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When I was a graduate student looking for a thesis topic, Herbert Ryser
advised me not to work on the projective plane of order 10. Even though he
was extremely interested in this subject, he believed that it was too
difficult and that I might get nowhere with it. I took his advice and
chose another problem. Somehow, this problem has a beauty that fascinates
me as well as many other mathematicians. Finally in 1980, I succumbed to
the temptation and started working on it with some of my colleagues. We
eventually managed to get somewhere, but unfortunately, Dr. Ryser is no
longer with us to hear of the final result. This is an expository article
describing the evolution of the problem and how computers were used to
solve it.