## Monday, July 17, 2017

### Happy Yellow Pig Day!

Today, July 17 is Yellow Pig Day. This "holiday" was created by Princeton math students Michael Spivak and David C. Kelly when they were analyzing the number 17 and wanted to have a day to celebrate this number. This year (2017) is extra special since the year also ends in the digits 17.
Michael Spivak is the author of the wonderful differential geometry texts (published by Publish-or-Perish Press which he founded) which I fondly remember reading in graduate school. He also wrote a popular typesetting book on TeX which I did not read since Leslie Lamport's book on LaTeX makes typesetting papers using LaTeX so easy that I have skipped learning TeX and went straight to using LaTeX (which sits on top of TeX).
If I remember correctly, the typesetting software I used prior to LaTeX was ChiWriter, which is quite easy to use as it is WYSIWYG, so moving to a typesetting paradigm where you relinquish control on the formatting, page breaks, etc. to the software is quite unnerving, but I soon learn to appreciate it as I can focus on the content of the document, rather than spend time improving its appearance.