A word from Automath's father

The Automath group at Eindhoven produced a large number of documents, mainly in the sixties and seventies of the 20-th century. Much of it was never made available to a larger public. One of the reasons was that most of the material was not of a kind for which publication channels existed in those days. The ideas of Automath were revolutionary and by no means popular among mathematicians and logicians.

Another reason for being reticent about publication: unlike what happened with so many other systems, we did not issue new versions of Automath every other year. So after a first published report the general rule that only new material is publishable worked against us.

The Automath documents have been stored in paper form, many of them only as a single copy, at the Eindhoven Technological University. Much of it was hardly known to exist. There was the obvious danger that this historic archive would sooner or later deteriorate, getting lost forever. But modern electronic facilities made it possible to save the archive from decay, at the same time making it available to a large public.

This was achieved mainly by the kind financial support of Prof. H.P. Barendregt (Nijmegen Institute for Computing and Information Science (NIII), `Brouwer Institute', Nijmegen University) and also of the Formal Methods group of the department of Mathematics and Computer Science at Eindhoven University of Technology. The work was very efficiently carried out by Mark Scheffer. The Automath workers, including myself, express their gratitude for what these people did.

N.G. de Bruijn (1918-2012)