So I wondered if this was the guy who discovered the Fano plane FP. (FP is the discrete projective plane that consists of 7 points and 7 lines such that each point is contained in 3 lines and each line contains 3 points. It's usually depicted as an equilateral triangle with all 3 medians drawn in, plus a 7th "line" being its inscribed circle. FP can be obtained geometrically analogous to the ordinary projective plane P^2, by substituting the smallest finite field — F_2 — for the reals: Let V denote the vector space (F_2)^3. Define the points of FP to be the 1-dimensional subspaces of V, and the lines of FP to be the 2-dimensional subspaces of V. (There is, incidentally, a type of duality between the points and lines of FP: If points are redefined as lines and the original lines redefined as points, it's still a Fano plane. (I'm not very clear on how to best describe all incidence-preserving bijections between the set of points and the set of lines, i.e., ways of specifically interchanging each point with one and only one line to realize this duality.) FP is particularly interesting in that its automorphism group (permutations of its vertices that preserve incidence) is isomorphic to the 2nd-smallest nonabelian simple group: the one of order 168. Turns out that the Fano who discovered this is Robert Fano's father, the Italian mathematician Gino Fano. —Dan ----- FYI -- Bob Fano was my undergraduate advisor; his lovely daughter, Paola, worked at BBN for a while. It's bizarre that the NYTimes makes such a big deal out of CTSS; I consider Fano's work in information & coding theory (& whatever he did during WWII, much of which may still be classified) his major accomplishments. He was also an incredibly good teacher, and a wonderful advisor: he finally convinced me that Kronecker may have been somewhat short-sighted ("God created the integers..."), and got me to take probability. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/27/technology/robert-fano-98-dies-engineer-wh... Robert Fano, 98, Dies; Engineer Who Helped Develop Interactive Computers -----