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Comments: 823 +- Hardware: How To Enter Equations Quickly In Class? on Thursday October 29, @03:36PM
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AdmiralXyz writes "I'm a university student, and I like to take notes on my (non-tablet) computer whenever possible, so it's easier to sort, categorize, and search through them later. Trouble is, I'm going into higher and higher math classes, and typing "f_X(x) = integral(-infinity, infinity, f(x,y) dy)" just isn't cutting it anymore: I need a way to get real-looking equations into my notes. I'm not particular about the details, the only requirement is that I need to keep up with the lecture, so it has to be fast, fast, fast. Straight LaTeX is way too slow, and Microsoft's Equation Editor isn't even worth mentioning. The platform is not a concern (I'm on a MacBook Pro and can run either Windows or Ubuntu in a virtual box if need be), but the less of a hit to battery life, the better. I've looked at several dedicated equation editing programs, but none of them, or their reviews, make any mention of speed. I've even thought about investing in a low-end Wacom tablet (does anyone know if there are ultra-cheap graphics tablets designed for non-artists?), but I figured I'd see if anyone at Slashdot has a better solution."
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LyX (Score:5, Informative)
I used LyX quite a bit; the equation editor is pretty quick to work with (better than MS Equation Editor or similar addons).
LyX is generally much faster than straight LaTeX - and there's a much shallower learning curve.
Additionally, LyX works on pretty much whatever platform you want to use.
What MACROS are for (Score:4, Insightful)
Create keyboard macros for all your math stuff.
CONTROL + SHIFT + F would be
f() [LEFT ARROW to put your cursor between the parenthesis]
You're in college, so I'm sure you can figure it out...
Parent
Re:LyX (Score:5, Funny)
Claim you have a disability and get the university to pay someone to write all of your notes.
Parent
Re:LyX (Score:5, Interesting)
I have used LyX in advanced mathematical courses such as quantum mechanics and relativistic electrodynamics. With the help of the copy-paste function I found that I could type the equations faster into my laptop than my classmates could write them onto paper and so had a little more time to think about them and ask questions.
LyX is very easy to learn for note taking as you type stuff like:
CNTL-M \int_{-\infty}^{\infty} \alpha(x) dx
and get instant pretty graphical equations.
If you need to draw pictures, however, you will need a tablet or pen and paper.
Hope this helps...
Parent
Re:LyX (Score:4, Insightful)
I've found that, assuming your professor is okay with it, bringing a digital camera with a good zoom lens and shooting pictures of the board as the professor writes on it is the fastest way to take notes. We do this in meetings at work for the same reason. Alternatively, professors who use electronic slides can provide a copy of them electronically, removing the need to waste a lot of the students' time hand-writing copies of the same content unnecessarily. We don't live in ancient times; we aren't training scribes here.
Parent
Re:LyX (Score:5, Insightful)
The muscle memory of (hand)writing notes (which are not necessarily verbatum copies of the presentation) is an excellant aid to learning.
In addition, it helps one learn how to filtre out the less relevant part of copious information; that is, to recognise what's important.
Parent
Re:LyX (Score:5, Insightful)
AND when you copy those onto your computer later, you'll be even MORE likely to remember it.
Parent
Re:LyX (Score:4, Insightful)
That is entirely dependent on the individual and their learning style.
Some people do learn that way, some people do not, some people learn better by reading, or speaking or listening, or teaching others. Back in high school I used to program my calculator to do the problems on the homework and while I couldn't use those programs in class, explaining how to do something to the calculator generally gave me a pretty good understanding of it myself.
Parent
Re:LyX (Score:4, Interesting)
I wrote my thesis in LyX, and it was basically a good experience with few problems. However, if I was doing it again I'd probably use straight LaTeX via a nice editor (gedit has a nice LaTeX plugin, for example). The reason for this is that I think LaTeX is in someways a bit simpler than LyX because it is always clear what is happening, whereas LyX has a second markup stage. I had a bit of difficulty doing some document-wide formatting in LyX that I think would've been more straight-forward in LaTeX.
I'm certainly not being heavily critical of LyX, and think that if you stick to their bundled document formats, you should be fine.
(this is a little off-topic, because the article is about taking equation notes in class, which would be a cinch in LyX, I reckon.)
Parent
Re:LyX (Score:5, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_curve#Common_terms [wikipedia.org]
You'd think that people would learn that language isn't always sensical, and that terms may have multiple --- even mutually contradictory --- meanings. Hope that's not too inflammatory a hope.
Parent
Re:LyX (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, indeed. Actually, it makes perfect sense. "Steep" is a metaphor based on climbing a hill, where the steeper it is the harder it is to get to the top. Does this really escape some folks?
Parent
Re:LyX (Score:5, Insightful)
Even though we both have similar concepts of what the learning curve is referring to, I think the GP's interpretation is backwards, at least from a user interface design perspective. If the learning curve is steep, that means you learn a lot at the very beginning, which means that you have to learn a lot just to get started. Otherwise, you wouldn't have bothered to learn all that stuff up front. Thus, a steep learning curve means that the UI is relatively hard to learn, even if it doesn't take you a huge amount of time.
The ideal learning curve for software is actually fairly linear; the amount you learn at the beginning should be minimal because the UI should be discoverable enough and familiar enough (relative to other software) that you don't need to learn anything of substance to start using it at a basic level. As you get into it more, you should continue to discover things that make your life easier.
Just my $0.02.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
'Steep learning curve' goes both ways.
I'm more familiar with it being used in the sense as it refers to the curve you have to climb, hence a 'steep' learning curve has you start on ground level and then climb the face of El Capitan to get to the top. Wiki says it started your way, but current usage is more often the way I see it.
Maybe we should just drop the saying all together and stick with "easy to learn" and "complex to learn"?
Re:LyX (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:LyX (Score:5, Funny)
It took me lightyears to explain that to someone.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Some people might think that. It really means that the jump is very sudden, regardless of how big it is. That said, by definition, most sudden jumps are big, or else we wouldn't perceive them as a jump, so that's not a particularly surprising interpretation. And in a relativistic sense, a quantum leap of an electron is fairly large... compared with the size of an atom, that is. Not huge, but certainly not tiny.
What's old is new (Score:5, Informative)
Wacom's low-end Bamboo Pen [wacom.com] ($69) tablet should be more than you need. Amazon has it for $60. [amazon.com] Combine it with Microsoft OneNote or similar and you'll have recreated the fabulous 2-buck pen-and-paper experience. Go you!
Pulse Smart Pen (Score:4, Informative)
The only downside is that it needs special paper which you can buy in notebook form or which you can print yourself using a laser printer. The windows version has some extra software you can buy to perform OCR on your handwriting but since I have a Mac I have no idea how good it is. There is even an open SDK for you to develop your own applications for it but it unfortunately only supports Java.
Parent
Re:What's old is new (Score:5, Insightful)
you'll have recreated the fabulous 2-buck pen-and-paper experience. Go you!
The question I don't understand is WHY. The quoted statement outline the end result pretty clearly. I understand slashdot loves to use fancy technology to solve simple problems, but sometimes simpler is better. I already have a HUGE set of properly formatted equations all nicely written out, it's called the Book.
Note taking, for me, was to summarize what the teacher said, in MY words so that I could understand it later. I just learn by writing it down, there were some classes that I never kept the notes. I'd grab what ever scratch paper was by the printers, write on it, and toss it after class. (Statics. F=0, how hard is it?). I still have quite a few of both textbooks AND notes for a class. I have the hard equations and then I have how I learned it. Heaven forbid ever become an engineer, where the teacher is drawing simply supported beams on the board, the teacher is drawing feedback control systems.
Anything worth writing is worth writing once. If someone already wrote it in the text book. Then that is good enough for me. In some classes we'd photocopy the problems out of the book, cut them out and paste them on the homework. It was better looking than my drawing and clearer than my handwriting... and I can guarantee I never made any transcribing errors.
Instantly digitized notes seem like they'd be great for classes where the content will never exist again outside of that class. Philosophy debates, taking notes as a reporter, etc. You're going to spend more of your time trying to figure out how to make that '2' go subscript of that '4' in the numerator with the summation block than you will learning the content. Put down the computer. Grab a good mechanical pencil and a $.50 notebook from walmart and quit worrying about it.
If you HAVE to have a digital copy. Take notes on something that can easily be separated into individual sheets (3 ring binder and 8x11s with 3 holes). When the semester is over take it to any decent multifunction machine, put it in the top and let it scan everything for you.
Parent
pencil/paper (Score:5, Informative)
Re:pencil/paper (Score:5, Informative)
Pen and paper got me through my math classes in school. Then I'd transcribe the equations later into digital form.
Parent
Re:pencil/paper (Score:5, Insightful)
Absolutely! I have students that take notes on computer, and I think it's a terrible idea. First there is the problem of equations. In the class I teach we introduce a lot of symbols, so even if you have a fast system you would have to find the symbols in a big list. By the time you do, you're probably behind.
Second, note taking is a tool which helps you learn the material better. Transcribing the notes later helps significantly more, because now you get to revisit the material with fresh eyes. Something that may have seemed obvious initially may seem less so when you transcribe them. Now you can go to the next lecture an ask questions from the previous class. (As a professor, I'm *very* impressed when students do this, because it proves to me that they did something other than drink beer between the end of the last class and the beginning of the next.)
Finally taking notes on a computer provides you with many distractions. I know lots of students who claim "I don't get distracted from using a computer", but then my grader or another student informs me the were surfing the web, reading email, IMing, etc. Save yourself from having to avoid these and just use paper.
Parent
Re:Question (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:pencil/paper (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:pencil/paper (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:pencil/paper (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:pencil/paper (Score:4, Insightful)
Another problem with handwritten notes is that many people experience serious hand cramping after writing continuously for an hour. I could type for a week without getting tired; you don't have to tightly grip a keyboard. I stopped writing stuff by hand entirely back in junior high, with the exception of a couple of teachers who didn't like typed stuff. Handwriting is just too physically draining for what you get out of it. Pen and paper are for *short* notes to myself, marking up copy, etc. Everything else is 1s and 0s.
Parent
Re:pencil/paper (Score:4, Insightful)
Handwriting is just too physically draining for what you get out of it. Pen and paper are for *short* notes to myself, marking up copy, etc. Everything else is 1s and 0s.
For fuck's sake. What do you think we used to do in olden days before there were laptop computers? I went through college, not only writing my notes in lectures with my bare hands but also copying them out neatly later with my bare hands.
There's this amazing thing with muscles, if you use them they get stronger.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:pencil/paper (Score:5, Funny)
1. Memorize as you go.
2. Screw lecture, just watch Square One.
3. Have friend audio-record lectures then have other friend convert them to notes then photocopy friend's notes and use OCR.
4. Drop out of school.
5. Prove the Reimann Hypothesis and skip right to that PhD.
6. Hire a plant to continually ask inane questions during lecture, giving you more time to input those equations in LaTeX.
7. Code up a Math Module for Dragon Naturally speaking.
8. ???
9. Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all
Wait... What were we talking about?
Parent
ASCIIMathML (Score:5, Interesting)
Old school (Score:5, Insightful)
Keep it simple - pen and paper.
Re:Old school (Score:4, Insightful)
aren't math people supposed to use pencil?
Parent
Re:Old school (Score:5, Funny)
aren't math people supposed to use pencil?
Only if you're one of those people who make mistakes. Obviously no one on /. would fit in this category.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I knew a constipated mathematician who worked it out with a pencil.
paint (Score:5, Funny)
microsoft paint
Windows 7 (Score:4, Informative)
If you do choose to invest in a Wacom tablet, Windows 7 comes with a math input panel:
http://www.gottabemobile.com/2008/10/29/windows-7-math-input-panel-screenshots
It's not very usable with a mouse, though.
Windows 7 now has a math input panel (Score:4, Informative)
TeX to the rescue (Score:5, Funny)
f_X(x) = integral(-infinity, infinity, f(x,y) dy)
Just type $$f_X(x) = \int_\infty^\infty f(x,y) dy$$ instead.
Re:TeX to the rescue (Score:5, Funny)
Say, you are doing probability and have to write a bunch of integrals over the real line. Then you can prepare this:
\newcommand{\fX}{f_X(x)}
\newcommand{\intii}{\mathop{\int_{-\infty}^\infty}}
or
\newcommand{\intR}{\mathop{\int_{\mathbb R}}}
and later use
\[ \fX = \intii f(x,y)dy \]
Parent
Pen, paper, TeX. (Score:3, Insightful)
I had this issue for years. Ultimately I never found anything within a factor of 5 for speed of simple pen and paper. The next best thing was LaTeX; with practice you can type that remarkably fast. (Especially if you pre-define macros relevant to whatever you're doing) The GUI-based solutions uniformly stank.
I've never found any system for digitizing handwritten equations; for a long time, my hope was that such software (preferably with LaTeX output) and a tablet would be a good solution. But the market for such things is small, and a few minutes of design work convinced me that implementing it was a lot more trouble than it would ever be worth.
LyX? (Score:3, Informative)
I don't know if it is up to the speed you need, but the equation editor in LyX is pretty darn cool.
http://www.lyx.org/ [lyx.org]
steveha
Mac's Typography; in short: transcribe your notes (Score:4, Interesting)
OpenOffice.org (Score:3, Informative)
Your example would almost work as is; it would be entered as:
f_x (x) = int from -infinity to infinity f (x, y) dy
Or, if you prefer your parentheses to stretch (in case you have fractions inside, or what have you):
f_x left ( x right ) = int from -infinity to infinity f left ( x, y right ) dy
Either way, it comes out looking very nice. The one thing that takes some getting used to is that you need to make liberal use of whitespace (e.g. between f and the opening parenthesis of the function), otherwise things will occasionally come out looking a little strange. The best part is, when you don't know what you need to type for a particular symbol, you can select it from the menu and OO will insert the plaintext code, which makes it very easy to learn the code for new items.
Remap the keystrokes (Score:5, Informative)
I was disabled and taking notes was VERY slow for me if I tried writing. I used a word processor WP or MS Word (I don't remember which one) to take notes. I had a similar problem until I discovered that I could map an entire phrase into a single keystroke. For example: "ALT + CTRL + F " could be "f(X) = " You could even be more elaborate because certain phrases are used time and time again in lectures. My longest remapping was 20 characters. For different classes, I had completely different keystroke mappings. Just be careful not to remap the standard keystrokes.
This technique worked for me all though grad school. I also used a tape recorder (get the professors permission first) and reviewed my notes after class to make sure I got it all.
Prof says: paper and pencil (Score:5, Interesting)
Hi, I'm a physics professor. I say, take your notes on paper. Math is the most computer-incompatible writing system ever designed. You'll never ever be able to type equations fast enough to keep up with me on the blackboard.
And even if you manage to find a math entry system that's fast enough, it won't help you with the diagrams, graphs, and sketches.
Of course, I don't practice what I preach: my own lecture notes are in text files. But that's because to me, "block ramp friction mu=0.2, 1 kg 30deg 1m long, find final v. U=4.9 Wf=1.7 v=2.5" is a complete set of notes for a 20-minute segment of lecture.
Oh, also: write in pencil. I guarantee you that whenever you bring a pen, I will spend the entire lecture correcting minor mistakes by erasing with the heel of my hand, changing variable notations, and editing diagrams and drawings halfway through working a problem.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Tex Faster (Score:4, Informative)
Use the auctex mode in emacs, which *greatly* reduces the number of keystrokes you need.
That combined with x-symbol let me take notes in graduate math classes for an experiment.
Parent
Re:Stop Taking Notes (Score:4, Insightful)
Interesting...
If find that the process of writing down class notes is what (a) keeps my mind focused on the lecture and (b) aids in review when I have the notes in _my_ order with my side notes. I've taken classes lately with professors using your method (their notes, sometimes with blanks to simplify class participation) - and it didn't "stick." Sure, I did well, but it was all short term memory - in a year the knowledge was nearly as foreign as if I hadn't taken it.
It sounds more like you prefer to provide more material than normally covered, and that's fine. I'd prefer to cover a little less and have it stick with me. As for recording notes and recopying later - I'll admit I'm a bad student. My time is limited and the hour I spend in a lecture is the hour I devote to that material - I don't want to spend an extra 1-2 hours relistening to a lecture - it wastes my time if I've done the in-class routinge correctly. Sample problems (aka homework) cements the lesson and identifies areas I don't understand so I can review them at the next opportunity.
What really cements the knowledge are the tests where I get to use a formula/summary sheet (preferably multiple for later, cumulative exams). I have notes from a decade ago that I use regularly in my office because I copied carefully in class, then when studying for the exams prepared "summary" sheets. Those sheets are - to this day - my professional references. A quick glance for the right formula, back to the notes I took (with my side points) if it's been a while, and into the textbook if I need to really brush up or have to expand on a subject.
Of course, this is primarily for engineering; math can be different, as can other topics.
Parent
Re:Stop Taking Notes (Score:5, Insightful)
I would drop any class you did that in and ensure that I reward you with a terrible recommendation and report, if I was your dean I would fire you. I learn best by writing what is said, take away my ability to write and I won't learn it all. Your policy is beyond stupid because everyone learns differently. By forcing everyone to learn the way you learn, or the way you believe people should learn, you are guaranteeing that a minority of your classes won't learn anything. You should rethink your insistence that you know how to learn better than the students you are teaching because not only is your policy downright discriminatory for those with learning disorders such as dyslexia, but your arrogant belief that you know better demonstrates a superiority complex that's prevalent in higher education and a first order indicator of a bad teacher.
Parent