Without meaning any offense to the OP, I think this is a pretty low bar for Emacs eye-candy... Nicolas Rougier's "Nano Emacs" [0], or his previous "Elegant Emacs" [1] are better examples. You can also get pretty far using variable-pitch mode for mixing fonts (for example in org-mode [2]).
> But this book was where I first learned about tensor products, and why the matrix elements go the way they do and not the other way (Halmos is very careful on this point).
I haven't read the book, but it sounds like the answer may be there.
[0]: https://github.com/rougier/nano-emacs
[1]: https://github.com/rougier/elegant-emacs
[2]: https://github.com/minad/org-modern