Biographical Note


Richard Koch graduated in mathematics with degrees from Harvard and Princeton, and taught at the University of Oregon from 1966 to 2002, working on pseudogroups and filtered Lie algebras. For the last fifteen of these years he was director of the Undergraduate Program in Mathematics, and won the University's Ersted and Hermann teaching awards.

He first became acquainted with TeX on a NeXt cube running Thomas Rokicki's TeXView. When Apple bought NeXt, the Unix TeX binaries were ported to OS X, but predictions that a TeX front end would follow didn't materialize. So he wrote the front end TeXShop, releasing it while OS X was still in beta. In those days, Apple's pdf display engine didn't understand non-native fonts and TeXShop users had to use Times Roman and avoid mathematical symbols. Luckily, the release version of OS X had a proper pdf engine.

TeXShop won an Apple Design Award in 2002 in the Open Source category.

Recently Koch has been maintaining the MacTeX distribution for OS X, a complete TeX distribution which can be installed with Apple's installer and a few button clicks. This install package was written by Jonathan Kew in a single all night programming session, after Wendy McKay, in a carefully orchestrated lunch at the national TeX User Group Conference, made it impossible for us to say "no."





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