On Academic Genealogy
I stumbled into some neat sources the other day for investigating academic genealogy. And, I’m a sucker for some history (especially when it’s personal), so I had to look into it. Read on for more.
It's a bit misleading to call this a “blog” – it’s more like a collection of miscellaneous essays that don’t fit anywhere else, and it’s only very rarely updated. But enjoy nonetheless.
I stumbled into some neat sources the other day for investigating academic genealogy. And, I’m a sucker for some history (especially when it’s personal), so I had to look into it. Read on for more.
So, this is essentially the saga of how I typeset my Princeton undergraduate senior thesis. Several people have expressed interest in seeing how it was done, so I figured I’d write up my collected wisdom as an article here. I’ll present this material as an annotated version of the document preamble.
For my PHI 340 at Princeton, I found myself needing to typeset lots of tableaux-style proofs in the style of our textbook, Possibilities and Paradox, An Introduction to Modal and Many-Valued Logic by Beall and van Fraassen. The same sorts of tableaux proofs appear in Tomassi’s Logic. Here’s a tutorial teaching you how to typeset them in LaTeX, using a couple of freely-available packages.
So you want to typeset a document with lots of math, and you don’t want it to
look like x + y^2 = 4z. No, you actually want it to look like your
textbook. Well, you’re in luck. In all likelihood, the program the authors of
your textbook used to write it is a handy little tool called LaTeX
(‘LAY-tech’). There’s all sorts of history here involving LaTeX’s author
(Knuth), the programming of TeX, the book that is the TeX source code (yes,
the entire source code to TeX is actually a book that you can buy), but that’s
for another time and place. Or some kind of computer science lecture or
something. You just want to draw pretty integrals, right? Right. So let’s get
to it.