The 21st Postgraduate Group Theory Conference (PGTC) takes place in Birmingham on 22nd-26th July 2019. The main program of the conference will run from Tuesday 23rd July till Thursday 25th July. On Monday 22nd July and on Friday 26th July we organise a satellite hands-on tutorial on the computational algebra system GAP for PGTC participants.
The tutorial will have a similar format to the GAP tutorial at PGTC 2018. To allow for travel on Monday morning, we will begin at 1pm on Monday with the Software Carpentry lesson “Programming with GAP”. On Friday 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 tutorial will finish at 1pm on Friday to permit convenient return travel. During the week of PGTC, we will be using this collaboratively edited document to post organisational details, share code, ask and answer questions, and communicate using the chat. It will be available for some time after the workshop, but will not be persistently stored; therefore, we advise you to copy and save all useful information from there elsewhere.
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 to be able to code along on your own computer. 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.
Limited financial support to cover accommodation and subsistence for up to two extra nights stay in Birmingham, needed to attend the GAP Tutorial, is available to PhD students from UK Universities who are taking part in PGTC and will attend both days of the GAP Tutorial. Students wishing to apply for the support should register for PGTC as soon as the registration will open, and then ask their PhD supervisor to send to obk1@st-andrews.ac.uk a recommendation that they should take part. To get the reimbursement of their expenses, participants whose funding is approved will have to fill in an online expenses claim form after the event.
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.