6 ms·

I used to wonder how likely it was that the printers made some typesetting errors. Who among us could, say, type a thousand pages of APL symbols without introdu

I used to wonder how likely it was that the printers made some typesetting errors. Who among us could, say, type a thousand pages of APL symbols without introducing a bug?

inigyou 1mo ago
apocryphally a typesetter saw "make x as small as possible" at the end of a math problem to be typeset, and did exactly that
- taneq 1mo ago
  “Find x” <— here it is!
- gjm11 1mo ago
  The version of this story I heard is in Littlewood's "A Mathematician's Miscellany"[1] and it's a sigma rather than an x. But he tells it as something that happened specifically to him -- he wrote a memo that ended with "thus sigma should be made as small as possible", and that bit was absent but there was in its place a very very tiny sigma. Unless he's outright lying, I think this one actually happened! [1] The more recent edition is titled "Littlewood's Miscellany"; I am fairly sure this story is in both the older and the newer version.
WillAdams 1mo ago
There's a reason mathematics was known as "penalty copy" and was notoriously difficult to typeset and even more difficult to turn a profit on. For a deep dive into both ends of that, see the history of publication of Knuth's TAoCP where the text was originally published traditionally by setting metal type on a composition machine (to the extent possible), then compositors would add the additional characters and spacing material necessary to compose the equations and so forth so as to lay out a galley (which would then be proofed/corrected) --- a successive edition was then typeset using an early imagesetter, which looked so ghastly that DEK considered giving up, but when informed that the imagesetter was controlled by a computer declared, "I am a computer scientist, I can fix that." and expected to knock out a typesetting system over his next sabbatical.... Roughly a decade later, TeX 1.0 was released.... the current version is 3.141592653 (with new versions adding another decimal place as the version tends towards \pi) --- while we're still waiting on the full publication of Vol. 4, it is widely considered that TeX was worth the delay.
- karmakurtisaani 1mo ago
  > the current version is 3.141592653 Another instance of a "clever" joke that becomes annoying very fast.
  - blipvert 1mo ago
    I suppose that to make it slightly less tedious we could just refer to the version using the number of significant digits: 10
    - karmakurtisaani 1mo ago
      Denote the version with a simple integer? Now that's thinking outside the box!
  - lanstin 1mo ago
    Or delightful if you used to have pi digit contests in math camp as a middle schooler.

I used to wonder how likely it was that the printers made some typesetting errors. Who among us could, say, type a thousand pages of APL symbols without introducing a bug?

inigyou 1mo ago

apocryphally a typesetter saw "make x as small as possible" at the end of a math problem to be typeset, and did exactly that

taneq 1mo ago
“Find x” <— here it is!
gjm11 1mo ago
The version of this story I heard is in Littlewood's "A Mathematician's Miscellany"[1] and it's a sigma rather than an x. But he tells it as something that happened specifically to him -- he wrote a memo that ended with "thus sigma should be made as small as possible", and that bit was absent but there was in its place a very very tiny sigma. Unless he's outright lying, I think this one actually happened! [1] The more recent edition is titled "Littlewood's Miscellany"; I am fairly sure this story is in both the older and the newer version.

WillAdams 1mo ago

There's a reason mathematics was known as "penalty copy" and was notoriously difficult to typeset and even more difficult to turn a profit on. For a deep dive into both ends of that, see the history of publication of Knuth's TAoCP where the text was originally published traditionally by setting metal type on a composition machine (to the extent possible), then compositors would add the additional characters and spacing material necessary to compose the equations and so forth so as to lay out a galley (which would then be proofed/corrected) --- a successive edition was then typeset using an early imagesetter, which looked so ghastly that DEK considered giving up, but when informed that the imagesetter was controlled by a computer declared, "I am a computer scientist, I can fix that." and expected to knock out a typesetting system over his next sabbatical.... Roughly a decade later, TeX 1.0 was released.... the current version is 3.141592653 (with new versions adding another decimal place as the version tends towards \pi) --- while we're still waiting on the full publication of Vol. 4, it is widely considered that TeX was worth the delay.

karmakurtisaani 1mo ago
> the current version is 3.141592653 Another instance of a "clever" joke that becomes annoying very fast.
- blipvert 1mo ago
  I suppose that to make it slightly less tedious we could just refer to the version using the number of significant digits: 10
  - karmakurtisaani 1mo ago
    Denote the version with a simple integer? Now that's thinking outside the box!
- lanstin 1mo ago
  Or delightful if you used to have pi digit contests in math camp as a middle schooler.