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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)

#92

Post by ai_ia »

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 had been an avid latex note taker since my college days though I used Emacs Org Mode. I consider writing your own notes in the form of a well-typeset book extremely rewarding as it kind of forces you to distill concepts better. For instance, I would actively seek out additional historical origins of a formulae or an associated anecdote or analogy for helping others to better understand the concept. My motivation largely was to write in a way such that it would help others understand better.

This exercise inspired me to build my own learning platform from scratch that generates a latex-generated books at the end of course completion. The idea is to have interactive conversations while learning and at the end the personalized book is generated for you. You can see an example of personalized Python book here: https://tinyurl.com/3xfsunj9

You can see that the conversations between learner and Primer highlighted as red sprinkled throughout the book.

The learner doesn't need to write any equations or code examples as it is generated for them. They can further customize the notebook by adding notes or questions using prompts.[1]

Right now there are two free courses on the platform[2], and 5 more would be added by the end of the month. But the goal is create self-paced computer science degree.

[1]: https://primerlabs.io/blog/introducing-primer/#the-problem-o...

[2]: https://primerlabs.io

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

#94

Post by jonnycomputer »

gjulianm wrote: post #83
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…

The notation in the lecture couldn't have been that complex then. Or the pace that rapid.

What about diagrams?

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

#96

Post by gjulianm »

jonnycomputer wrote: post #94
gjulianm wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The notation in the lecture couldn't have been that complex then. Or the pace that rapid. What about diagrams?

For complex notation I had a keyboard distribution with symbols available (e.g., α is alt-a, ∩ is alt + shift + i, ∈ is alt + shift + [) and also made commands to abbreviate, which made it faster than writing (and more consistent). The pace depended on the lecture, but I had no issues keeping up with the teachers speaking/writing pace. If the class was being too complex and I couldn't understand and write in my own words, I just went into "memory dump mode" and wrote whatever and then understood and reformatted it later.

For diagrams I had several options. Simple ones were easy enough to do with Tikz (maybe I didn't get it perfectly on the first try but good enough to fix later), diagrams that had a repeated structure were done with commands, and then for the ones that I couldn't do on the fly I just either wrote the description in text and did them later, or did a drawing in a notebook/phone/took a picture and then replicated it later with Tikz. I could also take diagrams from the web and paste the image.

If you want examples, we actually had all our note PDFs in a shared Dropbox folder [1] (in Spanish, though). Not all of them are mine, but there are a good bunch of them where I'm the main author. I'm specially proud of some notes, like the differential geometry course [2] or topology [3] with a good amount of diagrams (for a math course).

1: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/kbymf37cykz77ha/AADuRd3CoU6UUCZMt...

2: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/kbymf37cykz77ha/AAA1SKV3JLkVPX2nc...

3: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/kbymf37cykz77ha/AABNb9rTsaRzc-3xP...

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

#99

Post by createunderrate »

BbzzbB wrote: post #65
wolverine876 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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".

Hum, so when you copy the text and post it into Notepad, it's written with a ton of dashes at places I can't make sense of (not syllables or every word). If you post it in this text box or in Word, it looks normal, I can't even figure out how to share it here (without manually "dashing") except this screenshot : https://imgur.com/DWRJlKf . I am very confused, what's up with this?

Likely, the site was set up before all browsers supported automatic hyphenation (fairly recently), and the soft hyphens were added to assist with hyphenation.

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

#100

Post by jimhefferon »

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/ )

Thank you for the kind words, but I nodded when I read the parent post. It reminded me of something my wife and I talk about, how we took a lot of video when our kids were young, and maybe we should have just enjoyed more of the time.
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