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. The instructors will be Olexandr Konovalov and Chris Jefferson (University of St Andrews), and the helpers for the Monday session will be Ruth Hoffmann and Michael Torpey.
The tutorial will take place in the computer classroom in the School of Physics and Astronomy (see travel directions to St Andrews and to the School of Physics and Astronomy). On Monday July 16th it will run from 2:00 pm to 5:30 pm and will be structured around the Software Carpentry lesson “Programming with GAP”. On Friday July 20th it will run from 9:30 am to 1:00 pm, and there we plan to cover more advanced topics, including sessions on avoiding common pitfalls while programming group-theoretical algorithms, debugging and profiling, and using the new Jupyter interface to GAP. The link to use on Friday is here. Lunch (at 1 pm) and refreshments during breaks will be provided on both days.
Since most of the tutorial will be in the form of live coding, it is strongly recommended to bring with you a laptop with the working installation of the latest GAP release (GAP 4.9.2) to be able to follow the instructions on your own machines. For downloads and installation instructions and for Windows, OS X and Linux please see this page. If you need any help with installing GAP, please contact Olexandr Konovalov by email at obk1@st-andrews.ac.uk or find him on Monday before the tutorial begins.
We will be using this Framapad for communication during the tutorial. Please feel free to make notes and ask questions there (you can switch the language to English using the menu which appears after a click on the Framapad settings button). It will be available for some time after the tutorial.
Please note that this is not a full-scale Software Carpentry workshop, so it will not cover topics such as Unix shell and version control with Git which are standard parts of the Software Carpentry curriculum. If you’re interested in these topics, in addition to the GAP tutorial we recommend you to attend one of the Software Carpentry workshops, which you can find on this page.