Neat. I'm a self-taught developer, and I learned a lot by watching MIT computer science lectures on youtube while taking notes in a markdown file. But I definitely hit a wall when I tried to follow the Mathematics for Computer Science course. I didn't have a good way to handle the notation. Ultimately though I think if I ever decide to follow through with that I'll probably just write in a notebook and scan the documents so I can easily reference them. But I love the dedication to figuring this out!
How I'm able to take notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim
21–30 of 223 posts
Re: How I'm able to take notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's fine amd dandy from a US perspective, but many European universities are different. I don't know about this guy's exact class, but some (many?) undergrad classes are 500 people in a lecture hall with the professor orating, no textbook, and the content on the exam is pretty much whatever was covered during the lectures. So accurate note taking is very important because those notes essentially are your textbook.…
At that point smuggling an audio recorder to the class might lead a better reproduction of the material.
audio recording != text book ;)
It still would need significant time to transcript, and then OPs workflow comes back into picture ...
Re: How I'm able to take notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's fine amd dandy from a US perspective, but many European universities are different. I don't know about this guy's exact class, but some (many?) undergrad classes are 500 people in a lecture hall with the professor orating, no textbook, and the content on the exam is pretty much whatever was covered during the lectures. So accurate note taking is very important because those notes essentially are your textbook.…
At that point smuggling an audio recorder to the class might lead a better reproduction of the material.
You'd still have to transcribe them, and you'd miss what's on the blackboard.
Re: How I'm able to take notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim
#24As a feat in itself this is definitely very impressive, but I wonder if it's really worth anyone's time to spend precious lecture time with your mind fully occupied in the mechanical task of taking notes rather than actually absorbing and engaging with the content. Especially for an extremely content-dense subject like Mathematics, where you need all your concentration just to process what you are reading and follow…
> mechanical task of taking notes rather than actually absorbing and engaging with the content
The mechanical task of taking notes is one of the most important parts of actually absorbing the material. It is not an either-or. Hearing/seeing the information, processing it in a way that makes sense to you individually, and then mechanically writing it down in a legible manner is one of the main methods that your brain learns. It's one of the primary reasons that taking notes is important in the first place. This is referred to as the "encoding hypothesis" [1].
There are actually even studies [2] that show that tools that assist in more efficient note taking, such as taking notes via typing rather than by hand, are actually detrimental to absorbing information, as it makes it easier for you to effectively pass the information directly from your ears to your computer without actually doing the processing that is required when writing notes by hand. This is why many universities prefer (or even require) notes to be taken by hand, and disallow laptops in class.
1: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0361476X78...
2: https://www.npr.org/2016/04/17/474525392/attention-students-...
Re: How I'm able to take notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim
#25This reminds me of the sole draining * job as a "web developer" to turn word documents into HTML. I imagine such a job also exist in science, but instead of Word to HTML you turn paper notes into LaTeX. He could probably make good money helping professors write papers.
* You coded since you where 15 years old, wrote your own game engine, wanted to cure cancer and save the world, and now your job is to copy text from one document to another.
Re: How I'm able to take notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim
#26The techniques in the article definitely are useful to improve efficiency of typing math. I have used vi/vim and latex for many years (over 20). And this still impressed me a lot. Can’t wait to see how he does the figures.
Re: How I'm able to take notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim
#27Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 (the tab) had a feature in cooperation with WolframAlpha a few years back that translated your handwritten formula into a nice digital formula. It was like 90% there. Unfortunately fixing interpretation errors was a pain in the ass, which made it basically useless.
I wonder if there was any meaningful improvement on this approach. Even just adding a nice UI to fix errors would've made it really useful.
Re: How I'm able to take notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim
#28As a feat in itself this is definitely very impressive, but I wonder if it's really worth anyone's time to spend precious lecture time with your mind fully occupied in the mechanical task of taking notes rather than actually absorbing and engaging with the content. Especially for an extremely content-dense subject like Mathematics, where you need all your concentration just to process what you are reading and follow…
I live-TeXed notes for some of my math classes and it was absolutely a great idea.
Re: How I'm able to take notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim
#29A template expander is indispensable for productivity. I have a perl script that expands text based on matching regular expressions. In this way I'm not tied to any particular editors: I wrap it in an AppleScript for a text service, and I wrap it in a shell script for working in Acme.
Re: How I'm able to take notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim
#30I used to do this, but I switched to just using a Jupyter Notebook. It’s nice to be able to move between multiple computers, with no need to set up a LaTeX install. A couple of things I love about this setup: I can write in Markdown and drop to LaTeX when I need to forumalate any equations. For homework, I can implement a quick Python script inline to build intuition behind a topic. I can use Sympy to simplify and so…
Hi, what sort of complex derivations can you solve for with Sympy?