4 ms·

Many of these EWD notes are hand written with a lot of mathematical notation, and no corrections. For example: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/ewd10xx/EWD1063.

• KPGv2 10mo ago
  > and no corrections There of course could have been 100 corrections. He just threw those papers out and started again. Which is what we old timers did when we wrote things that we wanted to look nice. I did this with every math assignment at uni: do the work, get it right, then hand-copy a legible version to hand in.
  • jonjacky 10mo ago
    Oh sure, he might have made several, or many, drafts on scratch paper. But even then it is impressive. Many of these are around 12 pages of hand written text and math in ink with no corrections -- he famously used a Mont Blanc fountain pen. How many people could do that at all, even if they were copying from a rough draft? And there are so many -- more than 1300 EwDs!
    • KPGv2 10mo ago
      Well he only needs to write one mistake-free page at a time. On page two, a mistake, you just stat page two over again. But your point about doing 1300 of these is well-taken. (For what it's worth, this would be easier with a fountain pen because a big selling point of them is they fly over the paper so easily compared to a ballpoint pen. I switched to a fountain pen, and I had to un-learn how hard to grip the pen and press on the page.) Not to undersell things, but doing this for hundreds of pages is what everyone did before 1868, when the typewriter was invented. I think perhaps it's less about the physical act of doing it and more about the mental act of deciding to do it over and over again.