How I'm able to take notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim • Hacker News Board

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

#211

Post by angleofrepose » Fri, Mar 22, 2019, 1:36 AM UTC

elagost wrote: post #138

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…

> 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.

This is a great point and one I've been thinking about more recently. Tools and/or setups like the one displayed in the post with this level of specificity or complexity seem like they would be almost useless packaged up as a standalone. Much more valuable would be the system on which this was built (vim and the collections of extensions he used, not saying this is anywhere near an idea workflow but as you know if you use vim - it is extensible in its own right). Or, rather than that system, to take inspiration in it and design tools with much more intentional flexibility to allow people to build their experience.

I recently had a great conversation about how science educators might wish to have 3 brown 1 blue style animations or experiments, but such a programming tool would be much too difficult to teach to the educators. I think that is totally true, 3b1b generates his videos programmatically and while I believe some version of his tool is open source, he does not offer any support. But there is something to the idea of having one's own publishing tool and workflow to allow the exploration of ideas in whatever field it may be. For Science teachers, they ought to be able to play in a tool like 3b1b uses, but it can't be his exact one, it seems they'd need some well thought out foundation upon which to express their mental models of physics or geometry or whatever it is.

3b1b about page; first item is his modeling approach: https://www.3blue1brown.com/faq

3b1b animation: https://github.com/3b1b/manim

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

#212

Post by NikkiA » Fri, Mar 22, 2019, 2:05 AM UTC

setquk wrote: post #80

Rainymood wrote: post #71

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. 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…

> As if the average modern day student is going to do this. This is the problem. Yes I dozed off in lectures too but only when I knew the material already (preparation - another modern day student failing!) or had a heavy night or a starchy breakfast. Like I said I'm fairly experienced with LaTeX. I've used it for technical documentation for 20 years. Picking an example, I did an EE degree. I sat there and watched a…

If I'd known to do that, I might have made my way through my EE degree instead of dropping out to the (easier) CS degree. 90% of the time I got about 40-50% of the way through transcribing the stuff on the board before the lecturer erased it because 'fuck you, you had 30 seconds'

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

#213

Post by ShepherdKing » Fri, Mar 22, 2019, 8:19 AM UTC

sus_007 wrote: post #167

I'm surprised to see not enough mentions of Emacs's Orgmode which clearly dominates Vim when it comes to note-taking with or without Latex. Not to start another Vim vs Emacs war, I've been using both of them for quite some years now for each of their specialties. But when it comes to Notetaking, Orgmode is hands-down far superior with it's rich plugin ecosystem & minor modes within. Some plugins I use to do Latexy st…

See https://github.com/jceb/vim-orgmode for Orgmode in Vim.

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

#214

Post by ShepherdKing » Fri, Mar 22, 2019, 8:22 AM UTC

The real value I see here, is being able to write anything, such as a publication-quality scientific document - in Vim. I have yet to see a comprehensive overview of what this would entail in Vim. I think Orgmode [1] in Vim makes progress towards this.

[1] https://github.com/jceb/vim-orgmode

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

#215

Post by quietbritishjim » Fri, Mar 22, 2019, 10:12 AM UTC

steventhedev wrote: post #52

Impressive! For anyone looking to do something similar, but in Sublime, I can recommend the LatexTools[0] plugin, which gives similar live previews of math mode. I'd never considered embedding figures from Inkscape though. I also decided that I wanted to keep lecture notes in LaTeX, and the best advice I have for anyone is to just practice. Start from LyX if it helps, but just make sure that you grind down the rough…

Start from LyX if it helps, but just make sure that you grind down the rough edges.

Fully enough, I would have exactly the opposite recommendation: Start by writing LaTeX out manually, then move on to LyX when you have a good understanding.

This is due to a combination of (1) needing to already know about LaTeX features before you can know to look for them in LyX (buried in menus or whatever) and (2) although LaTeX errors are much rarer when you're using LyX, when you do get them they're often really confusing ones. I'd say that using LyX requires greater knowledge of LaTeX than using LaTeX directly, just applied less often.

The benefit of LyX is not that you avoid needing to know about LaTeX. It's that you don't have to see it when you're editing your content. Equations with a lot of subscripts and superscripts come to mind; anyone who claims that it is easier to find and fix mistakes in a nested superscript in the raw LaTeX rather than just clicking directly in rendered representation and fixing it in place is, frankly, lying, if only to themselves.

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

#216

Post by trombonechamp » Fri, Mar 22, 2019, 1:09 PM UTC

miki123211 wrote: post #49

I use LaTeX for notetaking as a blind person because that's the only way to show my notes to sighted people. Nothing else comes even close. Ascimath would be much better and that's what I'd recommend for most people, unless you're required to send PDF documents and often offline.

Thanks for the ascimath reference. Do you know of any similar technologies for writing equations in a simpler and more readable form than latex?

I've never seen ascimath before but I wish I had because I think I partially reinvented the wheel. I wrote some extensions to Pandoc (and an associated emacs major-mode) for scientific note-taking, with a main portion being a "simplified latex" for writing equations in a more readable way. The key features of simplified latex format are matlab-style matrices, UTF8 support, easy exponents, and better formatting (e.g. functions automatically use roman instead of italics). There are still a few edge cases mine doesn't catch, but I'm in the process of rewriting it in Haskell and rewrite is more stable.

https://code.launchpad.net/~mwshinn/+junk/notes3

or for documentation:

https://bazaar.launchpad.net/~mwshinn/+junk/notes3/view/head...

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

#217

Post by gonzus » Fri, Mar 22, 2019, 4:02 PM UTC

ordu wrote: post #201

adrianrocamora wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that Greek might not be the best for people with a different linguistic background. By the way, did you mean Galois Theory? If it's OK to ask, what other languages do you speak mainly besides English?

Yes, I meant Galois Theory. I speak russian, and 'Galua' just letter-per-letter transcription from russian spelling.

If you read that out loud as if it were Spanish, it would sound like the original French pronunciation for Galois. So, good job! :-)

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

#218

Post by ejz » Fri, Mar 22, 2019, 8:23 PM UTC

This is godly.

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

#219

Post by quanticle » Sat, Mar 23, 2019, 5:54 AM UTC

oarabbus_ wrote: post #208

ordu wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 exa…

Research shows handwritten notes to generally be far superior to typed notes for memory and retention https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-learning-secret... So while there are certainly some people who are better with digital notes it is absolutely not " pointless to agree or disagree."

Do they control for handwriting? It's hard to learn from handwritten notes if your handwriting is illegible, especially at speed.

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

#220

Post by ordu » Sat, Mar 23, 2019, 2:58 PM UTC

gonzus wrote: post #217

ordu wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I meant Galois Theory. I speak russian, and 'Galua' just letter-per-letter transcription from russian spelling.

If you read that out loud as if it were Spanish, it would sound like the original French pronunciation for Galois. So, good job! :-)

Russian spelling is mostly phonetic. It tries to keep the idea of spelling that word is a program for sound making machine, which knows nothing about pronunciation of a particular word, just follow simple rules for interpreting letters.

As I understand, Spanish is much like this, it keeps spelling simple. If so, then there are nothing surprising that transliteration from cyrillic into latin make sense from Spanish point of view.