Atlas in the Notices

I just got the latest issue of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society today, and was excited to find in it an article by David Vogan on the Atlas Project. In particular, there’s a lot of information on how the programming and computation ran. I found it sort of interesting, but I know there are people out there who just love tweaking programs and squeezing that extra bit of performance out. Most of the time it really doesn’t matter, but the Kazhdan-Lusztig polynomials for split are one of those few calculations that are just so unbelievably massive that you have to use every trick you can just to get the damn thing to fit in the computer.

Oh, and if any of you code junkies wants to Slashdot that article, I’d appreciate a “heard it on The UM” nod 😉