From boiling lead and black art: Eddie Smith on math typography

From boiling lead and black art: An essay on the history of mathematical typography

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Some very interesting videos in there.

Tau.Neutrino said:

From boiling lead and black art: Eddie Smith on math typography

From boiling lead and black art: An essay on the history of mathematical typography

more…

This is a brilliant summary.

I entered the fray first by hand-written mathematics in lines of text. Then a big advance in the IBM Selectric golf-ball typewriter, which was used for my PhD thesis and other reports. I really felt for the poor typist who had to keep changing golf balls and moving text up and down every few letters.

“Equations could either be written in by hand or composed on something like an IBM Selectric typewriter, which became very popular in the 1960s. Typewriters were office mainstays well into the late 20th century.

“Larger departments at businesses and universities not only had legions of secretarial workers capable of typing papers, but many had technical typists as well. Anecdotes like this one from a Math Overflow commenter, Peter May, highlight the daily struggles that took place:

“The Selectric’s key feature was a golf ball-sized typeball that could be interchanged. One of the typeballs IBM made contained math symbols, so a typist could simply swap out typeballs as needed to produce a paper containing math notation. However, the printed results were arguably worse aesthetically than handwritten math and not even comparable to Monotype.

Math typography is still so difficult that it’s excluded from many popular science magazines such as New Scientist. I remember a period of ten years, there was only a single mathematical equation in New Scientist – and they got that wrong.

> By 1978, Knuth was ready to announce TeX (“tek”1) to the world at the annual meeting of the American Mathematical Society (AMS).

It’s still the standard. Even now. Mathematics on the web in ArXiV won’t be accepted in anything other than TeX. Microsoft Equation is crap by comparison.

> What makes Knuth’s role in typographical history so special was just how much he cared about the appearance of typography in the 1970s—and the fact that he used his technical abilities to emulate the art he so appreciated from the Monotype era.

Yes. Knuth’s work was brilliant. And because he cared so much, it was released into public use for free.

For example, the following TeX syntax:

$y = \sqrt{x} + {x – 1 \over 2}$
will render:

y
=
√
x
+
x
−
1
2

See. Even now computers won’t typeset mathematics as well as old TeX.