It’s been a long time coming, but Semigroups 3.0 is nearly ready for release.  We’re going to have a hackathon to squash all the remaining bugs, add documentation, replace TODOs, and generally polish and tweak the package until it’s ready to be released! The kick-off is at 11am on Monday May 29th in Maths Lecture Theatre D. Everyone is welcome to join!

Groups St Andrews 2017 takes place in Birmingham on August 5th-13th 2017. The talks will happen from 6th August until 12th August 2017 (inclusive). It will be followed by a satellite event – a tutorial on the computational algebra system GAP on August 13th-14th.

The Third Scottish Combinatorics Meeting on 24-25th April was hosted by Sophie Huczynska and Nik Ruskuc. Rosemary Bailey was one of the invited speakers and Matt McDevitt also gave a talk. Other invited speakers included Robert Brignall, who gained his PhD in St Andrews PhD in 2007 and who now works at the Open University, as well as being our Subhonours External Examiner. Following the meeting, Robert stayed from 26-28th April to collaborate with Nik on well quasi ordered-ness of pattern classes of permutations. Another invited speaker, Maura Paterson from Birkbeck, University of London also stayed from 26-28th April to work with Sophie on external difference families and related topics.

Bob Gray visited Nik Ruskuc from 10-12th April and gave a talk at the Pure Mathematics Colloquium. Bob was a St Andrews undergraduate and research student at St Andrews, taking his PhD in 2006 and is now a Senior Lecturer at the University of East Anglia in Norwich.

There will be a Workshop on Groups, Generalisations and Applications at the University of St Andrews on the afternoon of Thursday May 4, with talks by Ellen Henke, Murray Elder and Peter Cameron. 

Madeleine Whybrow, a PhD student from Imperial College London, visited Markus Pfeiffer funded by CoDiMa to work on GAP code supporting her project on Majorana Algebras and the Monster sporadic simple group. She gave a talk on her work at the Pure Mathematics Colloquium. You can find a report on her visit here.

The Third Scottish Combinatorics Meeting on 24-25th April 2017 will be held in St Andrews; this is the first time the meeting has been held here with the previous two in the series having taken place at the University of Glasgow. Attendance is free, but anyone who would like to attend is encouraged to register by emailing the hosts, Sophie Huczynska and Nik Ruskuc. This will be followed by the British Colloquium in Theoretical Computer Science from 26-28th April, to be hosted by Markus Pfeiffer.

Welcome to Julius Jonusas who has “joined” us as a Teaching Fellow, although he is by no means new to the School. Julius arrived in St Andrews as an undergraduate in 2009, took his BSc in Mathematics and Physics in 2012 and successfully defended his PhD last summer.

Sophie Huczynska has been awarded a Carnegie Trust Research Incentive Grant on the topic of ‘Difference Families in Coding and Cryptography’. This will support a collaboration with Maura Paterson at Birkbeck, University of London, and Siaw-Lynn Ng at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Reports from the Computational Mathematics with Jupyter workshop, organised jointly by the OpenDreamKit and CoDiMa projects at the ICMS in Edinburgh on 16-20th January, are now published on the Software Sustainability Institute blog: see here and here. There is also a digest of #JupyterICMS tweets.