That's unbelievable.

i browsed through his siggraph paper. it's about a system of graphing equations, i.e. plotting software, and apparently he argues a lot of software doesn't quite do it right. He doesn't even bring up the coolness of his algorithm

And by checking out his (possibly out of date) U of T website, I learn:

1) it seems to be his only paper

2) his school email address was MOONCAKE

http://www.dgp.toronto.edu/people/mooncake/mooncake.html

my officemate theorizes the formula is a way of plotting a picture encoded as a large integer. The integer he chose was the one that represents the formula. so for some other value of n you could plot some other arbitrary picture. in essence n is a data file and the formula itself is a plotting program.

and kottke, who i guess you may have gotten this from, has helped me to learn that such a thing is called a quine. the tupper formula isn't quite a quine, though, since it doesn't print the integer.

Quines: I think I learned about those in Godel, Escher, Bach.

I like your officemate's theory.

Yeah, quines were in Godel Escher Bach but now I can't remember any of the English language examples. They were something along the lines of:

"'Is a sentence fragment' is a sentence fragment."