Thank you. I’ve been saying this for years. He could very well have been some listserv lurker who followed the prior art, and just went ahead and solved the outstanding problems on his own. There are far more brilliant programmers out there working quietly, than those who are known. Everybody reaches for a name they know because that’s all that’s available to reach for.

Just some lurker of that early mailing list, absorbing knowledge that eventually culminated into the code and paper. The number of unknown great programmers is a lot. What I think is interesting is that it was both code and a paper, not only code. So at least a grad student. And likely someone that starts many projects, because they left after only one year. Something else could have gotten more interesting.