Blog

Donald Knuth’s 80th birthday on January 10, 2018 was celebrated by two events in Piteå, Sweden: the scientific symposium "Knuth80: Algorithms, Combinatorics, and Information" in honour of Don’s career-long efforts, followed by the world premiere of Fantasia Apocalyptica, a multimedia work for pipe organ and video written by Don himself.

The symposium included speakers from a wide range of fields, and we were delighted to hear that Yannis Haralambous – a WriteLaTeX/Overleaf user since early 2014 who has contributed with many feature suggestions and bug reports over the years – had been invited to speak on the topic of digital typography (“TeX as a path”). His talk attempts to cover the manifold aspects of TeX (historical, epistemological, psychological, societal, etc.) and the many qualities of its creator, Don Knuth. Among the societal aspects of TeX he mentions the emergence of cloud-based online LaTeX platforms such as Overleaf.

A video of his talk and accompanying slides are available along with those of the other speakers on the symposium website, and it is worth highlighting that Yannis's video includes an excellent set of subtitles (which he prepared himself). You can also find numerous photos from the event in this google gallery.