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“Mathematical Typography” (After Donald Knuth, 1978)

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Part of the book series: Mathematics, Culture, and the Arts ((MACUAR))

Abstract

The type you are reading right *now* is called Meta-the-difference-between-the-two-font. It was designed by Dexter Sinister in 2010, and derived using MetaFont, the now-thirty-five-year-old computer typography system programmed by Donald Knuth in 1979.

This paper originates in two texts: “A Note on the Type,” (2010) first published in The Curse of Bigness, Queens Museum (see also [8]) and “Letter & Spirit” (2011), Bulletins of the Serving Library [9].

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References

  1. Hofstadter, Douglas R. “Metafont, Metamathematics, and Metaphysics: Comments on Donald Knuth’s Article (16:1)” Visible Language 16, no. 4 (1982): 309–338.

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  2. Knuth, Donald Ervin. The Art of Computer Programming, Vol. 1–4A Boxed Set. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 2011.

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  3. ———. “Mathematical Typography.” Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society 1, no. 2 (1979).

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  4. ———. “The Concept of a Meta-font.” Visible Language 16, no. 1 (1982): 3–27.

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  5. Max, D. T. “The Unfinished.” The New Yorker 9 (2009): 48–61.

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  6. Morison, Stanley. Letter Forms: Typographic and Scriptorial. Point Roberts, WA: Hartley & Marks Publishers, 1997.

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  7. Sampson, Geoffrey. “Is Roman Type an Open-Ended System? A Response to Douglas Hofstadter.” Visible Language 17, no. 4 (1983): 410.

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  8. Sinister, Dexter. “A Note on the Type.” Bulletins of the Serving Library 1, 2011.

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  9. Max, D. T.. “Letter & Spirit.” Bulletins of the Serving Library 3, 2012.

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  10. Smith, Zadie. “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men: The Difficult Gifts of David Foster Wallace.” In Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays, 257–300. London: Penguin UK, 2009.

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  11. Tschichold, Jan. The New Typography. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.

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Correspondence to D. Reinfurt .

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Sinister, D., Reinfurt, D., Bailey, S. (2017). “Mathematical Typography” (After Donald Knuth, 1978). In: Kossak, R., Ording, P. (eds) Simplicity: Ideals of Practice in Mathematics and the Arts. Mathematics, Culture, and the Arts. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53385-8_14

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