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Are mathematicians going to be using TeX in a hundred years? Two hundred? Five hundred? Two thousand? Math is timeless. TeX may be, but it's too soon to sa

Are mathematicians going to be using TeX in a hundred years? Two hundred? Five hundred? Two thousand? Math is timeless. TeX may be, but it's too soon to say. It's a recent invention. It's only been around for 35 years.

cschmidt 13y ago
It wouldn't surprise me if they still use it in a hundred years. It just fits thinking in math. By then TeX will be on version number 3.1415926535897932384626433832795028841971693993751 :-).
- adamgravitis 13y ago
  IIRC, it's supposed to be set exactly equal to pi upon Knuth's death.
- Zuider 13y ago
  And Emacs (with AUCTeX ) will have reached version 2.7182818284590452353603...
kyzyl 13y ago
Perhaps you're correct, but I would say this article is the author explaining his criteria, and asserting that it might be useful for some other people, on both sides of the line. Given that, I suspect that in one, two, five hundred years neither he nor his blog will be around. Nor anybody who read his blog. Even if his text had survived (perhaps someone goes digging though the NSA archives in a few hundred years), I'm sure that the person reading it will just intelligently substitute in the succeeding technology. So, what I'm trying to say is that the point about TeX is just a point of practicality. It happens to be approximately true right now, and the author has no information to guide him to an alternate conclusion.
reeses 13y ago
TeX is evolving with LuaTeX appearing to get some momentum. Given that almost no one uses TeX directly, I'd expect the biggest change would involve a gradual "improvement" in the macro library. It may even result in an embedded TeX à la sweave. Wolfram is hammering against the interactive element with CDF and I could see TeX being extended to support a more dynamic electronic document format if HTML rendering engines continue to be typographic messes. Perhaps an LLVM-type backend to generate executable ebooks would be an interesting project, but I'm not sure I'd start with TeX except for math markup. I would hope my prediction of the death of TikZ and PGF would come true soon enough, though.

cschmidt 13y ago

It wouldn't surprise me if they still use it in a hundred years. It just fits thinking in math. By then TeX will be on version number 3.1415926535897932384626433832795028841971693993751 :-).

adamgravitis 13y ago
IIRC, it's supposed to be set exactly equal to pi upon Knuth's death.
Zuider 13y ago
And Emacs (with AUCTeX ) will have reached version 2.7182818284590452353603...

kyzyl 13y ago

Perhaps you're correct, but I would say this article is the author explaining his criteria, and asserting that it might be useful for some other people, on both sides of the line. Given that, I suspect that in one, two, five hundred years neither he nor his blog will be around. Nor anybody who read his blog. Even if his text had survived (perhaps someone goes digging though the NSA archives in a few hundred years), I'm sure that the person reading it will just intelligently substitute in the succeeding technology. So, what I'm trying to say is that the point about TeX is just a point of practicality. It happens to be approximately true right now, and the author has no information to guide him to an alternate conclusion.

reeses 13y ago

TeX is evolving with LuaTeX appearing to get some momentum. Given that almost no one uses TeX directly, I'd expect the biggest change would involve a gradual "improvement" in the macro library. It may even result in an embedded TeX à la sweave. Wolfram is hammering against the interactive element with CDF and I could see TeX being extended to support a more dynamic electronic document format if HTML rendering engines continue to be typographic messes. Perhaps an LLVM-type backend to generate executable ebooks would be an interesting project, but I'm not sure I'd start with TeX except for math markup. I would hope my prediction of the death of TikZ and PGF would come true soon enough, though.