David Reinfurt of Dexter Sinister / O-R-G
Mathematical Typography

« I will be speaking today about work in progress, instead of completed research; this was not my original intention when I chose the subject of this lecture, but the fact is I couldn’t get my computer programs working in time. Fortunately it is just as well that I don’t have a finished product to describe to you today, because research in mathematics is generally much more interesting while you’re doing it than after it’s all done. When invited to give the Josiah Willard Gibbs lecture to the American Mathematical Society (AMS) in 1978, Stanford computer science professor Donald Knuth chose to speak not directly about mathematics, but instead about the shapes of letters. In Mathematical Typography, Knuth discussed the typographic evolution of the AMS Journal and his own attempts to realize a computer automated typesetting system. Ten years later his programming efforts yielded the discipline-standard TeX and its helper program, MetaFont. This talk will begin where the previous ends. »