Information about LiE

LiE

A Computer algebra package for Lie group computations

LiE is a computer algebra system that is specialised in computations involving (reductive) Lie groups and their representations. It is publically available for free in source code. For a description of its characteristics, we refer to the following sources of information.

An online demonstration of some of its capabilities
A brief description;
Some facts regarding the software;
A journal article providing a more extensive description of LiE (a 39 KB dvi file).
The complete manual for LiE (a 808 KB PDF file, included as a DVI file in the distribution).

Version 2.2.2

The current version of LiE is 2.2.2, which is more or less unchanged since about the year 2000. Minor bugfixes do get applied now and then.

The LiE manual

As indicated above, the manual is included in electronic form in the distrubution. As a convenience for those without TeX installed, here is a PDF version of the manual. A paper version has also been published; although it is no longer in print, it may referred to as follows

M. A. A. van Leeuwen, A. M. Cohen and B. Lisser, "LiE, A Package for Lie Group Computations", Computer Algebra Nederland, Amsterdam, ISBN 90-74116-02-7, 1992

Obtaining LiE

Since July 1996, LiE is publically available for free. There have been questions about what this means exactly, notably whether it can be redistributed by thrid parties, and under what licence. The answer is that the institute CWI at which LiE was developed (and therefore holds the original copyright) has given the developers permission to do whatever they want with the source code, and that the project leader Arjeh Cohen has decided that LiE can be distributed under the GNU Lesser General Public Licence. The current distribution does not contain any of the blurb necessary to make this clear from the distribution itself; feel free to add this if you want to distribute.

There are various versions of the software you may obtain:

If you want to try out some computations with LiE without having to install it, you can invoke LiE through the WWW, by simply filling in a form, and the result will be displayed.

If you want to compile and run the program, but need no documentation of the source files, you can fetch the tarfile for a compile only version.

You can also get a much more documented version of the source files, which use the CWEBx software documentation system. To use this version you need to download and compile the CWEBx system in addition to the documented sources for LiE.

Detailed instruction of how to install each of these versions can be found in the README files contained in the individual tarfiles. Currently, the Makefiles use the functionality of GNU make.

LiE on Macintosh OS X

If you want to install LiE on Mac OS X, please read this note.