Lend a hand
Get
involved
A great deal of this mathematics exists only as offprints, seminar notes and photocopies in other people's filing cabinets. The aim is to find it, typeset it properly, and put it back where people can read it.
Buy the project a coffee
Every paper here is recovered the same way. A copy is tracked down in an archive or a filing cabinet, scanned, checked to confirm what it is, typeset from scratch, read back against the original, and only then published. It is slow, unglamorous work, and most of it is done by volunteers.
Support also goes to What Is the Point?, George Csicsery's documentary on the life and influence of Bernhard Banaschewski, premiering at the centennial conference in January 2027.
Where it goes
- Scanning and retrieving copies from archives
- Hosting the typeset papers and keeping them online
- Finishing and screening the documentary
Three ways in
However much time you have
None of these require you to be a specialist in frames and locales. One of them does not even require you to read mathematics.
Send in originals
Offprints, preprints, seminar notes, correspondence, photocopies, a phone photograph of something in a filing cabinet. Scans do not need to be good. A legible photograph of a page is worth more than a perfect scan that never gets made.
Worth including
- What the document is, as far as you know
- Where it came from, so provenance can be recorded
- Anything you know about its publication status
Typeset a paper
The slowest part of the work is turning a scan into a source file. If you can read mathematics and write LaTeX, you can take a paper from image to document. You do not need to be a specialist in frames and locales — the mathematics is checked separately.
Worth including
- Roughly how much time you can give
- Whether you would rather be assigned something or pick
- Your LaTeX setup, if you have a preference
Edit and vet
Typeset drafts need someone who can compare them against the original and catch what the transcription lost: a misread symbol, a dropped hypothesis, a diagram that has to be rebuilt. New sources need someone who can judge whether they are what they claim to be.
Worth including
- Which areas you are comfortable checking
- Whether you would rather proofread drafts or vet new sources
Where it all goes
One inbox
Originals, typeset drafts, corrections and offers of help all go to the same place. A subject line saying which of the three you are writing about is enough to keep it sorted.
The long game
Eventually, all of the legends
The work starts with Bernhard Banaschewski, because his centenary is the occasion and because so much of his output is scattered across journals that are hard to reach. But he is not the only one.
Stone, Ehresmann, Dowker and Papert, Isbell — the same problem applies to all of them, in varying degrees. The intention is to work through the lineage, one person at a time, until the foundational papers of pointfree topology are all somewhere a student can simply read them.