On Fri, Oct 31, 2008 at 8:17 AM, alunw <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > As a matter of fact I had an email from Martin Edjvet earlier today > who told me that he had a student > called Jerry Swan "who also came up with his modified (improved?) > version (called KBMAGNUM) which was set up > to deal with batches of presentations". > He tells me is using it now with a file of about 68000 presentations. > I hope to hear from Jerry soon. > > I did exchange a couple of emails with Derek Holt, and also Sarah > Rees. > In fact if it wasn't for that my package would probably have been > finished long ago, because that was what got me interested in dealing > with orderings other than shortlex, and I found this a very > challenging problem. > I have of course studied KBMAG very carefully - despite its rather old- > fashioned coding style, I often found it a lot easier to learn by > studying real source code than reading papers and books. I hope my > code will also be useful that way. > > I'm afraid I have developed all this as a "mathematical crank". I > knew almost nothing about automatic groups when I started, and there > are probably huge gaps in my knowledge still, as I am entirely self > taught, and don't have access to a decent library, and don't have any > regular contact with the academic world. But my first ever KB program > did the infamous third in BHN's series of presentations of the trivial > group in under 30 seconds, which is about 60 times quicker than KBMAG, > so I was hooked. (Don't worry it does proper examples too - obviously > it is all to easy for bugs to make a presentation appear to be > trivial)
You are clearly the furthest thing from a "mathematical crank". Those are non-humble people who claim repeatedly to have proofs of important conjectures or theorems, but don't know what they are talking about. As a number theorists, I've been contacted with such people a lot of the years (e.g., just yesterday). You are humble, careful, and are doing good work that will genuinely be useful to people. You're definitely nothing like a crank. William --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
