The monodromy group of a function on a general curve

Let C_g be a general curve of genus g>3. Guralnick and others proved that the monodromy group of a cover C_g-> P^1 of degree n is either S_n or A_n. We show that A_n occurs for n>2g. The corresponding result for S_n is classical

A GAP package for braid orbit computation, and applications

Let G be a finite group. By Riemann's Existence Theorem, braid orbits of generating systems of G with product 1 correspond to irreducible families of covers of the Riemann sphere with monodromy group G. Thus many problems on algebraic curves require the computation of braid orbits. In this paper we describe an implementation of this computation. We discuss several applications, including the classification of irreducible families of indecomposable rational functions with exceptional monodromy group