Dear GAP Forum members:

In my last note to the Forum I described some procedures endorsed by the
GAP Council, but I said only a few words about the Council itself. Let me
now give you a little more information about us.

As I said before, the GAP Council was formed in 1995 to provide broad
policy advice for the future development of GAP. My last note described
the Council's role as an editorial board, but its interests extend more
broadly, to include enhancing recognition not only of GAP itself but also
of the whole field of computational group theory. This means, in
particular, that if you become aware of ways in which the Council can
promote greater understanding and awareness of CGT we would appreciate
your telling us, so that we can lend our support. And of course if you
want to raise policy issues directly related to GAP we are the obvious
group to contact.

Although the Council is not intended to be a representative body, our
members come from all over the globe and from many parts of the CGT
landscape, so there is a good chance that you already know, or know of,
at least one Council member. Since one of our roles is to seek out and
encourage the development of new contributions to GAP, and since we may
not be aware of your interests, we encourage you not to wait to be
contacted but to correspond directly with me or with one of the other
Council members if you have information that we can use. At the end of
this note is a list of the present Council members, with thumbnail
descriptions of their special fields of interest. We are still
considering whether to assign formal portfolios to individual Council
members, but for the time being, at least, we will proceed with our
present loosely organized system.

It is my pleasure to announce the election of two new members to the
Council. Leonard Soicher, of Queen Mary and Westfield College, is known
to many of you already through his package GRAPE, which integrates
groups, graphs and geometries, but he has a wide variety of other
interests too, as you may have observed from his responses to questions
raised in the GAP Forum. Eamonn O'Brien, of the University of Auckland,
has also been a great contributor to the Forum. He is the author of the
ANU PQ Package for computing with p-groups and p-quotients, and is a
coauthor of both the Smash and Matrix packages for investigating matrix
groups over finite fields. Council members serve for staggered four-year
renewable terms, so Leonard and Eamonn will serve at least until 2001.

This June's Council meeting at Oberwolfach may well be the last for
some time at which all members are physically present; from now on we
intend to meet "virtually" on a fairly regular basis, as well as to
correspond among ourselves on matters of Council interest. Let me
invite you again to tell me or any other Council member of items that
you think should be on our virtual agenda. For our part, we will try to
keep you abreast of activities, such as this summer's spate of meetings
and workshops, that are closely related to the interests of the
Council.

Sincerely,

Charles Wright, Chair,
For the GAP Council

----------------

GAP Council members as of July 8, 1997. See the GAP Web page for current
membership and address listings.

Mike Atkinson:
Finite Dimensional Associative Algebras, Permutation Groups,
Combinatorics

Andrea Caranti:
Polycyclic Groups, Lie Algebras, Nilpotent Quotient

Gene Cooperman:
Matrix and Permutation Groups, Computer Science Issues, Parallel Computing

Gerhard Hiss:
Representation Theory, Groups of Lie Type, Hecke Algebras

Derek Holt:
Finitely Presented Groups, Rewriting Systems, Automatic Groups,
Matrix Groups, Cohomology Groups

Steve Linton:
Presentations, Sporadic Groups, Representation Theory,
Computer Science Issues, the GAP Kernel

Mike Newman:
Nilpotent Quotient, p-Groups, Polycyclic groups, Lie Algebras, Burnside
Groups, Soluble Quotients

Eamonn O'Brien:
Matrix groups, p-Quotients, p-Group Classification, Automorphism Groups

Herbert Pahlings:
Representation Theory

Cheryl Praeger:
Graphs and Permutation Groups, Combinatorial Structures, Matrix Groups

Ed Robertson:
Presentations, Semigroups and Related Structures

Akos Seress:
Permutation Groups, Combinatorics, Black Box Groups

Leonard Soicher:
Groups, Graphs, and Geometries, Computer Science, Collection Methods

Charles Wright:
Finite Solvable Groups