TeX Discussion Thread

[Drake Tungsten]

Why the **** am I just now finding about about the existence of TeX (in the comments section at Marginal Revolution, of all places)? I spent all those years in undergrad and grad school, fighting with Word to produce professional looking academic papers, and now I find out about this? Do you have any idea how much easier this would have made all those statistics projects/reports? **** me. Why couldn't one professor have clued me into this?

[DaShi]

Or you could have just used InDesign

[Drake Tungsten]

TeX is free.

[Jon Miller]

I and KH talked about it at least once or twice.

JM

[MikeH]

I remember that.

"Hey, JM do you use TeX?"
"Yeah... really useful. Oh, sh*t, better delete this thread before Drake sees it!"

[Drake Tungsten]

This thread was created so the science types could mercilessly mock my ignorance.

I and KH talked about it at least once or twice.

Serves me right for not reading the physics discussions, I guess.

[MikeH]

Reading the physics discussion would cancel out any benefit you got from discovering TeX.

[Kuciwalker]

Why the **** am I just now finding about about the existence of TeX (in the comments section at Marginal Revolution, of all places)? I spent all those years in undergrad and grad school, fighting with Word to produce professional looking academic papers, and now I find out about this? Do you have any idea how much easier this would have made all those statistics projects/reports? **** me. Why couldn't one professor have clued me into this?

How did you make it through years of university and grad school without ever hearing of it? There weren't any math/cs/physics types in your statistics classes?

wtf

[KrazyHorse]

at clueless arts grads.

I actually know one physicist who did his thesis in word...

[KrazyHorse]

at clueless arts grads.

I actually know one physicist who did his thesis in word...

[Jon Miller]

at clueless arts grads.

I actually know one physicist who did his thesis in word...

I also. I was shocked.

JM
(He went to Houston or something.)

[MrFun]

I've never heard of TeX either. And so, as a graduate student I did my thesis in . . . .



yep, Word.

[Drake Tungsten]

There weren't any math/cs/physics types in your statistics classes?

Of course not. Only a retarded math/cs/physics type would be taking introductory statistics classes in grad school.

I'm so pissed that I never knew about this. Do you know how hard it is to write ****ing equations out in Word?

[Asher]

More importantly, let us discuss the awesomeness of Donald Knuth, author of TeX: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Knuth

• He used to pay a finder’s fee of $2.56 for any typographical errors or mistakes discovered in his books, because “256 pennies is one hexadecimal dollar”, and $0.32 for “valuable suggestions”. (His bounty for errata in 3:16 Bible Texts Illuminated, is, however, $3.16). According to an article in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Technology Review, these Knuth reward checks are “among computerdom’s most prized trophies”. Knuth had to stop sending real checks in 2008 due to bank fraud, and instead now gives each error finder a "certificate of deposit" from a publicly listed balance in his fictitious "Bank of San Serriffe".[13]
  
• Version numbers of his TeX software approach the number π, in that versions increment in the style 3, 3.1, 3.14. 3.141, and so on. Similarly, version numbers of Metafont approach the base of the natural logarithm, e.
  
• He once warned a correspondent, “Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.”[1]
  
• All appendices in the Computers and Typesetting series have titles that begin with the letter identifying the appendix.
  
• TAOCP volume 3 (First Edition) has the index entry “Royalties, use of, 405”. Page 405 has no explicit mention of royalties, but however does contain a diagram of an “organ-pipe arrangement” in Figure 2. Apparently the purchase of the pipe organ in his home was financed by royalties from TAOCP.[14] (In the second edition of the work, the relevant page is 407.)
  
• The preface of Concrete Mathematics includes the following anecdote: “When Knuth taught Concrete Mathematics at Stanford for the first time, he explained the somewhat strange title by saying that it was his attempt to teach a math course that was hard instead of soft. He announced that, contrary to the expectations of some of his colleagues, he was not going to teach the Theory of Aggregates [ Aggregate functions or Aggregate (composite) ], not Stone's Embedding Theorem, nor even the Stone–Čech compactification theorem. (Several students from the civil engineering department got up and quietly left the room.)” (Concrete and aggregates are important topics in civil engineering.)
  
• Knuth published his first “scientific” article in a school magazine in 1957 under the title “Potrzebie System of Weights and Measures.” In it, he defined the fundamental unit of length as the thickness of MAD magazine #26, and named the fundamental unit of force “whatmeworry.” MAD magazine bought the article and published it in the #33, June 1957 issue.
  
• Knuth's first “mathematical” article was a short paper submitted to a “science talent search” contest for high-school seniors in 1955, and published in 1960, in which he discussed number systems where the radix was negative. He further generalized this to number systems where the radix was a complex number. In particular, he defined the quater-imaginary base system, which uses the imaginary number 2i as the base, having the unusual feature that every complex number can be represented with the digits 0, 1, 2, and 3, without a sign.
  
• Knuth’s article about the computational complexity of songs, "The Complexity of Songs", was reprinted twice in computer science journals.
  
• To demonstrate the concept, Knuth intentionally referred 'Circular definition' and 'Definition, circular' to each other in the index of The Art of Computer Programming Vol. 1.

[Drake Tungsten]

More importantly, let us discuss the awesomeness of Donald Knuth, author of TeX

I checked out his web site earlier. He is indeed a bad ass.