# My Doctoral Thesis

In 1999 I submitted a thesis as part of my PhD program in Mathematics. It was written up in
[LaTeX](https://www.latex-project.org/). I have long since lost the source files but, luckily, I still have a hard copy.

This is an experimental project with the goal of (re)typesetting my thesis in [Typst](https://typst.app/docs), a new (2023)
typsetting engine.

## Goals

I have two main goals.

Firstly, I would very much like to have the ability to regenerate a version my thesis. It annoys me to have lost all my sources from
my student days and makes we wonder what else I lost that I would find interesting to see again today. As things stand, it would be
hard to replace my hard copy if I should ever lose it.

Secondly, I would like to learn more about Typst. It looks like a reasonable tool for typesetting documents with significant amounts
of mathematical notation while avoiding much of the complexity of LaTeX and related tools. 25 years ago I felt productive with
LaTex, but not so much these days. I've been using [ConTeXt](https://wiki.contextgarden.net/Main_Page) for several years when
typesetting short mathematical documents - like solutions to problems in the American Mathematical Monthly - but I'm always having
to remind myself how to do things, and sometimes run into instability.

## Plan

I plan to retypeset as much of my thesis as I can, working from my hard copy.

My submitted thesis has more typos that I care to admit, even after all the proofreading I did back in the day. After a certain
point I became blind to them. For now I'm aiming to reproduce the thesis, errors and all, so that I can fix them as later
commits. Of course, the very process of typsetting it again means I'll introduce new errors.

The thesis also has expositional problems that are evident to me even 25 years later, when much of my knowledge is gone
and my mathematical maturity is back at a primitive level. For example, section 3.4 is a bit of a mess and could
use better exposition and perhaps some diagrams.

Typst is still in beta and in flux. Things will surely change, and I'm sure that things I want to be able to do aren't (yet)
possible.

I may get too frustrated to continue, or I may just run out of steam. We'll have to see how it goes.
