Typeface design is something of an art. For many centuries, this art is been constrained by the materials available to typographers, mainly lead and wo0d. More recently, typographers have been freed from this constraint with the advent of digital typesetting and the number of typefaces has mushroomed. Verdana, for example, is designed specifically for computer screens.

Now typeface design has taken a step into the mathematical realm. Today, father and son team Martin and Erik Demaine, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, reveal a number of typefaces that they have designed that are based on, or are related to, mathematical problems that these guys have worked on. “We have been designing a series of typefaces (font families) based on our computational geometry research,” they say.

A typeface is a set of glyphs that share common design features such as their weight, width, slant, ornamentation and so on. They often consist of a family of fonts of different sizes each of which contains glyphs representing all of the letters, numbers, punctuation marks and other symbols that are required to convey meaning in text.

Here are several of the new ones with a few introductory details…