math-biographies

name	math-biographies
description	Plan and insert sourced mathematician biographies into relevant mathematical-book chapters with project-configured count, length, format, placement, and whole-book de-duplication.

Math Biographies

Use this skill only when a mathematical-book project explicitly enables biography material.

Contract

1. Read the complete book outline, chapter map, project initialization instruction, biography settings, existing chapter files, and any existing biography plan or ledger.
2. Scan existing TeX biography environments and % MATHBOOK_BIOGRAPHY: person-id markers before choosing anyone.
3. Plan the whole book first in blueprint/biography-plan.json. Do not edit a chapter before the plan is valid.
4. Select a person only when their work or historical role directly illuminates that chapter's mathematics. A name appearing in prose is not enough.
5. Use one stable lower-case hyphenated person_id per person. Never plan or insert the same person twice in one book.
6. Respect the project's target count, length unit/range, LaTeX environment, title template, and placement rules. These are project settings, not universal conventions.
7. Cite factual sources for dates, positions, works, attribution, and historical claims. Mark uncertainty instead of inventing a fact.
8. During insertion, add % MATHBOOK_BIOGRAPHY: person-id immediately before each biography block. Keep biographies outside exercises and do not interrupt definitions, theorem statements, proofs, or worked calculations.
9. Write logs/biography-ledger.json only after insertion. Bind it to the SHA-256 of the final plan and record each person, chapter, artifact, status, factual sources, and measured length.
10. Run the plan validator and the MathBook deterministic checks. Leave a configured human review pending; an agent must never approve it.

Required Plan Shape

{
  "version": 1,
  "settings": {
    "target_count": 4,
    "min_length": 180,
    "max_length": 320,
    "length_unit": "characters",
    "format": {
      "environment": "project-environment",
      "title_template": "project-defined template"
    },
    "placement_rules": "project-defined rules"
  },
  "people": [
    {
      "person_id": "stable-person-id",
      "name": "display name",
      "chapter": "04",
      "placement": "after-section:4.2",
      "relevance": "specific relationship to this chapter's mathematics",
      "sources": ["source identifier and location"],
      "status": "planned"
    }
  ]
}

The Heine file in assets/heine-renwu-example.tex is one reference supplied by a user. It demonstrates a possible Chinese renwu environment and narrative register. Do not copy its environment, title syntax, length, or tone unless the active project selects them.

After insertion, use this ledger shape:

{
  "version": 1,
  "plan_sha256": "sha256 of the exact biography-plan.json bytes",
  "entries": [
    {
      "person_id": "stable-person-id",
      "chapter": "04",
      "artifact": "chapters/04-draft.tex",
      "status": "inserted",
      "sources": ["factual source identifier and location"],
      "measured_length": 240
    }
  ]
}

Measure only the biography body, excluding its title and TeX commands. The deterministic checker recalculates the result using the project-configured unit.