Research Fellow, Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Computational Algebra, University of St Andrews
Interests
- Computational discrete mathematics and its applications.
- Abstract algebra, combinatorics, optimisation and search.
- Open-source mathematical software development.
- Parallel computing in a variety of settings.
- Recomputable scientific experiments.
Research
I am a member of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Computational Algebra at the University of St Andrews and one of the developers of the open-source system GAP, which is used for research and teaching in the study of groups and their representations, rings, algebras, semigroups, combinatorial structures, and other discrete mathematical objects. One source of my motivation to make GAP better comes from using GAP in my own mathematical research – to search for examples and counterexamples, to automate routine calculations and to find arguments needed for proofs. This often requires substantial computational resources and combining different tools, which has naturally led me into the area of parallel computations and interfaces design. I have been involved in the EPRSC-funded HPC-GAP project where we worked on reengineering the GAP system to take advantage of the power of current and future high-performance computers, and in the European project SCIEnce (Symbolic Computation Infrastructure for Europe). Currently I am a co-investigator on the EPSRC-funded community building project CoDiMa - Collaborative Computational Project in the area of Computational Discrete Mathematics, and on the Horizon 2020 European Research Infrastructure project OpenDreamKit . I am a member of the GAP Council and the GAP Support group (and an author of the Software Carpentry lesson on GAP), and an editor of the Journal of Software for Algebra and Geometry and the Journal of Open Research Software.
Also I am an Instructor and a Trainer for The Carpentries.
Online Presence
Check out contributions by and mentions of Olexandr Konovalov on www.software.ac.uk