The Small Groups Library
Overview

The Small Groups library gives access to all groups of certain small orders. The groups are sorted by their orders and they are listed up to isomorphism; that is, for each of the available orders a complete and irredundant list of isomorphism type representatives of groups is given. Currently, the library contains the following groups:

those of order at most 2000 except 1024 (423\;164\;062 groups);
those of cubefree order at most 50 000 (395 \; 703 groups);
those of order p^7 for the primes p = 3,5,7,11 (907 \; 489 groups);
those of order p^n for n \leq 6 and all primes p
those of order q^n \cdot p for q^n dividing 2^8, 3^6, 5^5 or 7^4 and all primes p with p \neq q;
those of squarefree order;
those whose order factorises into at most 3 primes.

The first three items in this list cover an explicit range of orders; the last four provide access to infinite families of groups having orders of certain types.

The library also has an identification function: it returns the library number of a given group. This function determines library numbers using invariants of groups. The function is available for all orders in the library except for the orders 512 and 1536 and except for the orders p^5, p^6 and p^7 above 2000.

The library is organised in 11 layers. Each layer contains the groups of certain orders and their corresponding group identification routines. It is possible to install the first n layers of the group library and the first m layers of the group identification for each 1 \leq m \leq n \leq 11. This might be useful to save disk space. There is an extensive README file for the Small Groups library available in the small directory of the &GAP; distribution containing detailed information on the layers. A brief description of the layers is given here: (1) the groups whose order factorises into at most 3 primes. (2) the remaining groups of order at most 1000 except 512 and 768. (3) the remaining groups of order 2^n \cdot p with n \leq 8 and p an odd prime. (4) the remaining groups of order 5^5, 7^4 and of order q^n \cdot p for q^n dividing 3^6, 5^5 or 7^4 and p \neq q a prime. (5) the remaining groups of order at most 2000 except 1024, 1152, 1536 and 1920. (6) the groups of orders 1152 and 1920. (7) the groups of order 512. (8) the groups of order 1536. (9) the remaining groups of order p^n for 4 \leq n \leq 6. (10) the remaining groups of cubefree order at most 50 000 and of squarefree order. (11) the remaining groups of order p^7 for p = 3,5,7,11.

The data in this library has been carefully checked and cross-checked. It is believed to be reliable. However, no absolute guarantees are given and users should, as always, make their own checks in critical cases.

The data occupies about 30 MB (storing over 400 million groups in about 200 megabits). The group identification occupies about 47 MB of which 18 MB is used for the groups in layer (6). More information on the Small Groups library can be found on http://www.icm.tu-bs.de/ag_algebra/software/small/

This library has been constructed by Hans Ulrich Besche, Bettina Eick and E. A. O'Brien. A survey on this topic and an account of the history of group constructions can be found in . Further detailed information on the construction of this library is available in , , , , , , , , , , , , .

TwoGroup
library
ThreeGroup
library
The Small Groups library incorporates the &GAP; 3 libraries TwoGroup and ThreeGroup. The data from these libraries was directly included into the Small Groups library, and the ordering there was preserved. The Small Groups library replaces the Gap 3 library of solvable groups of order at most 100. However, both the organisation and data descriptions of these groups has changed in the Small Groups library.

As of version 1.4 of this library, the arrangement of groups is the same as in Magma, Version 2.23. In earlier releases of this library, the arrangement in orders p^7, p=3,5,7,11 disagreed. An attempt to fix this was instated on version 1.1 of this library, but a wrong permutation was used. If you would like to refer to index numbers for these orders in older versions of the library, see ). The arrangement of all other orders has always agreed and has remained stable.
Function Reference
<#Include Label="SmallGroup"> <#Include Label="SmallGroupsAvailable"> <#Include Label="AllSmallGroups"> <#Include Label="OneSmallGroup"> <#Include Label="NumberSmallGroups"> <#Include Label="NumberSmallGroupsAvailable"> <#Include Label="SelectSmallGroups"> <#Include Label="IdSmallGroup"> <#Include Label="IdGroupsAvailable"> <#Include Label="IdsOfAllSmallGroups"> <#Include Label="IdGap3SolvableGroup"> <#Include Label="SmallGroupsInformation"> <#Include Label="UnloadSmallGroupsData"> <#Include Label="SMALL_GROUPS_OLD_ORDER">