[GAP Forum] Generators of the additive group of a finite field

Max Horn max at quendi.de
Tue Jul 7 21:55:49 BST 2009


Dear forum readers,

today I wanted to naively obtain a list of generators for the additive  
group of a finite field. To may surprise, I got an error:

gap> IsGroup(GF(9));
false
gap> IsAdditiveGroup(GF(9));
true
gap> GeneratorsOfAdditiveGroup(GF(9));
Error, no method found! For debugging hints type ?Recovery from  
NoMethodFound
Error, no 1st choice method found for `GeneratorsOfNearAdditiveGroup'  
on 1 arguments called from
<function>( <arguments> ) called from read-eval-loop
Entering break read-eval-print loop ...
you can 'quit;' to quit to outer loop, or
you can 'return;' to continue


So, GAP says GF(9) is an additive group, but refuses to give me a list  
of generators -- confusing to me :). Is there some other way to obtain  
a (ideally minimal) generating set ?


Cheers,
Max



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