The First Joint GAP-SageMath Days will be held at the University of St Andrews on January 18th-22nd, 2016. The focus of this event will be on improving GAP-SageMath integration and interaction between our systems. Further details will be posted soon!
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.