Galois field

[Nick Craig-Wood]

Mikael Olofsson <mikael at isy.liu.se> wrote:
>  At our department we use Magma (http://magma.maths.usyd.edu.au/)
>  for finite field arithmetic and error control codes. Magma has
>  nothing to do with Python, instead it is a very mature tool of its
>  own, mainly for descrete math. It knows what a permutation group
>  is, it knows what GF(81) is, and much more.

I think pari/gp can do arithmetic over general Galois fields.  I
certainly have a recollection of doing that with it in the past.  Its
free (GPL) too, and has a library that could be wrapped with SWIG/etc
to make it python friendly.

  http://pari.math.u-bordeaux.fr/

  * PARI is a C library, allowing fast computations.
  * gp is an interactive shell giving access to PARI functions, much easier to use.
  * GP is the name of gp' s scripting language
  * gp2c the GP-to-C compiler makes the best of both worlds

If someone did wrap PARI in python it would certainly be easier to use
than GP which I found very unintuitive!

In fact I just found this which looks like just the job!

  http://www.fermigier.com/fermigier/PariPython/readme.html

-- 
Nick Craig-Wood <nick at craig-wood.com> -- http://www.craig-wood.com/nick