| | | What is LaTeX? |
Donald E. Knuth, a mathematician and computer scientist, developed the TeX typesetting system "for the creation of beautiful books--and especially for books that contain a lot of mathematics." His brilliant work was a resounding success, and some variant of TeX is now used by most professional mathematicians. If you pick a random mathematics book published in the last five years, the chances are good that it was formatted with TeX.
Leslie Lamport created LaTeX as a structured, high-level interface to TeX. Technically, LaTeX is a large macro package that loads on top of TeX. An advantage of using LaTeX instead of "plain" TeX is that LaTeX takes care of many stylistic details automatically; also, many people have written add-on packages for LaTeX that solve common typesetting problems. In particular, the American Mathematical Society has sponsored the development of a package named "amsmath" that simplifies the typesetting of complicated mathematical expressions.
The Math 696 course
pages were last modified April 5, 2005. | | | What is LaTeX? |