Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How I'm able to take notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim

castel.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 223 posts

Re: How I'm able to take notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim

#131

Post by pflats »

lastUsername wrote: post #116
setquk wrote: post #65

I don't agree with this. Perhaps it's possible for someone with exceptional LaTeX and vim knowledge, but even after using both for 20 years I wouldn't do this. The point of the lecture is to assimilate structure and basic understanding, not to produce a neat set of notes instantly. To take notes to this detail means you're putting more time into the note taking than the work. Use a pen and paper. Write down structure…

It is scientifically proven that handwriting is better for your memory because it forces you to process the material more than note taking on a laptop. https://www.google.com/url?q=https://linguistics.ucla.edu/pe...

That's... not true, and not supported by the study you linked.

In the study, there was no measured difference in memory between the two note taking styles; the groups' factual scores were not significantly different in any of the tests.

Where things vary is the non-memory questions: are the notes helping you understand and apply the material better, and how advantageous are they to your studying?

In both of those categories, handwritten notes win out.

Finally, there is no "because"; the authors can only speculate. I am not aware of any studies that can actually purport to say why handwritten notes are better.

Re: How I'm able to take notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim

#132

Post by joppy »

Rainymood wrote: post #71
setquk wrote: post #65

I don't agree with this. Perhaps it's possible for someone with exceptional LaTeX and vim knowledge, but even after using both for 20 years I wouldn't do this. The point of the lecture is to assimilate structure and basic understanding, not to produce a neat set of notes instantly. To take notes to this detail means you're putting more time into the note taking than the work. Use a pen and paper. Write down structure…

>Write your notes up at the end of the day with reference material at hand and no compromises. You can structure, extrapolate and transform things into your own understandable language then. As if the average modern day student is going to do this. I did what OP did and it worked for me because instead of dozing off I was focused on keeping up with the lecturer. It worked for me personally. More on topic, the standar…

This method of writing notes still seems like a downgrade from using a pen - my optimal way of taking notes would be with a pen, but with some sort of handwriting recognition on a tablet so it could immediately translate it to prose + LaTeX mathematics. Something that does both nicely seems difficult to find though...

Re: How I'm able to take notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim

#133

Post by dhimes »

setquk wrote: post #98
matwood wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> >Write your notes up at the end of the day with reference material at hand and no compromises. You can structure, extrapolate and transform things into your own understandable language then. > As if the average modern day student is going to do this. Why wouldn't modern day students do this? It's one of the best way to study that I ever used.

I can understand why people don't do it. We weren't taught how to learn at school or college and when we turned up at university we were expected to know how. It took me a semester of alcohol fuelled hedonism, followed by screwing up, panic, then introspection to work it all out. I imagine a lot of that could be avoided with some assistance from the education sector along the way. My eldest wants to be a doctor so I'…

This is exactly what I have observed among today's students also, and I am desperately trying to help! Smart students actually get hit harder because they cruise through high school and hit the wall in college. Then they may have a seminar or something on how to take notes and basic time-management (usually delivered through a first-year experience program or something similar), but if they want a real understanding of how to learn they have to get it on their own.

Re: How I'm able to take notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim

#134

Post by samfriedman »

4thaccount wrote: post #88
setquk wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Run away from OneNote quickly. Microsoft are not shipping OneNote desktop any more, preferring the horrid UWP app. Another vote for paper or neutral formats here. They persist longer than vendor whims! Case in point I wrote a lot of my work up on TechWriter on an Acorn RiscPC. Where are we now with that. Hmm...

Thanks for the tip. OneNote is one of a handful of things Microsoft has done that I like. Is it really not on Windows10? I haven't upgraded from 7 yet.

I'm hopeful that the "new" OneNote will follow the same type of iterative dev/release scheme that VSCode has used so well, but for now it is pretty barebones and missing a lot of functionality from the Office app.

Re: How I'm able to take notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim

#135

Post by z3t4 »

krageon wrote: post #38
z3t4 wrote: post #25

This 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…

The best response to having to do dumb work like this is to automate it with regex, bash (and possibly an unzipping tool - aren't word documents zipped xml?) and take the time that people previously gave you to do the task to tweak your scripts and learn things you find interesting. I got through my dumbest student jobs that way, which was almost all of my student jobs.

I got a friend that basically automated his job, the management was not pleased, and forced him to go back to doing it manually ...

He managed to get another job. But figured out he wanted to work with actual software development, and it also seems to be a shortage of software developers. But it was virtually impossible to get a job without a degree or experience. So he's now at age 45 enrolling a five year university program to become an engineer on paper ...

Re: How I'm able to take notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim

#136

Post by 0xCMP »

gjulianm wrote: post #127
lastUsername wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is scientifically proven that handwriting is better for your memory because it forces you to process the material more than note taking on a laptop. https://www.google.com/url?q=https://linguistics.ucla.edu/pe...

I want to highlight that part: "Participants using laptops are more likely to take lengthier transcription-like notes with greater verbatim overlap with the lecture" In other words, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with taking notes on a laptop if you don't copy everything verbatim. If you force yourself to process the material you should have no problem.

But they noticed that most do not go back to their notes as much as they should so a general advice, while typing is easier hand-written helps you learn and retain better using less exposure.

Assuming a class isn't already being recorded (many/most at my university were), the best solution is probably to record audio on your phone and take hand written notes. Then go back and transcribe the hand written notes while referring to the audio in to the computer.

Re: How I'm able to take notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim

#137

Post by ordu »

setquk wrote: post #65

I don't agree with this. Perhaps it's possible for someone with exceptional LaTeX and vim knowledge, but even after using both for 20 years I wouldn't do this. The point of the lecture is to assimilate structure and basic understanding, not to produce a neat set of notes instantly. To take notes to this detail means you're putting more time into the note taking than the work. Use a pen and paper. Write down structure…

People are different, the processes in their minds goes different ways. People develops different styles of learning and then they adopt to that styles and adopt styles for themselves. So it is pointless to agree or disagree.

I personally like this idea of vim+LaTeX. It is close to what I did while studying math, though I write notes down with pen and paper. Mostly I wrote down them once and read them once before exam. I remember some issues with this approach, but the one I remember most was due to incomplete recording, not due to "I didn't managed to understand this mess of greek letters while listening a lecture".

I remember some problems due to inability to understand, it was Galua theory, but I solved them by reading books. I had read three different authors on topic, and I think it was the only way, I think that any style of keeping records would not help more then mine.

And I hate to write greek letters by hand. There is one names xi, I never managed to figure out how to write it, so xi looked in my recordings as some messy knot of lines. All my xi's was different, but there was a bright side of this: xi was the only one, that was so messy, so I could understand that it is xi when I saw this mess. With LaTex xi looks nice and clear.

Re: How I'm able to take notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim

#138

Post by elagost »

This method is beautiful and incredibly complicated. Anyone who has enough determination to build up their tools like this and make them 100% ideal and customized for their situation deserves all the praise they get.

If your use case is similar to the author's, perhaps consider taking your environment and leaning hard into customization. As he's proven, it's very much worth it. Seems like it would be much less useful to copy his configs rather than building your own organic system after years of use, though - which is what he did.

I really like vim, personally, but I encourage my coworkers more familiar with Windows to use nano over vi (nobody wants to type that extra m, for some reason) because they're less likely to mess things up. Better off for them to learn their own way rather than being dumped in the middle of the vi desert with no way to exit.

Re: How I'm able to take notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim

#139

Post by dangom »

1700 pages of notes would translate to 9 pages/working-day in a year. That's a lot of note taking. The blog post is wonderful and does show outstanding LaTeX and VIM practical knowledge, but I'd be skeptical that the average student could absorb so much content and still have time to bring it to such a polished final format every day.

Nonetheless, there's definitely a lesson to be learned here with respect to the usage of templates. In essence it seems like OP developed his own shorthand language for both text and mathematics. I'm always curious to hear about approaches that try to solve the bandwidth problem (as we have quickscript [1] for hand-writing and stenography [2] for typing). Most interestingly, I'd be curious to know whether these short-hand notations are actually capable of improving learning and assimilation, and whether they'd work for a general audience.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quikscript [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography

Re: How I'm able to take notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim

#140

Post by werdnapk »

securitybear wrote: post #93

Now that 'Escape' is not a real hardware key in the new Macbook Pro anymore and even otherwise 'Escape' has always been one of the hard to reach keys, what is workaround for avoiding the 'Escape' key in Vim?

I use ctrl+[ myself.
Post reply on HN