Francy - An Interactive Discrete Mathematics Framework for GAP
This work addresses the need for more extensible and portable visualization tools in computational discrete algebra research and teaching, though it is incremental as it builds on existing technologies.
The authors tackled the problem of visualizing and interacting with large mathematical objects in GAP by developing Francy, a graphical semantics package that creates a representational structure renderable across various GUI frameworks, leading to integration with Jupyter for enhanced usability and accessibility.
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.