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Taking notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim (2019)

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Re: Taking notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim (2019)

#81

Post by ant6n »

tomerv wrote: post #67
hwers wrote: post #13

I did this too for a while. It's a fun challenge for yourself and a cool way to brag to your friends. Paper is such a better interface though and real time latex takes away too much of your attention from the lecture I found in the end (the best way to attend a lecture is to barely write anything imo, just some rough notes while mostly spending your time in your head - if you missed something look at a friends' notes…

Note-taking is very individual. I found out in university that the act of writing lecture notes helps me focus and remember. Otherwise my mind would drift. In fact, I soon realized that I should write my own lecture notes, even if I never look at them afterwards. And only paper is good enough for fast writing of math.

I used a tablet pc during my math bachelor's (convertible laptop computer with Wacom that existed 2002~2008). A couple years back I still used a Samsung Android tablet with pen (and squid). If I went back to school now I'd probably use an iPad and pen, or perhaps one of those wacom enabled e-readers (remarkable, boox?)

Re: Taking notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim (2019)

#82

Post by ykonstant »

qmmmur wrote: post #78
ykonstant wrote: post #72

I would advise against trying to typeset lectures live, at least for my courses. I structure my lectures as an abstract detective work: start with a motivating problem or example, experiment with it, distill the key ideas, formalize them into definitions, deduce consequences (theorems, new problems). I expect my students to be active participants at each step. Paper notes work well for this, because they are both low…

My research lately is quite meta, and involved in breaking down the various ways in which dissemination of knowledge can be structured. Mind if I borrow this analogy and test it out on some students? Something about it resonated.

Go ahead!

Re: Taking notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim (2019)

#83

Post by gjulianm »

ykonstant wrote: post #72

I would advise against trying to typeset lectures live, at least for my courses. I structure my lectures as an abstract detective work: start with a motivating problem or example, experiment with it, distill the key ideas, formalize them into definitions, deduce consequences (theorems, new problems). I expect my students to be active participants at each step. Paper notes work well for this, because they are both low…

I took notes on my courses in LaTeX, and I didn't find it detrimental. If anything, it was way faster to write and understand them later. And it is easier to write whatever you need to keep track of the lecture and then modify it later (or during the lecture) than to have some paper notes where you need to first complete them and then organize them.

Not to mention that it's far easier to collaborate with LaTeX notes than paper. For example, we split the courses between friends so only one took LaTeX notes, the rest paid attention or took quick annotations on paper to later complete the notes.

Re: Taking notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim (2019)

#84

Post by gjulianm »

An important part missing in this is to add symbols to your keyboard layout. Instead of typing \alpha, just type α. To type \cap, write ∩. I used a StackOverflow answer [1] to build a key layout [2] for my Spanish mac keyboard, but this should be easily replicated for other systems and languages

1: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/110042/entering-unic...

2: https://github.com/gjulianm/MathUnicode

Re: Taking notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim (2019)

#85

Post by dotancohen »

gjulianm wrote: post #84

An important part missing in this is to add symbols to your keyboard layout. Instead of typing \alpha, just type α. To type \cap, write ∩. I used a StackOverflow answer [1] to build a key layout [2] for my Spanish mac keyboard, but this should be easily replicated for other systems and languages 1: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/110042/entering-unic... 2: https://github.com/gjulianm/MathUnicode

For Linux users, see this Unix.SE post for adding new symbols to a keyboard layout: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/674997/new-keyboard...

Note that is my own self-answered question and answer, after having difficulty. For completeness' sake all steps involved in adding new symbols to the keyboard - desktop agnostic - are included in that question.

Re: Taking notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim (2019)

#86

Post by gjulianm »

dhosek wrote: post #64

Typing notes is probably the worst way to encode things into your memory. There's been plenty of research on this and I'm not going to regurgitate it here, but the process of handwriting notes does a lot to help you remember things even if you never look at those notes again. There are people with disabilities that prevent them from handwriting notes, but everyone else is better served by handwritten notes.

> but everyone else is better served by handwritten notes.

Completely disagree here. You need to find the setup that works for you, and for a lot of people that setup will be taking notes in a computer.

And I know this because in my class me and a few friends took computer notes, and we did really well. In my personal case, my handwriting is terrible and gets worse by the hour. By the fourth lecture of the day, my paper notes were an incomprehensible mess. Reformatting, organizing and sorting those notes took quite some time and then searching or referencing other pages was impossible.

When taking LaTeX notes, I could write at the same speed as when I was writing by hand, got less tiring, could pay more attention to the lecture (I can just go on and write things on the computer without looking and worry about them later, but I can't handwrite without looking).

Then later I could go back, rewrite the parts that needed rewriting, reference the parts that needed referencing, put graphs, paste links, whatever. And it was really helpful to have a document where I could iterate and improve the notes as my knowledge and understanding of the contents improved. You know how they say that you don't really understand something until you can explain it? Well, rewriting my notes was my process to understand things. And it would be impossible to have done it if I had to take paper notes.

Also, I could do the exercises on the same document (in an appendix) and quickly reference the theorems, and also work with my friends to correct/review the exercises. Again, impossible to do with paper notes.

Re: Taking notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim (2019)

#87

Post by necovek »

908B64B197 wrote: post #75
miki123211 wrote: post #33

Blind 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…

> considering I had to work with teachers who didn't have any experience with blind people before. Sorry you had to pave the way. > PDFs generated with pdflatex and similar aren't screen reader accessible, but I could read the LaTeX source code just fine. That's... sad. Is Word any better?

pdflatex, just like TeX, comes from an 8-bit past, so it will frequently resort to custom encodings to fit all the glyphs in a single 255-character font. That means that any 8-bit "character" (in PDF bytes, what is really copy-pasteable or readable by TTS system) can actually stand for any displayable character.

Perhaps XeTeX is better?

(I am not intimately familiar with what pdf(la)tex does, but this is how TeX works, and I've seen those PDFs, esp with eg. Cyrillic, which on select show up garbled text)

Re: Taking notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim (2019)

#88

Post by ant6n »

Myrmornis wrote: post #20

Plug: I recently created a new LaTeX editing environment for Emacs with automatic inline rendering of math, TikZ diagrams, and tables: https://github.com/dandavison/xenops It creates plain LaTeX files that can be shared with non-Emacs users, but also works with org-mode. Math preview images are SVG by default and are crisp on high res / retina screens.

When reading the article I was thinking "shit, maybe I have to learn drop emacs and finally learn vim". But then u post your emacs latex plugin and I can perish that thought.

(Do any of the features work in the terminal?)

Re: Taking notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim (2019)

#89

Post by dotancohen »

yesenadam wrote: post #51
a_lost_needle wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 compre…

The person you're addressing like they're 16 and asking for your guidance is a literal expert in their field(s). (See https://hefferon.net/ )

Welcome to HN! Where the guy that I'm giving hobby car advice to is something of an idol in my professional field.

Newton may have stood on the shoulders of giants, but HN enables us to casually rub elbows with them.

Re: Taking notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim (2019)

#90

Post by necovek »

ykonstant wrote: post #72

I would advise against trying to typeset lectures live, at least for my courses. I structure my lectures as an abstract detective work: start with a motivating problem or example, experiment with it, distill the key ideas, formalize them into definitions, deduce consequences (theorems, new problems). I expect my students to be active participants at each step. Paper notes work well for this, because they are both low…

Your classes sound amazing. In my experience though, seldom a professor or a TA tries that hard to prepare an engaging lesson.

And certainly, it'd be a shame to be busy "live-latexing" notes for your class, but I think in the vast majority of classes, for someone really adept at it, it might work.

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