I'm at the IMA coding theory, complexity and communication conference this week. (I'll post pictures somewhere later.)
One problem I've been trying to solve is to try to contact Jeffery Leon, a mathematician at UIC who wrote a number of programs using a very difficult combinatorial technique called "partition backtracking". This collection of programs, written in C in the 1980's, will compute automorphisms of designs, linear codes, and matrices. The program Leon wrote does some hard coding theory and combinatorial computations quite fast. The issue is that it does not have an open source license. I think it was written during a time when no one worried about such things. I have tried over the years emailing and calling Leon, but no responses. (BTW, many people have told me that Jeff is a very nice guy but you have to physically talk to him, as opposed to writing.) These days, no one will maintain it unless it has some sort of open source license (such as the GPL or the MIT license or the BSD licence ...). If this is not done, the code will die. Why? Well, bugs have been discovered (some serious, some not) and no one will spend the time to maintain someone else's code. There are many people who are willing to maintain, on volunteer basis, open source software, as part of a community effort though. Also, the code is hard to read, which only compounds the problem.
I happened to ride the airport shuttle to the hotel with Vera Pless, the great (now "retired" from UIC, though she still directs several students) coding theorist who is also visiting the IMA, and told her the problem. When we were dropped off we went our separate ways. Then, the next day we happened to meet at breakfast and she told me to call Steven Smith (the finite group theorist) at UIC and tell him the problem. I sent him and email and he almost immediately responded that he would sit down to talk with Jeff Leon about the situtation. As a result of Vera and Steven's help, Jeff just sent me a very nice email saying, in particular:
I, Jeffrey S. Leon, agree to license all the partition
backtrack code which I have written under the GPL
(www.fsf.org) as of this date, April 17, 2007.
This is great news!
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
Sunday, April 15, 2007
Favorite quotes
There are some things which cannot
be learned quickly, and time, which is all we have,
must be paid heavily for their acquiring.
They are the very simplest things,
and because it takes a man's life to know them
the little new that each man gets from life
is very costly and the only heritage he has to leave.
- Ernest Hemingway
(From A. E. Hotchner, Papa Hemingway, Random House, NY, 1966)
Finish each day and be done with it.
You have done what you could;
some blunders and absurdities have crept in;
forget them as soon as you can.
Tomorrow is a new day;
you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit
to be encumbered with your old nonsense.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius and power and magic in it.
- Johann Goethe
(John Anster's translation of Faust)
This was my uncle David's favorite quote.
Praise and blame, gain and loss, pleasure and sorrow come and go like the wind. To be happy, rest like a giant tree in the midst of them all.
- Buddha
We must not forget that when radium was discovered no one knew that it would prove useful in hospitals. The work was one of pure science. And this is a proof that scientific work must not be considered from the point of view of the direct usefulness of it. It must be done for itself, for the beauty of science, and then there is always the chance that a scientific discovery may become like the radium a benefit for humanity.
- Marie Curie
The best thing for being sad is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting.
- T. H. White, in The Once and Future King
The advantage is that mathematics is a field in which one's blunders tend to show very clearly and can be corrected or erased with a stroke of the pencil. It is a field which has often been compared with chess, but differs from the latter in that it is only one's best moments that count and not one's worst. A single inattention may lose a chess game, whereas a single successful approach to a problem, among many which have been relegated to the wastebasket, will make a mathematician's reputation.
- Norbert Wiener, in Ex-Prodigy: My Childhood and Youth
be learned quickly, and time, which is all we have,
must be paid heavily for their acquiring.
They are the very simplest things,
and because it takes a man's life to know them
the little new that each man gets from life
is very costly and the only heritage he has to leave.
- Ernest Hemingway
(From A. E. Hotchner, Papa Hemingway, Random House, NY, 1966)
Finish each day and be done with it.
You have done what you could;
some blunders and absurdities have crept in;
forget them as soon as you can.
Tomorrow is a new day;
you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit
to be encumbered with your old nonsense.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius and power and magic in it.
- Johann Goethe
(John Anster's translation of Faust)
This was my uncle David's favorite quote.
Praise and blame, gain and loss, pleasure and sorrow come and go like the wind. To be happy, rest like a giant tree in the midst of them all.
- Buddha
We must not forget that when radium was discovered no one knew that it would prove useful in hospitals. The work was one of pure science. And this is a proof that scientific work must not be considered from the point of view of the direct usefulness of it. It must be done for itself, for the beauty of science, and then there is always the chance that a scientific discovery may become like the radium a benefit for humanity.
- Marie Curie
The best thing for being sad is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting.
- T. H. White, in The Once and Future King
The advantage is that mathematics is a field in which one's blunders tend to show very clearly and can be corrected or erased with a stroke of the pencil. It is a field which has often been compared with chess, but differs from the latter in that it is only one's best moments that count and not one's worst. A single inattention may lose a chess game, whereas a single successful approach to a problem, among many which have been relegated to the wastebasket, will make a mathematician's reputation.
- Norbert Wiener, in Ex-Prodigy: My Childhood and Youth
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