UO Math Professor Wins Annual Apple Design Award

TeXShop application recognized as "Best Mac Open Source Port"

What do you get when you cross a mathematician with a computer programmer?

Award-winning mathematical typesetting software!

Last May, University of Oregon mathematics professor Richard ("Dick") Koch, along with Dirk Olmes and Gerben Wierda, were awarded an Apple Design Award for Best Mac OS X Open Source Port in an annual event honoring the best Macintosh software developers of the year. Their winning entry was a freeware program for Mac OS X named TeXShop.

TeXShop is an application that creates publication-quality output of math and other technical material. Rather than writing TeXShop from scratch, Koch and his colleagues based it on the Unix application TeX, a process called "porting." Koch used TeX for the underlying processing and created TeXShop as the user interface for editing, previewing, and printing.

Koch, an amateur programmer for years, decided to port TeX to Mac OS X while attending Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference two years ago. "During the conference, I decided that I could probably port TeX myself, since nobody seemed to be doing it," Koch said. "I've been working on the program ever since."

TeXShop was written in Objective C using the Cocoa classes that Apple inherited from NeXT.

Koch was very surprised to win the award. "Most winners were commercial programs, so I'm happy that Apple awarded a prize to a completely free open-source project," Koch said.

Retiring UO mathematics professor Dick Koch, shown here outside his office in Deady Hall, has been surprised and pleased by the success of TeXShop.

In fact, he was so unprepared for winning that he had to hastily arrange a last-minute trip to San Jose, California, to accept the award. "I got a call from Apple at 9:30 Wednesday morning, May 8. At 10:00 I walked into my discrete [math] class and canceled it. By 3:30 I was in downtown San Jose," Koch said.

TeXShop was released under the GNU Public License and is available at http://www.uoregon.edu/~koch/texshop/texshop.html

In addition to Olmes and Wierda, Koch gave special recognition to others who made significant volunteer contributions to the creation of TeXShop. His long-distance collaborators--none of whom he's ever met personally--included Geoffroy Lenglin and Jerome Laurens (France), Anton Leuski (United States), and Nicoals Ojeda Bar, an Argentinean high school student.