Title: GNU TeXmacs, a scientific editing platform

Speaker: Prof. Joris van der Hoeven (LIX, Ecole Polytechnique, France)

Time: 10:00, Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Venue: Lecture Room, 3rd Floor, Building #5, State Key Laboratory of Computer Science, Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Abstract:
GNU TeXmacs is a free wysiwyw (what you see is what you want) editing platform with special features for scientists. The software aims to provide a unified and user friendly framework for editing structured documents with different types of content (text, graphics, mathematics, interactive content, etc.). The rendering engine uses high-quality typesetting algorithms so as to produce professionally looking documents, which can either be printed out or presented from a laptop.

The software includes a text editor with support for mathematical formulas, a small technical picture editor and a tool for making presentations from a laptop. Moreover, TeXmacs can be used as an interface for many external systems for computer algebra, numerical analysis, statistics, etc. New presentation styles can be written by the user and new features can be added to the editor using the Scheme extension language. A native spreadsheet and tools for collaborative authoring are under development.

In our talk, we will demonstrate the software, which includes Chinese language support.

Bio:
Professor Joris van der Hoeven is director of research at CNRS, Ecole polytechnique, France. His main research topics are computer algebra, algebraic complexity, asymptotic analysis, and mathematical user interfaces. On these topics, he has written one book and more than 50 research papers. He is also a very active developer of mathematical software. He designed the GNU TeXmacs scientific text editor and interface for computer algebra systems, as well as the Mathemagix system for symbolic algebra and certified numerical computations. Currently, he is still the lead developer of these systems.