GAP System for Computational Discrete Algebra

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.

In July 2008, GAP was awarded the ACM/SIGSAM Richard Dimick Jenks Memorial Prize for Excellence in Software Engineering applied to Computer Algebra.

How to obtain GAP?

The current release is GAP 4.13.0 and it can be obtained from our downloads page. This website describes this release if not stated otherwise. Changes from earlier versions are described in the Release history.

We are looking forward to hearing from you!

We welcome contributions to GAP. The GAP development repository is hosted on GitHub. You may find some guidance on contributing via GitHub here. If you have any questions, or suggestions for GAP, the repository, or documentation, feel free to contact us via the open GAP development mailing list or submit an issue or a pull request on GitHub.

There is an extensive documentation advising how to write a GAP code. Also there is a guidance on developing a GAP package and its submission to GAP.

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 to subscribe to the email-based GAP Forum.

Please tell us about your use of GAP in 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.

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. Since March 2005, the GAP Centers in Aachen, Braunschweig, Fort Collins, and St Andrews took over coordination. They were joined by Kaiserslautern as fifth GAP center in 2020. Since July 2022, the GAP center in Kaiserslautern is coordinating the further development and maintenance of GAP.