============================================================================== This letter is intended for those who wrote USENET posts or email which I would like to store at my web site for public access. ============================================================================== March 1 1996 Dear recipient, Please excuse the form letter; I'm trying to reach many people. For a year or two I have kept on my web page some useful mathematical essays I have written, and have stored helpful information written by others in my own private directories. At the end of 1995 I decided it would be more helpful to web users to combine the two. Since then I have been sorting the files, and editing them for form (not content). I plan to announce the collection to the USENET newsgroup sci.math in a couple of weeks. You are receiving this message because one or more posts you made or email messages you sent me are included in that collection. Law and custom are not well established in this arena, so it is not clear whether what I intend to do is appropriate. Attached is a list of files in the collection which appear to have been written by you. (If you wrote under several names or addresses, you may receive additional copies of this letter with more lists.) I would like to give you the opportunity to review these files before the collection is announced, to see if you have any objection to their inclusion. If you can browse the World-Wide Web, prepend the URL to the filenames below. If you prefer to use gopher or FTP, you should be able to retrieve your files by attaching first to the site gopher://gopher.math.niu.edu:70/11/Papers/Rusin/known-math/ FTP://ftp.math.niu.edu/pub/papers/Rusin/known-math/ and then descending the appropriate subdirectory to your file. If none of these methods is available to you, please reply to this message and I can email the files to you for your perusal. HOW I INTEND TO USE WHAT YOU WROTE: 1) I would like to include your posts or letters, usually as part of a longer file which includes other discussion on that theme. I will edit only the headers and footers, although long quoted passages of other articles in the file will be excised. I will also remove any patently personal material. 2) I would like to be able to move the file around in the collection, and possibly delete it at some time. 3) I would include pointers to the file in the collection's indices. 4) Threads of particular interest may be revisited. If I or someone else writes a summary article which includes passages clearly derived from what is in your articles, then of course you would be mentioned. HOW YOU SHOULD RESPOND TO THIS LETTER: If you feel I may leave the files as they are, you need do nothing. Probably I should keep a short permission letter in my files, but I won't press for one right now since I anticipate a clogged mailbox over the next couple of weeks. If you don't mind the inclusion of the files in general, but you would like me to make some editorial changes, please let me know what they are. One easy choice is to tell me that you simply want me to remove references to your name, user-ID, and site. (Note however that some of this information is included in follow-up posts by others, in which case I feel it should remain inside those followups). Once this is done I won't be able to attribute the files to you, since I don't intend to keep the pre-edited versions. If you wish me to remove (some of) your messages altogether, I can also do that. Again I note that your messages won't exactly vanish without a trace if there are responses by others to what you wrote. In particular, if I spent a fair amount of effort to respond to something you wrote, I'd be happy to excise all direct references to you, but I will probably retain that edited response on my site. If you notice that I have listed one or more files which you have made available at your own site for WWW access, let me know and I can replace the file here with a link to your site. In such a case, however, I would appreciate notice if you move the files around so I can keep my links fresh. (Also note that if your site is subject to frequent down-times or slow connections, I would like to keep a copy here anyway.) Of course I will at any time honor requests to adjust files I have which you wrote. However, I would encourage you to notify me of any changes I should make by March 15 1996 so that I can announce the collection to the sci.math readers. DISCLAIMER: Please note that I was interested only in preparing the files in a rather minimal way for web access; in particular, I'm not claiming that the organization of the collection, choice of articles for inclusion, or edited form of the articles are optimal in any way. Certainly there is no hope of representing anything but a fraction of the most interesting bits of mathematics in any one corner of the web. In time perhaps this collection can be improved, but for now I'd just like to leave this useful information out for anyone who comes by to pick it up. As I prepared articles for this collection, I was not particularly interested in paring down the files. It may well be that the articles I am asking you to review are, in retrospect, not worth keeping. If you see that this is the case, perhaps you can let me know (if there is a portion of your message which _is_ helpful, I'd like to keep it.) Thank you for your cooperation. dave (Prof.) Dave Rusin, Northern Illinois University rusin@math.niu.edu ============================================================================== Files with a match to your name in 'grep ^From */* ' (multiple mentions of a file mean separate messages from you are now included in one file.) :