Étienne Ghys delivered the MAA-AMS-SIAM Gerald and Judith Porter Public Lecture at the 2026 Joint Mathematics Meetings, exploring the surprising history linking Renaissance letterforms to modern typography. A mathematician at École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, Ghys traced how artists and scientists approached the visual structure of text across centuries.

The lecture titled "The Shape of Letters: from Leonardo da Vinci to Donald Knuth" frames type design as a shared intellectual pursuit rather than a purely aesthetic discipline. Ghys connects da Vinci's sketches of proportional letterforms to Knuth's work on digital typesetting, showing how mathematical thinking shaped readable text.

For developers and typographers, this represents a reminder that the fonts we use daily carry centuries of mathematical reasoning. The Porter Public Lecture series brings accessible talks to broader audiences, and Ghys bridges art history with computer science in a single narrative about letterform evolution.