Hi GAP forum members, I appreciate any advice, hints, ideas concerning the following...
A bit of background: I consider myself an abstract algebra self-student, that is: i have learned everything I know through self-study. That would not have been possible without Mathematica, and more recently GAP. My career, work, is in IT consultancy. Mathematics however, is in my heart, I am sure you'll understand. Although there is already an Abstract Algebra package for Mathematica available, it is limited and no longer maintained. ( http://www.central.edu/eaam/index.asp ) It is my goal to develop a Group Theory package for Mathematica. I'll make it a project of 1, maybe 2 years. This project is ( nothing more than ) an instrument to bring my understanding of Group theory to a deeper level. Sofare about my plans. My ambitions are the following. ( Initially ) I do not want to invent algorithms, I want to study them and implement them in the Mathematica programming language. Since GAP is ( or very close to ) the centre of the state-of-the-art of Computational Group Theory / Algebra, I intend to use the GAP algorithms, if at all possible. If I understand it correct the knowledge in GAP is free to use as long as it is referenced. As far as functionality is concerned I aim for what is available in the nice Open Source program Group Explorer 2.0 ( http://groupexplorer.sourceforge.net/ ) plus Character Tables, Table of Marks and the Cycle Graph of a group. More than enough to do, I might say. Group Explorer is rather limited in the groups it can handle: all groups of order =< 20, three of order 24 and A5. I intend to be able to handle much more groups than that. The key to solving that issue is imo using better, faster algorithms. Hence, GAP. To the point. I am looking for ( the papers which contain ) the algorithms on which GAP has been built, restricted to Group Theory, Representation Theory, Vector Spaces and Matrices. What is really an issue in my situation though, is that, since I don't work at a university, I do not have access to the paid journals. Before you may decide this message is outside the context of the GAP forum I would like to add that it is my ultimate goal to add code to GAP itself and publish about that, and the sooner the better. In order to achieve that I must practice first. Thanks for reading. Kind regards, nilo de roock _______________________________________________ Forum mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gap-system.org/mailman/listinfo/forum
