Francy - An Interactive Discrete Mathematics Framework for GAP

TL;DR

Francy is a new graphical framework for GAP that enables interactive visualization of complex mathematical objects across multiple platforms using modern web technologies, improving usability and extensibility.

Contribution

It introduces Francy, a versatile graphical semantics package for GAP that is platform-independent and integrates with Jupyter for enhanced user interaction.

Findings

Enables cross-platform visualization of discrete mathematical objects.

Integrates with Jupyter for interactive computational environments.

Improves extensibility and maintainability over previous solutions.

Abstract

Data visualization and interaction with large data sets is known to be essential and critical in many businesses today, and the same applies to research and teaching, in this case, when exploring large and complex mathematical objects. GAP is a computer algebra system for computational discrete algebra with an emphasis on computational group theory. The existing XGAP package for GAP works exclusively on the X Window System. It lacks abstraction between its mathematical and graphical cores, making it difficult to extend, maintain, or port. In this paper, we present Francy, a graphical semantics package for GAP. Francy is responsible for creating a representational structure that can be rendered using many GUI frameworks independent from any particular programming language or operating system. Building on this, we use state of the art web technologies that take advantage of an improved REPL environment, which is currently under development for GAP. The integration of this project with Jupyter provides a rich graphical environment full of features enhancing the usability and accessibility of GAP.