Re: Perry vs. the Math Teacher

[tcmay@netcom.com (Timothy C. May)]

Douglas Sinclair writes:

> By the same token, I might say that to communicate in a scholarly manner
> one must know how to spell and punctuate with marks other than ellipses.
> However, I will not.  As has been pointed out, each of us learned the

I don't understand your use of the term "ellipse" here. You mean like
a circle? Like a big O? O, I see.

(Just kidding. Spelling flames are especially pointless on a list like this.)

> Certainly "big O notation" and the modulo operator are studied in undergrad
> computer science and mathematics.  However, many of us have never studied
> these things.  There are a number of high-school students on the list.  There
> are people who have never had the oportunity to study technical subjects.
> IMHO, these people are all welcome on cypherpunks and have much to contribute.
> When I first joined the list, I was a self taught programmer and had never
> been taught the formalisms of "big O notation".  We must not become a 
> self-congratulatory elite.

None of us knows everything. The things I know little or nothing
about, I stay out of. I think this is reasonable. The list has 500 or
so people on it, and there's no point in 500 people watchin someone
presume to speak on computational complexity without even knowing the
basic terms, such as Big O notation (for which I would recommend _any_
computer science textbook, perhaps Aho, Hopcroft, and Ullman, or even
a more basic text...the new Leiserson, Rivest, etc. text covers a lot
of such things).

On things I know little or nothing about, I just don't post. You won't
see me rambling on about swIPe, encrypted IP tunnels, algebraic number
theory, etc. (Some of these things I know just enough about to know
they are important, but I leave the inner workings for others.)

The recent unpleasantness is just a continuing pattern of someone
getting a bug in his bonnet and not letting a topic drop.

Let's just let it drop.


--Tim May


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