<< back to the program

Plenary talk: Collaborative & open software development

Max Horn

Juniorprofessor for algebra and geometry, JLU Gießen
http://www.quendi.de/en/

Abstract

In this talk I will describe various lessons we (should) have learned over the past 30 years of developmen of the GAP computer algebra system. Starting with a brief overview of the history of GAP, and historical mistakes, I will try to convince you of the merits of using a version control system like git, and issue tracker and continuous integration, and that it is highly beneficial to open them all up to your users and generally anybody interested. I'll provide examples from GAP as motivation. In the end, I will give you a quick demo on the typical life cycle of a GAP code change, by making a pull request on the GAP repository.

Slides

About the speaker

Max Horn is a German mathematician originally working in the field of algebraic Lie theory, in particular Kac-Moody theory and buildings. After his PhD on Involutions of Kac-Moody group, he was PostDoc at the TU Braunschweig with Bettina Eick, where he worked on various computational problems (non-commutative Gröbner bases in group rings, classification of small solvable groups, symbolic computations in infinite families) of Lie rings and p-group.
He has become a major developer of the GAP system, and is at the forefront of the renewal of its development model, including the coorganization of the four first GAP Days. In addition, he has been active contributor to a multitude of open source projects, and was project leader for two major non-mathematical open source projects (Fink and ScummVM) during that time.