Tag Archives: GAP

Microsoft buys GitHub?

Posted on 06/06/2018 by

Some years ago, it was announced that Microsoft had done a deal with Donald Knuth and the American Mathematical Society and had bought the rights to TeX. It was slightly worrying until you noticed that the announcement was dated 1 … Continue reading →

Posted in software, technology | Tagged , , , | 5 Comments

More groups

Posted on 20/05/2016 by

The title reminds me of the occasion when my academic grandfather lectured to the London Mathematical Society on “Moore graphs”. Unfortunately, someone got it wrong, and his lecture was billed as “More graphs”. But here I really do mean what … Continue reading →

Posted in doing mathematics, software | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Computer blues

Posted on 06/05/2015 by

No, not a grumble: a story with a happy ending. Back in 2008, when the Asus eee-pc notebook came out, I got one of the first. I have written elsewhere about how it was indispensible on my Forder tour of … Continue reading →

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A symmetric design

Posted on 24/08/2014 by

Quite a long time ago, Arunas Rudvalis discovered a symmetric 2-(14080,1444,148) design: a set of 14080 points, with 14080 subsets of size 1444 called blocks, with the property that any point lies in 1444 blocks, any two points in 148 … Continue reading →

Posted in doing mathematics, exposition | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

A cliff

Posted on 06/08/2014 by

The “combinatorial explosion” is a well-known phenomenon. I recently came across a very dramatic example of it. I was trying to compute the function F(n,k), defined to be the maximum of |S|×|P|, over all sets S of k-subsets and all … Continue reading →

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From the archive, 2

Posted on 29/12/2013 by

Next up is a document which is just over a quarter-century old, a photocopy of a 26-page handwritten document entitled “On doing geometry in CAYLEY”. The background, as explained in the document, is that John Cannon’s computer algebra system CAYLEY, … Continue reading →

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