Mathematical progress

Once upon a time typesetting mathematics was very expensive. It took a skilled operator hours and hours to get multi-line mathematics setting right. Now we’ve developed software which careful mathematicians can utilize themselves to bypass the expert compositors who used to man the composing rooms of university printing houses. There was a story of a Monotype comp at the University Printing House who was so knowledgeable, having set advanced maths journal papers every day for years, that Cambridge professors would rely on him as a correction mechanism. Then all that knowledge was keyed into a piece of software (no longer the human brain) and computers took over. In the early days of computer setting we had a freelance supplier in Austin, Texas, who so loved setting mathematics on his own computer that he’d do the job at a knock-down price. If he’d been ten or twenty years older he’d have become a typesetting apprentice. We exploited him ruthlessly by feeding his craving! I think both…