Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Math and keyboards are not the best match (Score 1) 823

If anyone gets to the 495th or so comment, as a former mathematician, I recommend a pen and paper. If it helps you to have it in ASCII text (for searching, etc...) then take a few minutes at the end of the day to transcribe it.

My rationale -
A) Basic mathematical notation has evolved over a few hundred years to be concise and easily manipulated. It once was that equations were all described in text, so that even the description of the square root of a number was cumbersome ('a quantity, which when multiplied by itself yields the original...'). Expressing mathematical entities in textual psuedo notation, while quite a bit better than in prose, is a step backwards.

B) As you get more advanced in mathematics, you will most likely find the need for diagrams anyway (depending on the field). For instance, commutative diagrams in algebra, or all the bizarre pathologies in analysis (such as the 'walking ghosts'). There may be packages to do specific kinds of diagrams, but they will likely be unwieldy.

So get a nice pencil and paper. Or, like has been mentioned many times in this thread, get a Pulse pen. It's no worse than a pen ('cept for price), and you might find it useful.

(mini-review)
  I recently got a Pulse pen, and while I'm no longer taking class notes, it's quite handy. It's a tiny bit large for my hand, but fairly comfortable still. You can search for the textual parts of your equations, and it mostly finds them. I've downloaded the MyScript OCR free trial (for Mac), but I don't think I'll buy it, since it does a poor job with my poor hand.

Slashdot Top Deals

Never tell people how to do things. Tell them WHAT to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity. -- Gen. George S. Patton, Jr.

Working...