The LaThalesians library comprises a heterogeneous collection of LaTeX packages, which facilitate the type-setting of the Thalesians’ work in mathematics, computer science, and finance. It was originally developed by Paul Bilokon to support his academic and professional work and the library’s scope still reflects some of his personal biases, viz.:
- mathematical finance,
- econometrics,
- programming,
- scientific computing,
- algorithms,
- statistics,
- stochastic analysis,
- probability theory,
- domain theory,
- computability theory.
It is hoped that, as more people get involved in the development and maintenance of this library, its scope will become more balanced and will more faithfully reflect the diverse activities of the Thalesians.
Rather than being structured as a single package, LaThalesians is a suite of packages, each package name starting with lathalesians-. Thus the modules may be used individually, depending on the user’s specific needs. Modularity is one of the design principles that guided us in this library’s development.
Another one is simplicity: tasks that occur often in our research and development work should be made easy. The syntax should be straightforward and easy to remember. LaTeX commands that we type in often should be brief.
But not too brief: they should still be unambiguous and easy to remember. Readability and clarity are also important to us. Finding the right balance between simplicity and readability is an art more than a science.
We are believers in domain-specific languages. Therefore we often define LaTeX commands to represent the concepts from a particular research area rather than typesetting instructions. This is done at the cost of introducing more words into our language. We believe that these are the very words that we need. Let’s express what things are, rather than what they should look like.
Finally, we believe that truth and beauty should go hand in hand. Both should be present in the content. Form should do justice to the content’s truth and present it in a way that is beautiful. We don’t claim that we have achieved this in LaThalesians. However, this is indeed our striving, our intention. We will be very much obliged for any recommendations on how to make the library’s output more aesthetically pleasing.
We, the Thalesians, would be very much obliged to you for your contributions to this library. It is far from perfect now. In many ways it is quite defective. Please help us make it both useful and beautiful.
This library is made available under the Apache License Version 2.0 (the “License”). You may obtain a copy of the License at
http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0