Modern curmudgeons
Today my EE professor told us a story. It will probably be amusing to all two of you who are familiar with the people involved.
So it starts with Neal Stephenson, who was a guest speaker at last year's faculty retreat. (I believe I vaguely remember Jack telling me about this before, actually.) He was discussing some research he's been doing for an upcoming novel on the mathematical notation war between Newton and Leibniz during the development of calculus. And then William Kahan (of floating point fame) apparently just tore him apart, saying that Stephenson had no idea what he was talking about.
Kahan, I should mention, is rather famous here for being a ridiculously difficult professor. I'm not the best one to tell the stories, though.
On a related note, while reading one of the faqs off of Neal Stephenson's page, I noticed that a certain Ian Goldberg was credited with writing a perl script that appeared in Cryptonomicon. I know that name (excepting the small possibility of an evil twin also into cryptography) from none other than my dear friend Ping.
Comments
It is the same Ian that Ping told you about. Ian says the typesetter lost a ; so extra points for being able to fix the perl script :-)
I am now on page 315...
Posted by: Paul | December 3, 2002 12:51 AM
Ah Kahan stories always amuse me.
And Cryptonomicon is the first book in my queue once finals are over. I don't dare start now, because I know how sucked into books I can get.
Posted by: Benjy | December 3, 2002 01:02 AM
Ohh... I think I already read something about the location of the lost ;... this is what I get for being the kind of person who almost always reads the documentation. :)
I really enjoyed Cryptonomicon (finished it in a matter of days) 3 or 4 years ago.
Posted by: Nadia | December 3, 2002 09:07 AM