Families and constructions of permutation groups

[Rob Beezer]

Kevin Halasz is an undergraduate student who has been working to add collections of permutation groups to Sage's collection as a funded summer research project.  He has several patches now ready, one is from several weeks ago.  I thought I would advertise them here, since classes start back up for Kevin on August 27 (and me too!).  I have worked closely to help him organize these patches properly, and will work closely with him to answer any comments from reviewers.  So potential reviewers should not fear having to provide extensive guidance on coding style or docstrings to a new contributor - I'll be doing that.  Kevin also already has a (merged) one-character, but non-trivial, documentation patch to his credit.

The goal of Kevin's project has been to make the creation of any group of order 31 or less available as a permutation group with a simple, but natural, Sage command.  I think this collection of patches will do that, but he may still need to go back and carefully check.  Kevin would like to study group theory in graduate school, so it would be great to encourage him with some reviews of his work, if you are familiar with the "permgroups" code.

Thanks,
Rob

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General Dihedral Groups
A construction of the semidirect product of C2 with any abelian group
http://trac.sagemath.org/sage_trac/ticket/13251

Semidirect Product
Totally general construction, wrapping GAP's command
http://trac.sagemath.org/sage_trac/ticket/13365

Semidihedral Groups and Split Metacyclic Groups
Families of 2-groups and p-groups
http://trac.sagemath.org/sage_trac/ticket/13366

Holomorph of a Group
The semidirect product of a group with its automorphism group
(This is in-progress, but should be ready very soon.)
http://trac.sagemath.org/sage_trac/ticket/13367