There will be a polymake workshop on March 31 and April 01, 2011 at TU Darmstadt, organized by the polymake team.

The program contains both expository talks on different aspects of polymake, and small group tutorials on specific topics. The workshop is addressed both to experienced users and beginners.

Participants are encouraged to bring their own laptop and use them in the tutorials, preferably with an installed version of polymake. There will also be an installation session at the beginning of the workshop for those that need help.

This workshop is supported by the DFG Schwerpunktprogramm SPP 1489.

We put together a new polymake version specifically tailored for the workshop's participants. It should be considered as a fully functional (but slightly flawed) tech preview to the next regular release. Among the new features are cones, fans, and an interface as a callable library.

This version will be used for the demos and we strongly recommend that all participants install this version before the workshop.

• The tarball of the new alpha release (version 3, rev [10093]) polymake-2.9.10.tar.bz2 from 24 March 2011.
  For installation instructions please read this page for Linux and this page for Mac. The only difference is the new dependence on the GNU mpfr library. You need version 3 or later. It you have installed this at a non-standard place use the option –with-mpfr= during configure.

• We have also an app bundle for Mac (April 4, again new version, fixed library paths for extensions, xml headers). This version has only limited access to the source code, so if you want to extend polymake with your own functions it is usually advisable to use the source tarball above.

• Here is a LiveCD based on Ubuntu 10.10 (i386). It contains polymake (rev [10093]), 4ti2, LattE, normaliz, TOPCOM and a web browser. You can use this to boot your laptop with Ubuntu (regardless of the OS you are usually running, in particular, this should work on any Windows laptop).
• Instead of burning this image to a CD you can also create a bootable USB drive with UNetbootin (Windows and Linux), Universal USB Installer (Windows), Startup Disk Creator (included in Ubuntu) or any other tool you can find. Depending on what tool you used it may ask what to boot and the correct option is to Try Ubuntu without installing.
• Here is an updated version of the LiveCD which should fix Illegal instruction crashes on most computers.

• The documentation of polymake 2.9.10 can be found here.

The workshop program will start on Thursday, March 31, at 10:00, and end on Friday, April 1, at around 17:00. The format of the workshop should be rather open. We would encourage participants to suggest topics to be discussed. Here is a time schedule based on the suggestions we received so far.

• informal start on Thu, Fri at 9:00, last minute installation issues

Throughout we will be running up to three parallel tracks. Empty slots will be filled upon request during the workshop. Decisions concerning this will be made during the Q&A sessions.

The tutorials of the sessions:

• GEN
• BEG
• APP
• VIS
• PRL, points.demo

The workshop will take place in the building S4|10 of TU Darmstadt (Dolivostraße 15 – the residence of the optimization group).

Travel information can be found here. A map can be found here. (Our building is marked by a blue pin.)

Please book accomodation yourself. Here are some choices:

• Etap Hotel, Kasinostr. 4-6
  Conveniently located close to the conference location and the main station, approx. EUR 45 for a single room
• Ibis Hotel, Kasinostr. 6
  Next to the Etap Hotel, slightly more expensive
• Bockshaut, Kirchstraße 7-9
  In the center of Darmstadt, approx. 80-100 EUR per single room

You could also use HRS to check for other hotels.

The institute has WLAN access via eduroam. This is the easiest way to get internet access here, so please check whether your institution offers eduroam accounts. We will try to arrange internet access for those that do not have an eduroam account. Please let us know if you don't have access to eduroam.