Abstract of the Commemorative lecture
Digital Typography
The appearance of each page in a book is in many ways just as important as the information contained in those pages. An author will take much more pride in an elegant book than in a book that is crudely printed; therefore authors work harder to write a good book when they know that it will be well produced.
I started to write a series of books called The Art of Computer Programming in 1962, and the first volumes were published in 1968 and 1969. The high quality of the typography in those volumes was achieved by using machines that were invented in the 19th century. Decades of development had shown how to adapt those machines beautifully to the needs of scientific publishing.
But those machines became obsolete during the 1970s, and publishers could no longer afford to match the quality of the 1960s, except in non-mathematical books, because books full of mathematics did not have enough economic clout. Therefore it was impossible for my publishers to make the second edition of my books look like the first.
I was discouraged, until I learned that the problem could be solved by computer programming. This lecture describes my 9-year adventure as I developed a way to define the total appearance of a book purely in mathematical terms. As a result of this work, authors can now be sure that their books will never again change when printing technology changes.
