Jim Hefferon
Professor of mathematics at university-of-vermont (b. 1958), and the author of hefferon-linear-algebra. Discovered while ingesting that book.
He has three open-content textbooks, all under GFDL or Creative Commons: Linear Algebra (4th ed. 2020, online since 1996), Introduction to Proofs: An Inquiry-based Approach (2nd ed. 2018), and Theory of Computation: Making Connections (v0.92, 2019). The MAA’s 2020 Daniel Solow Author’s Award went to the linear algebra book, whose citation called it one of the most successful open textbooks.
The other half of his record is infrastructure rather than authorship, and it explains the first half. He was a core maintainer of CTAN — the TeX archive — from 1999, running a primary US mirror until 2011, and sat on the TeX Users Group board from 2003 to 2017 and again 2019–2023, as vice-president 2011–2016 and acting president in 2016. The free-textbook practice and the free-typesetting-infrastructure practice are the same commitment; the same pattern shows in michael-corral, who states his LaTeX/Emacs/MetaPost stack in his colophon as a statement of allegiance.
Connections
- author of hefferon-linear-algebra (2020)
- affiliation university-of-vermont
- free-licence practice shared with michael-corral