What If We Just Put TEX In The Browser?
eigenblake
10 September 2026
o, computers aren’t yet fast enough for us to recompile entire documents
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with every keystroke in their entirety, so we have to do some interesting
tricks to simulate it. To get this degree of interactivity, we’re replaying from
a ladder of checkpoints, with it taking ms over interpreter
steps, of which ms wrote the pages you are looking at right now. Far
from elagant but it works.
[Try typing something here to see what it feels like – you should get
anywhere from 10 - 90 ms per keystroke]
Also, try interacting with the following – you’ll notice that it’s not quite
where we want it yet. Better than nothing but far too laggy. That’s where
optimizations should come in later.
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Chapter I
Down the Rabbit-Hole
* * *
lice was beginning to get very tired of sitting
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by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to
do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister
was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it,
“and what is the use of a book,” thought Alice “without
pictures or conversations?”
So she was considering in her own mind (as well as
she could, for the hot day made her feel very sleepy and
stupid), whether the pleasure of making a daisy-chain
would be worth the trouble of getting up and picking
the daisies, when suddenly a White Rabbit with pink
eyes ran close by her.
There was nothing so very remarkable in that; nor
did Alice think it so very much out of the way to hear
the Rabbit say to itself, “Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be
late!” (when she thought it over afterwards, it occurred
to her that she ought to have wondered at this, but at the
time it all seemed quite natural); but when the Rabbit
actually took a watch out of its waistcoat-pocket, and
looked at it, and then hurried on, Alice started to her
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Katherine Louise Bouman
Born 1989 Grew up in West Lafayette, Indiana
Education
Massachusetts Institute of Technology 2013, 2017
Master’s degree; doctoral degree, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), which worked with MIT’s
Haystack Observatory and the Event Horizon Telescope.
Master’s thesis: Estimating Material Properties of Fabric through the Observation of Motion.
Dissertation: Extreme imaging via physical model inversion: seeing around corners and imaging black holes,
supervised by William T. Freeman.
University of Michigan 2011
Electrical engineering
West Lafayette Junior-Senior High School 2007
Imaging research at Purdue University as a high school student
Experience
California Institute of Technology 2019 – Present
Assistant professor; associate professor from 2024
Computing and mathematical sciences, electrical engineering and astronomy.
New systems for computational imaging using computer vision and machine learning.
Her group analyses the Event Horizon Telescope’s images to study general relativity in a strong gravitational field.
Harvard University
Postdoctoral fellow, Event Horizon Telescope Imaging team
Event Horizon Telescope 2013 – Present
Member of the collaboration
CHIRP (Continuous High-resolution Image Reconstruction using Patch priors), an algorithm for imaging black
holes.
In April 2019 the collaboration produced the first image of a black hole. The image validation procedures were
inspired by CHIRP, and the results of different reconstruction techniques were compared within one imaging
framework.
Talks
How to Take a Picture of a Black Hole TEDx
Algorithms that could be used to capture the first image of a black hole, described before it was made.
Fields
Computational imaging, computer vision, machine learning
anything about it, even if I fell off the top of the house!”
(Which was very likely true.)
Down, down, down. Would the fall never come to
an end? “I wonder how many miles I’ve fallen by this
time?” she said aloud. “I must be getting somewhere
near the centre of the earth. Let me see: that would be
four thousand miles down, I think—” (for, you see, Al-
ice had learnt several things of this sort in her lessons
in the schoolroom, and though this was not a very good
opportunity for showing off her knowledge, as there was
no one to listen to her, still it was good practice to say it
over) “—yes, that’s about the right distance—but then I
wonder what Latitude or Longitude I’ve got to?” (Alice
had no idea what Latitude was, or Longitude either, but
thought they were nice grand words to say.)
Presently she began again. “I wonder if I shall fall
right through the earth! How funny it’ll seem to come
out among the people that walk with their heads down-
ward! The Antipathies, I think—” (she was rather glad
there was no one listening, this time, as it didn’t sound at
all the right word) “—but I shall have to ask them what
the name of the country is, you know. Please, Ma’am, is
this New Zealand or Australia?” (and she tried to curtsey
as she spoke—fancy curtseying as you’re falling through
the air! Do you think you could manage it?) “And what
an ignorant little girl she’ll think me for asking! No, it’ll
never do to ask: perhaps I shall see it written up some-
where.”
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