Gerhard Weber: "Early developments in access to Math"

Gerhard Weber, Technical University of Dresden, Dept. of Computer Science
E-mail: gerhard.weber [at] inf.tu-dresden.de
The advent of mark-up languages has helped to distinguish also in the world of mathematics content from presentation. This talk gives a personal overview on some of the developments that have first lead to the invention of new mathematical notations such as Stuttgart Maths Notation and ASCII Maths Notation. The multiplicity of such writing systems has manifested the need for a lingua franca and led to the SGML-based MATHS project which demonstrated multimodal access using speech, nonverbal audio, and dynamic Braille.
However, in this talk we will also raise the issue of openness of maths, as suggested already by T.V. Raman in his LATEX-based system Aster. Future research will have to address testability of systems providing access to maths.