People

The GAP Group

GAP Authors

The page GAP Authors lists people who have at various times written code for the kernel or library of GAP. We have collected this list to the best of our knowledge, but we apologize for any omissions. It should be understood that some of these contributions date back to the beginning of the GAP project and may not even be any longer part of the present distribution.

Module authors and maintainers

It is also clear that the contributions of different people vary significantly in size. Therefore and in view of the total size of the GAP library we decided in 2001 to introduce the concept of 'modules'. A module is a part of GAP that

• provides a describable functionality,
• consists of a discrete set of files,
• has a well-defined set of authors and maintainers.

On a separate page we provide a list of these Modules in which for each module we give the authors and maintainers as well as a brief description of its functionality in one line. A similar list is given in the tutorial manual.

There are some GAP authors with substantial contributions to GAP that are not definable as modules, but may be even considered as the backbone of the system. Of these, in the first place Martin Schönert should be mentioned who has been the system architect of GAP from its beginning until 1996. In that period (until 1997) also Frank Celler has made large contributions to the system. Also from the beginning of GAP and until now, Thomas Breuer has made large contributions not only to his special area of work, namely representation theory in GAP. Steve Linton, Alexander Hulpke, and Frank Lübeck have taken over a good deal of Martin's rôle since 1997.

Package and data library authors and maintainers

The scope of the GAP system has also been significantly enhanced by the many packages and data libraries that have been provided by users of GAP for both, GAP 4 and GAP 3. Since the authors and maintainers of these contributions are named with each of the packages or data libraries, respectively, we do not keep a separate list of all these names (see Packages, Data Libraries, GAP 3 Share Packages, and GAP 3 Data Libraries).

Support Group

Since the first release of GAP there have always been some people answering the many questions and requests sent by users either to the GAP Forum or to support@gap-system.org. On a special page we list as the GAP Support Group the names of those who at present are most involved in this help.

The GAP Council

Since 1995 a number of senior mathematicians and computer scientists, engaged in a broad spectrum of areas in computational group theory have agreed to form a 'GAP Council' that in particular functions as an editorial board for external contributions to GAP and will advise on broad policy issues in the continued development of GAP.