GAP

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Welcome to

GAP - Groups, Algorithms, Programming -
a System for Computational Discrete Algebra

What is GAP?

GAP is a system for computational discrete algebra, with particular emphasis on Computational Group Theory. GAP provides a programming language, a library of thousands of functions implementing algebraic algorithms written in the GAP language as well as large data libraries of algebraic objects. See also the overview and the description of the mathematical capabilities. GAP is used in research and teaching for studying groups and their representations, rings, vector spaces, algebras, combinatorial structures, and more. The system, including source, is distributed freely. You can study and easily modify or extend it for your special use.

The current release is GAP 4.4.12. The pages of this web site describe this release if not stated otherwise. The webpage updates explains the history of changes. The older version GAP 3 is still available.

We Invite You to Cooperate

The GAP Group welcomes contacts with the GAP users and offers support for them. To keep up to date on GAP news (discussion of problems, release announcements, bug fixes), we suggest you subscribe to the email GAP Forum.

Please tell us about use of GAP in your research or teaching. We may well want to provide a link to your work. If your work is published then we ask you to cite GAP like a journal article or book.

We maintain a Bibliography of publications citing GAP. Please help us keeping it up to date.

We welcome contributions to GAP. We provide advice to write GAP code, inform you how to submit contributions to GAP, and keep a list of possible GAP projects.

Acknowledgements

GAP has been and is developed by international cooperation of many people, including user contributions. We gratefully acknowledge all this help as well as some funding. GAP was started at Lehrstuhl D für Mathematik, RWTH Aachen in 1986. After 1997 the development of GAP was coordinated in St Andrews. At present (January 2012) the GAP Centers in Aachen, Braunschweig, Fort Collins and St Andrews have agreed to coordinate jointly the further development and maintenance of GAP.

News: In July 2008, GAP was awarded the ACM/SIGSAM Richard Dimick Jenks Memorial Prize for Excellence in Software Engineering applied to Computer Algebra. According to the sigsam.org website: The purpose of the Jenks Prize is to recognize outstanding software engineering contributions in the field of computer algebra and to encourage future excellence in such research and development.