Dear All: Well, the San Francisco Bay area GIMPS party last Friday evening was a lot of fun, and included a couple of surprise attendees who livened things up even more. It was a lovely clear evening in Mountain View; GIMPS members who showed up included Irv Rosenfeld (who flew up all the way from LA), Todd Sauke, Harald Alvestrand (who works for Cisco in Norway and happened to be in Silicon Valley last week on business), Spike & Mrs. Jones, and Russ Brooks and a ladyfriend. Brad Bernard of Entropia had said he'd be coming (all the way from San Diego), and indeed he did around 6:30, but he also brought a couple of other Entropians with him, inclu- ding none other than Entropia founder Scott Kurowski, who I hadn't seen since shortly before he moved the company from Silicon Valley to San Diego in Fall '99. There were several toasts, including two synchrony with a couple of groups of GIMPSers in Germany who stayed up late to mark the occasion with us, lots of good food and drink, and of course conversation about primes (mostly shouted, as Tied House was quite noisy this evening.
Then, around 7:30, I felt a hand on my shoulder and head a hello from...none other than Don Knuth himself. [The story there is as follows: in July of 1999, soon after GIM<PS discovered M#38, I'd just moved to the area from Ohio, and Scott and I had agreed to get together soon after the move. He had contacted Knuth soon after M#38 was discovered to offer him a poster of the new prime, so we wound up taking him to brunch in Palo Alto, near the Stanford campus. This time around there was no poster available yet, but as it happens, every year around this time, Knuth gives an informal lecture at Stanford about trees (of the data- structure kind), which he calls (what else?) his "Christmas Tree Lecture." This year's happend to be on the afternoon of Thursday the 6th, so I left work early that day and headed to Stanford to the talk. He started as soon as he entered the lecture hall and the talk ran late, so, needing to be home by 6, I slipped a copy of the M#39 press release along with a hand- written invitation to the party onto the corner of the desk where he was seated (an overhead camera was aimed at the pad of paper he was writing on and projecting it onto a large screen behind the lectern.) I didn't think he'd actually come or even if he recognized me, but was pleasantly surprised the next evening.] Knuth said he was late because he'd stopped by a Christmas party earlier that evening. They must not have fed him very well there, becuase he immediately oredered a big plate of food, and in short order polished that off, then set to work on several orders of french fried potatoes which we, his tablemates, had left uneaten. In between bites, he told us that one of the Stanford Computer Science students had been so taken with the poster of M#38 that he actually devised a mnemonic which allowed him to memorize the digits of the first line. (That might not sound like a lot to people who haven't seen the poster, but it's probably somewhere between one and two thousand decimal digits.) So it turned out to be rather a legendary gathering - thanks to all those who attended, and also to Scott for generously picking up the tab for the whole thing. It was nice to put some actual faces to the names of some of one's fellow GIMPSers! Cheers, -Ernst _________________________________________________________________________ Unsubscribe & list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
