On March 10, Ted Hurley posted a brief announcement of the Groups'93
Galway/St.Andrews meeting in this forum in which he mentioned that
during the second week we would organize a workshop on Computational
Group Theory using GAP. Here is a tentative plan for this workshop.

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Workshop

Computational Group Theory and the use of GAP

>during the second week of

Groups 1993 Galway/St.Andrews

August 9 - 13, 1993.

The workshop is intended to introduce group theoreticians to the
algorithmic methods presently available for the investigation of
finite groups and their (ordinary and modular) representations and of
finitely presented groups as well as to practical application of such
methods using the program system GAP (Groups, Algorithms, and
Programming). Accordingly the workshop will offer both, several series
of lectures describing the mathematics underlying the algorithms and
their implementations, and exercises at the terminal in applying GAP
to group theoretical problems. In detail:

There will be 5 such series of lectures, partly in parallel, each of
about 8 periods of 45 minutes, on the following topics:

- Permutation groups.
(A. Seress)
- Collecting methods for finitely presented and polycyclic groups.
(J. Neubueser and M.F. Newman)
- Finitely presented Groups: Coset table methods, Knuth Bendix,
Automatic Groups.
(D. Holt and J. Neubueser)
- Representation theory.
(K. Lux and H. Pahlings)
- Programming in GAP.
(M. Schoenert)

In addition we plan 5 exercise classes, three for people with little
or no experience in the use of computers in group theory, which will
begin with a common introduction to GAP and then separate according to
the interest of participants in finite groups, finitely presented
groups, or representation theory. Further, there will be one exercise
class for people with some experience, which will supplement the
lecture series 'Programming in GAP'. While for all these four
exercise classes we intend to provide some exercises and problems,
finally, mainly in the second part of the week, we intend to run an
exercise class 'Bring your own problem', in which we will try to give
advice how to use group theoretical software on problems that
participants are interested in (with no warranty of success!!). Of
course moving between these exercise classes will be possible.

A tentative time schedule for the workshop looks as follows:

Monday to Thursday:

8.30 - 10.00 in parallel:
'Finitely Presented Groups' and 'Representation Theory'.

10.30 - 12.00 in parallel:
'Collection Methods' and 'Programming in GAP'.

13.30 - 15.00  Permutation Groups.

15.15 - 18.00  Practical exercises.

On Friday morning there will be lectures on algorithms drawing from
all the various methods, on the use of Computer Algebra systems like
MAPLE for generic calculations, and on some new developments for the
investigation of matrix groups.

Terminals and help with their use will still be available on Friday
afternoon.

For attending the workshop you should register with 'Groups 1993
Galway/St.Andrews'; no special registration for the workshop is
necessary, but please do tick the relevant box in the registration
form for 'Groups 1993 Galway/St.Andrews'.

The GAP system is available free of charge (including source, the
manual and several executables) through anonymous ftp. If you want
information about GAP, its availability on various computers, and how
to get it, please get the file 'pub/gap/README' from the ftp server
'samson.math.rwth-aachen.de' by logging in as user 'ftp' with your
e-mail address as password.

If you have any further questions with regard to the workshop, please
contact:
neubueser@math.rwth-aachen.de
(Prof. J. Neubueser, Lehrstuhl D fuer Mathematik, RWTH Aachen,
Templergraben 64, D 5100, Aachen, Germany. Tel. +49/241/804543)

Joachim Neubueser, Martin Schoenert