Re: History of blackboard bold?

On 6 Oct 2003 07:25:50 -0700, [EMAIL PROTECTED] (gowan) wrote:

>"G. A. Edgar" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message news:<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>...
>
>> Of course this way of writing was devised for writing by hand (on a
>> blackboard, for example); and then adapted for use by a typewriter
>> (those ancient machines used before personal computers for producing
>> documents in a home or office environment).  Produce the blackboard
>> bold R by typing an I and an R close together.
>
>I agree this style must have originated as a way to produce "bold"
>letters by hand on paper or blackboard.  As an attempt to narrow the
>date of origin I recall not seeing this as an undergraduate at a
>mathematically sophisticated school in the early 1960's but
>encountering it as a graduate student in the mid-60's.  But I imagine
>something like this was used in Europe or Germany, especially, before
>that.

I remember noticing as an undergraduate math major (1967-1971) that
the books that I read and that used a distinctive font for these sets,
all used some sort of ordinary bold (upright or slanted). While all my
teachers used blackboard bold on the blackboard. I jumped to the
conclusion that BBB was simply a way to make a bold-like distinction 
in a medium where it was not otherwise possible. I have always felt 
it is overused in print. Most articles in my field (complex analysis)
don't have any other bold C in them and a simple bold letter C would 
be quite sufficient.

By the way, none of my teachers added more than one extra stroke to
their ordinary uppercase letters to produce BBB. The example BBB in 
the TeXBook (my edition anyway) is pretty obviously a CMR  I and R 
run together. (I thing it looks better than any currently available
doublestroke font and have considered adapting cmr to produce something
along those lines.) 


Dan

-- 
Dan Luecking                     Department of Mathematical Sciences
University of Arkansas           Fayetteville, Arkansas 72701
luecking at uark dot edu