typodupeerror

## How To Enter Equations Quickly In Class?823

Posted by timothy
from the napkins-and-a-digital-camera dept.
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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## How To Enter Equations Quickly In Class?

• #### LyX (Score:5, Informative)

on Thursday October 29, 2009 @04:37PM (#29915847) Journal

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)

by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 29, 2009 @04:47PM (#29916061)

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...

• #### Re:LyX (Score:5, Funny)

by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 29, 2009 @04:49PM (#29916105)

Claim you have a disability and get the university to pay someone to write all of your notes.

• #### Re: (Score:3, Funny)

Claim you have a disability and get the university to pay someone to write all of your notes.

Does having Windows Vista loaded on my laptop count?

• #### Re:LyX (Score:5, Interesting)

by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 29, 2009 @05:20PM (#29916633)

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...

• #### Re:LyX (Score:4, Insightful)

on Thursday October 29, 2009 @05:29PM (#29916805) Journal

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.

• #### Re: (Score:3, Informative)

And if you want a specific recommendation that works very well, any of the Canon Digital Rebel series with an 18-85mm lens are great choices for that. Pricey, but priceless.

• #### Re:LyX (Score:5, Insightful)

on Thursday October 29, 2009 @06:21PM (#29917595)

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.

• #### Re:LyX (Score:5, Insightful)

on Thursday October 29, 2009 @07:03PM (#29918041)

AND when you copy those onto your computer later, you'll be even MORE likely to remember it.

• #### Re:LyX (Score:4, Insightful)

on Friday October 30, 2009 @12:33AM (#29920627)

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.

• #### Re: (Score:3, Informative)

I second this. If you don't know TeX math commands, there are toolbar buttons, menus, and dialog boxes for everything. But once you do learn the commands (and the TeX commands are listed in the menus and appear as tooltips over the buttons), you can just type them. So instead of pressing the subscript button, you press _ and the display switches to subscript mode. Instead of clicking the sine function, you type \sin. Instead of clicking the fraction button, you can type \frac.

Also, text entry is pretty easy

• #### Re:LyX (Score:4, Interesting)

on Friday October 30, 2009 @04:31AM (#29921507)

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.)

• #### What's old is new (Score:5, Informative)

on Thursday October 29, 2009 @04:38PM (#29915863)

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)

on Thursday October 29, 2009 @05:21PM (#29916673) Journal
The pulse smart pen is far better. I tried the Wacom bluetooth tablet but the problem is that you cannot see what you write. If you use the Pulse Smartpen [smartpencentral.com] then it acts like a real pen - so you can see exactly what you have written - and as well as recording exactly what you wrote it records audio as well so you end up with a document that you can click on to hear what was being said at the time that you wrote that bit of text.

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.
• #### Re: (Score:3, Funny)

There is another issue with the Pulse Smartpen: the software is a steaming piece of shit. For instance, if anybody draws a huge penis on the first page of your notebook, you'll stare at it until the end of the year, because you can't delete pages.

And that is just one among many many many issues.

Great hardware. Failed software execution.

• #### Re:What's old is new (Score:5, Insightful)

on Thursday October 29, 2009 @05:37PM (#29916943)

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.

• #### Paper (Score:2)

Why not use a paper notebook in class, and just enter the equations into the computer later?

If you absolutely insist on a technical solution, how about:

- using macros. Use something like OO.o's auto expand feature (whatever they call it), so that when you type exp-1 it translates to ^-1, or intl expands to integral.

- using shorthand. Find a set of shorthand layouts that work for you, then run search and replace later to make them what they're actually supposed to be. The same examples as above work -- ju

• #### Amazing new technology (Score:2, Funny)

by Anonymous Coward
There's this amazing new technology that utilizes droplets of colored pigmentation that adhere via cohesion to sheets of a fibrous cellulose material. Ask your chemistry professor about it.
• #### TeX to the rescue (Score:5, Funny)

<fw@deneb.enyo.de> on Thursday October 29, 2009 @04:43PM (#29915981) Homepage

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)

on Thursday October 29, 2009 @04:59PM (#29916307) Homepage Journal

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

$\fX = \intii f(x,y)dy$

• #### Pen, paper, TeX. (Score:3, Insightful)

on Thursday October 29, 2009 @04:44PM (#29915991)

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.

• #### One Option (Score:2)

Pencil and paper.

Forget the computer for mathematics classes. You will never get as fast with any sort of computer technology as you will with paper. If you want to jot down a quick calculation, or more importantly, draw a diagram, paper and pencil are painless and easy, and as a result you'll spend more time focusing on what's really important: what the professor is saying and doing on the board.

I'm a math major just graduated and taking graduate courses in mathematics currently so I've had much experience

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