The GAP 4 package `Polycyclic’

Introduction

This is the package Polycyclic written for GAP 4. It provides a basis for working with polycyclic groups defined by polycyclic presentations.

To have the full functionality of the package available you need at least GAP version 4.5 and the GAP 4 package Alnuth and its dependencies must be installed.

The features of this package include

• creating a polycyclic group from a polycyclic presentation

• arithmetic in a polycyclic group

• computation with subgroups and factor groups of a polycyclic group

• computation of standard subgroup series such as the derived series, the lower central series

• computation of the first and second cohomology

• computation of group extensions

• computation of normalizers and centralizers

• solutions to the conjugacy problems for elements and subgroups

• computation of torsion and various finite subgroups

• computation of various subgroups of finite index

• computation of the Schur multiplicator, the non-abelian exterior square and the non-abelian tenor square

There is a manual in the subdirectory doc which describes the available functions in detail.

If you have used Polycyclic, and found important features missing or if there is a bug, we would appreciate it very much if you could report this via https://github.com/gap-packages/polycyclic/issues, or by sending us an email.

• Bettina Eick beick@tu-bs.de
• Max Horn horn@mathematik.uni-kl.de

Contents

With this version you should have obtained the following files and directories:

• README: this file
• init.g: the file that initializes this package
• read.g: the file that reads in the package
• PackageInfo.g: the file for the new package loading mechanism
• doc: directory containing the manual
• gap: directory containing the GAP code, it contains:
  • action: actions of polycyclic groups and orbit-stabilizer
  • basic: basic stuff for pcp groups
  • cohom: cohomology for pcp groups
  • exam: examples of pcp groups
  • matrep: matrix representations for pcp groups
  • matrix: basic stuff for matrices and lattices
  • pcpgrp: higher level functions for pcp groups

Installation

Make sure that the GAP 4 package Alnuth is installed to have the full range of methods available in polycyclic.

There are two ways of installing the package. If you have permission to add files to the installation directory of GAP 4 on your system, you may install polycyclic in the pkg subdirectory of the GAP installation tree. If you do not, you can also install polycyclic in a directory where you have write permissions. For general advice, see also the GAP 4 manual about the installation of GAP packages.

Installation in the GAP 4 pkg subdirectory on a Unix system.

We assume that the archive file polycyclic.tar.gz or polycyclic.tar is present in pkg and that the current directory is pkg. All that needs to be done is to unpack the archive.

tar xzf polycyclic.tar.gz 

The tar-command has unpacked the code into a directory called polycyclic in the current directory. You can check if GAP recognizes the polycyclic package by starting GAP and doing the following:

$ gap4
[... startup messages ...]
gap> LoadPackage("polycyclic");
true
gap>     

Installation in a private directory

Let’s say you would like to install polycyclic in a directory called mygap. Create a subdirectory pkg in mygap and move the polycyclic archive into that subdirectory.

cd mygap
mkdir pkg
mv polycyclic.tar.gz pkg
cd pkg
tar xzf polycyclic.tar.gz

The tar-command has unpacked the code into a directory called polycyclic in the current directory. You can check if GAP recognizes the polycyclic package by starting GAP and doing the following. GAP needs to be told that it should scan the directory mygap/pkg for GAP packages. This is achieved by calling gap with the option -l. Note the semicolon and the single quotes.

$ gap4 -l ';mygap/'
[... startup messages ...]
gap> LoadPackage("polycyclic");
true
gap>