Brahms Gang

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Brahms Gang were a pair of mathematics graduate students from Berkeley, Gene Ward Smith and Matthew P. Wiener, who gained notoriety for their frequent posts to Usenet during the 1980s. Their name is derived from the name of the server they posted from, brahms.berkeley.edu. They got involved in numerous flame wars with other Usenet luminaries including Rich Rosen and Tim Maroney. At one point, a filter was surreptitiously embedded on netnews servers that doctored Wiener's posts so that his name was displayed as "Obnoxious Math Grad Student".

Wiener now works at Merck Pharmaceuticals in New Jersey, while Smith is a mathematician known for constructing the Smith generic cyclic polynomial and for being a member of the Amdahl Six group that held the record from 1989 through 1992 for the largest known prime number.