PureGin.org

Sixteen years ago, I started translating "FLP": A. Fathi, F. Laudenbach and V. Poénaru's notes (in French) from a Seminar on the work of Bill Thurston on surface diffeomorphisms, measured foliations, and hyperbolic geometry. At the time I thought it might take a couple of summers (this being a fundamental division of time in the life of a graduate student). Time passed, and many things got in the way, including a thesis, work, offers to star in Hollywood movies... well, OK, not the last. The project had been sitting on a back-burner since 1996, when a lovely summer in Montreal provided the perfect setting for a bout of translation work. I faithfully copied my files from an old Compaq 8086 portable, to a Sparc Classic LX, to a Sparc 20, to a Pentium II Linux machine, and finally to my current Apple Powerbook, never fully expecting that they would ever see the light of day again.

However, last year, my Ph.D. supervisor Dale Rolfsen put me in contact with Dan Margalit, who had also been working on a translation. By some strange miracle, the intersection of the chapters we'd been working on was surprisingly small, while the union was encouragingly larger than I'd lately been imaging I'd ever see. We've been working together on this since April of 2005.

Today, I assembled the first complete draft of the book. I'd spent several days over the holidays translating one of the remaining chapters, and Dan sent me the last chapter yesterday. OK, we're still short an appendix, and some figures, and there's lots of cleanup, layout and beautifying to be done, but I'm looking at 269 pages of nicely typeset mathematics.

Remarkably, the language in which the work is typeset (TeX) is essentially unchanged in the 25+ years since it was first developed. I can typeset the entire book in 14 seconds now; in 1990 it used to take 30 seconds per page. But the early files are essentially unchanged from when I started. I shudder to think about the many generations of Word Star, Word Perfect, Works, Word, and other proprietary word processing software documents that have become inaccessible through 'progress'.

So, I say, three cheers for TeX - just one of many great achievement for Don Knuth, and one of the great successes of the idea of open standards and open source software.