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My Mathematics PhD research workflow: LaTeX notes and instant pdf referencing

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Re: My Mathematics PhD research workflow: LaTeX notes and instant pdf referencing

#11

Post by MarcelOlsz »

retskrad wrote: post #9

I looked at the math in the article and I asked myself, what compels people to choose this path for their career? Nothing about it looks appealing. It looks like a bunch of gibberish for 99% of humanity and only 1% of people willingly go to school to learn this stuff. I have a lot of respect for people who have jobs involving this level of math and physics so dummies like me have the ability to type out this comment.

I've been trying to learn math for years but truly have no idea where to begin. I started with Kiselev's Geometry and Gelfand's Algebra. I used to hate Math. When I read Lockharts Lament some years ago and it brought me to tears. Ever since then I've had a big appreciation for it but no real time to get into it. Gelfand's Algebra is really cool because it starts with the most basic problems ever that a 3rd grader can do, and works it's way up. It's worth checking out!

Re: My Mathematics PhD research workflow: LaTeX notes and instant pdf referencing

#13

Post by the_svd_doctor »

retskrad wrote: post #9

I looked at the math in the article and I asked myself, what compels people to choose this path for their career? Nothing about it looks appealing. It looks like a bunch of gibberish for 99% of humanity and only 1% of people willingly go to school to learn this stuff. I have a lot of respect for people who have jobs involving this level of math and physics so dummies like me have the ability to type out this comment.

Math for the sake of math can be very self fulfilling. Like an intellectual hobby (it just takes a lot of work and energy).

Re: My Mathematics PhD research workflow: LaTeX notes and instant pdf referencing

#14

Post by hollerith »

533474 wrote: post #10
rcap wrote: post #2

Author here, if you have any questions, feel free to ask them. It really is amazing how hard it is just to retrieve the currently opened pdf file and its page number in a pdf viewer. Some pdf viewers (Like Zathura) provide this via DBus, but even very common ones like Evince don't. I managed to find a way using gvfs, although it's a bit of a hack. For others (e.g. Mendeley), I have no idea on how to do this... Anybod…

Try emacs and org-mode sometime. Configurability is off the charts and vi keybindings are easily configurable (and so are the snippets). I loved the workflow, I believe that a mind like yours will also find emacs elisp captivating and I would love to see what you could come up with in that much more flexible ecosystem (I am a former Vim evangelist)

What does org mode have to do with the problem where you have a document open in a PDF viewer and you want to retrieve the location of the document in the file system and what page is currently showing in the viewer's window?

Re: My Mathematics PhD research workflow: LaTeX notes and instant pdf referencing

#15

Post by gsatic »

adhesive_wombat wrote: post #5

I just wish there was a good way to have something like Zeal[1] for PDFs. Navigating a big pile of huge datasheets and manuals (a processor TRM can be 5000 pages!) is such a huge pain and that's assuming they have decent TOCs, which many do not. [1]: https://zealdocs.org

I use pdfgrep a lot.

Probably possible to convert pdfs to html (with the default pdf tools on nix - pdftotext pdf2txt et al) and pull them into zeal.

Re: My Mathematics PhD research workflow: LaTeX notes and instant pdf referencing

#16

Post by ivansavz »

godelski wrote: post #6

Does anyone have a good reference for Tikz? I feel like I'm pretty good at it (at least better than most my peers) but I also believe it takes a significant amount of time to create interesting pictures and do even basic things that PPT or other basic tools can do easily. I want the full editing power of tikz but doing the basic parts is tough (same with manim, though lower barrier to entry). As for writing documents…

The best way to TikZ is to copy-paste from previous figures you've created.

The second best is to look for a similar figure on TeXample https://texample.net/tikz/examples/ or stack overflow https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/tikz-pgf

The third best option is to use squared paper to draw by hand, then transfer hand-drawn stuff into TikZ code. It's slow as hell, but works well if you build up a collection of components you can copy-paste into other figs later.

There are also some GUI tools you could try: https://www.mathcha.io/ https://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/cheunen/freetikz/freetikz.htm... https://tikzit.github.io/ etc. (more links in this thread https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/84890/does-there-exi... )

Re: My Mathematics PhD research workflow: LaTeX notes and instant pdf referencing

#17

Post by Twisol »

retskrad wrote: post #9

I looked at the math in the article and I asked myself, what compels people to choose this path for their career? Nothing about it looks appealing. It looks like a bunch of gibberish for 99% of humanity and only 1% of people willingly go to school to learn this stuff. I have a lot of respect for people who have jobs involving this level of math and physics so dummies like me have the ability to type out this comment.

This only answers a small piece of your question, but it's important to realize that the mathematical notation you see is only how mathematics is recorded and communicated. Most of what goes into doing mathematics happens in your head. "Doing" mathematics requires you to know what the object of study is, and what tools have historically been brought to bear on it, and these are communicated and taught via notation. But once you've internalized those concepts, the notation doesn't usually play a significant role. Yes, you may trial your ideas with some calculations, and once you're convinced of something you need to prove it with some degree of rigor. But you don't usually set out to prove something you don't already have some reason to believe in -- it's not like the math workbooks you may have encountered in school. (I second the sibling reply's mention of Lockhart's Lament!)

Re: My Mathematics PhD research workflow: LaTeX notes and instant pdf referencing

#19

Post by amathres_info »

I'm another academic mathematician. I'm not really convinced that all this would be a time-saver for me as far as research productivity; maybe I'm just old-fashioned but I just have a few folders for paper notes and that's it. But certainly this could vary from person to person.

To me, the place for the real time savings is organizing your teaching workflow. If you're a grad student, make sure to get on top of that ASAP. A lot of it is very repetitive both within a given semester and also from year to year. I have a ton of scripts built up over the years for things like organizing lecture notes (especially if you are teaching a class you have taught before, you don't want to have to rewrite all your lectures), creating problem sets / solutions, inputting grades into the LMS,... I even have automatic solution generators for a few rote calculations that I assign many problems about (Gaussian elimination, for example).

Re: My Mathematics PhD research workflow: LaTeX notes and instant pdf referencing

#20

Post by t_mann »

bryanph_ wrote: post #4

Specifically being able to create a deep link to a passage is a very powerful capability indeed. The friction required to look up a paper and navigate to the specific passage for a given reference can really be so high that we just end up avoiding it altogether I feel. Kudos to you for trying to solve this problem! I personally find LaTeX a little too friction-full (is that a word?) on the input side. The output look…

Modern tools like Overleaf are great, especially for collaboration. But it's still extremely annoying having to google every little thing like "how can I move this element on the slide a bit to the right?" or even things that you'd expect would be easier in a software designed for mathematicians like "how can I format this common type of math problem (eg an optimization problem) nicely?". Plain LaTeX's overall useability has strong 80's vibes and the output does look nice, but imho doesn't justify the effort (especially given that the competition like Word has really come of age wrt to equation editing). If it wasn't for tools like Overleaf I might have ditched it, but there is also strong peer pressure in math-heavy fields to keep using it.
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