Nothing will make me switch me from my fountain pen on good paper, but this site got me to actually check out ultiSnips, which is amazing.
Taking notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim (2019)
31–40 of 110 posts
Re: Taking notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim (2019)
#32Just kind of a side note - Gilles's work is such a pleasure to browse, worth taking a look. Always made with deep understanding of the content and a spartan taste in design: https://castel.dev/notes
Re: Taking notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim (2019)
#33Blind person here. I've been using LaTex for note taking since age 15. Since braille typewriters are heavy and clunky and electronic braille notetakers are expensive, I decided it was the right thing to do pretty early on. I started doing this when I transferred out of blind school. Being able to compile my notes into a PDF was definitely useful, considering I had to work with teachers who didn't have any experience with blind people before.
When I got to college, I started requesting all the materials that students normally get in LaTeX. PDFs generated with pdflatex and similar aren't screen reader accessible, but I could read the LaTeX source code just fine.
Obviously, what I write for myself isn't pure, compilable LaTeX, I usually omit the dollar signs, write things like 2^32 instead of 2^{32} etc.
By the way, the linked post was almost unreadable to screen readers, the soft dash characters inserted between every syllable made my screen reader say every syllable separately, which breaks the pronunciation rules.
Re: Taking notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim (2019)
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you explain a bit about your personal note taking/retention process?
Forgive me, there is nothing to explain. I bring paper and pencil. Boring.
Take a look at what you do remember easily, and then game your note taking process, so that you add that stimulus/reward to your note taking. Maybe it's paper, maybe it's a computer, maybe it 's a fountain pen. Maybe you're like me and your retention is better if you're fully engaged and not taking notes. I see notes as some see a camera. You're so busy trying to transcribe what you're seeing, you're not fully comprehending it till later, and that's only if you're good at notes, otherwise, you now have a dumbass teaching you when you could have been listening to the litteral expert in their field explain it, paying better attention and understanding it; rather than memorizing it. Once you understand it, you're not memorizing, you're explaining. But that's just how I work. Find what works for you.
Re: Taking notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim (2019)
#35I did an experimental stint of turning in problem sets in TeX and found it to be very time consuming, though part of the exercise was to write up the solutions carefully and that took time too. I don't think I could possibly take notes in class that way. Also, typing in class would bother people, I expect.
One of my professors told me that the best way to do notes was write down normal quick ones in class, but then at home, rewrite the notes in complete sentences including the stuff you remember from the lecture that you didn't originally write down. He said this was a big help in absorbing and retaining the material. It sounded like a good idea, though I was too disorganized to actually try it.
Re: Taking notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim (2019)
#36vimtex is so nice. At every new LaTeX project I have, I find out something new about its capabilities; I had never heard of the concealment before.
EDIT: this seems to actually be vanilla vim. vimtex is still great, though!
Re: Taking notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim (2019)
#37This showcase in particular is what inspired me to pick up vim and LaTeX, and later pick up emacs. I could not have come back to my degree again without these tools. Many thanks to the author for the inspiration.
Re: Taking notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim (2019)
#38When I was in college, I used Grapher on Mac OS X to take all my math notes. It was very quick and used some LaTeX-like keyboard shortcuts. I'd copy the equations I generated into TextEdit (side note: I still miss the RTFD bundle format now that I use Windows and Linux). No doubt my professors thought I was just dicking around because I was the only person taking notes on a laptop but it was very nice and the results were much more legible than my handwritten notes.
Re: Taking notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim (2019)
#39Obviously the author can take these notes and be a mathematical success. That's amazing. Personally, I confess that I don't have enough cycles to both understand a lecture and live-LaTeX it. (Can I add that I am a math PhD and also very experienced with LaTeX? So if you feel that this may be too much for you, IMHO that's OK).
I'll second this. I am very familiar with latex. I have even done similar things to my neovim configuration (I use ultisnips) and have a few custom latex 'sty'les to include various commands to do stuff I do frequently but is a pain otherwise.
This however is and was for end-product stuff: my own personal collection of condensed notes, assignments that needed to be typed, and so on (I also use ultisnips for coding). I studied mathematics as a undergrad (I have a first class degree in Mathematics from a UK university) and I hand-wrote my lectures, and I know many mathematicians that are frankly much better than I am who find computers frankly difficult and avoided LaTeX as long as they possibly could.
What matters (if you are studying mathematics) is doing mathematics (exercises, experimentation, understanding proofs etc). There is no substitute. This is a nice to have, but will not make you a better mathematician. If you want to know how to be a good student, IMO this is a nice guide: https://www.maths.ox.ac.uk/system/files/attachments/study_pu...
Re: Taking notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim (2019)
#40Blind person here. I've been using LaTex for note taking since age 15. Since braille typewriters are heavy and clunky and electronic braille notetakers are expensive, I decided it was the right thing to do pretty early on. I started doing this when I transferred out of blind school. Being able to compile my notes into a PDF was definitely useful, considering I had to work with teachers who didn't have any experience…
> the soft dash characters inserted between every syllable
What CMS or editor outputs that? It's insane. I tried copying the text into a text editor and it displayed all the dashes: "math-e-mat-ics".