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11 Jan 08

Good Math, Bad Math : The Genius of Donald Knuth: Typesetting with Boxes and Glue

  • But on the whole, it's been a great thing. Pick up any conference proceedings
    from the last 20 years, in the fields of math, computer science, physics, or chemistry (among numerous others), and you'll see the results of TeX layout. Pick up a book published by Springer-Verlag, and it's almost certainly typeset by TeX. Look at Greg Chaitin's books - every one was written using TeX. Look at any typeset equation in pretty much any published source, from websites to conference proceedings, to journals, to textbooks. If the equation looks really good, if everything is in exactly the right place, and every symbol is correctly drawn in relation to everything else - odds are, it was generated by TeX. Even hardcore Microsoft word users generally use something TeX based for doing equations.
07 Jan 08

EDUCAUSE Publications: Educom Review March/April, 1999

  • In fact the most
    successful systems that humans have been able to design are ones in which
    most of the design effort goes into letting the system be able to grow in a
    fashion that detects and corrects the error, so that the system doesn't
    come apart. The Internet is a good example of that, because it's something
    that didn't require any central control and wasn't constructed, the way a
    clock is constructed. Another good example is the American Constitution,
    because the people who designed it realized that it would be very difficult
    to write laws for how people should live 50 years from their time and
    place, so they wisely made most of the Constitution a way of dealing with
    error situations that would come up and a way of keeping bad things from
    propagating. They didn't try to tell people how they should live over the
    next two centuries.
  • The reason our group has been successful is
    that our whole development system is designed to allow us to late-bind
    things that we discover along the way, things we would not have to find out
    along the way if we had a real engineering discipline.
  • 4 more annotations...

How to Read Mathematics

  • A reading protocol is a set of strategies
    that a reader must use in order to benefit fully from reading the text.
    Poetry calls for a different set of strategies than fiction, and
    fiction a different set than non-fiction. It would be ridiculous to read
    fiction and ask oneself what is the author's source for the assertion
    that the hero is blond and tanned; it would be wrong to read
    non-fiction and not ask such a question.  This reading protocol
    extends to a viewing or listening protocol in art and
    music. Indeed, much of the introductory course material in literature,
    music and art is spent teaching these protocols.
  • The beauty in a novel is in the aesthetic way it uses language to
    evoke emotions and present themes which defy precise definition. The
    beauty in a mathematics article is in the elegant efficient way it
    concisely describes precise ideas of great complexity.
  • 3 more annotations...
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