Comment by nv-vn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nv-vn | Hacker News Reader

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(Slightly off-topic) It's really sad to me that as of yet there is nothing to compete with paper and a pencil for math. I've used probably 10 different programs/websites, lots of stand-alone software, LaTeX, drawing programs on tablets, etc. for this during my time as a student. All of it feels poorly put together because none of it solves any new problems. Drawing on a tablet is a worse imitation of drawing on paper. TeX is just unwieldy for anything other than writing down a final answer. Even the tools that are supposed to help automate stuff almost always fail to do so. To be clear, I think there is a lot of room for improvement within the next few years, especially when it comes to touch-screen interaction and similar ideas. I'm just hoping someone comes along and invents a decent product that feels just as intuitive as drawing diagrams and writing equations that utilizes the power of the computer strapped to it effectively (i.e. not just attempting to translate and simplify my drawings to text).

I frequent math.stackexchange.com and never write anything on paper. I enter my solution in MathJax either directly in the answer space or use MacDown which lets me enter MathJax offline and view the result as it is entered.

My answers have more detail than most since I am working out the math as I enter it.

I think I do OK since I have over 60,000 reputation points.

Recently saw chalktalk[1] which is designed for a different goal (and very rudimentary from what I've tried), but seems to be a step in that direction.

[1]: https://github.com/kenperlin/chalktalk

This is very cool and very much like what I want, but I can see how it's rudimentary. I think the only sustainable approach to these things is to build modular components and keep them separated into different modes/contexts. The advantage of that being that you can easily import symbols/functions from that particular paradigm of math into your notebook and then apply it to what you're doing in order to save time.

Have you tried LyX? https://www.lyx.org/

I have memorized its keyboard shortcuts and for most problems I'm faster with it than with pen and paper.

A second vote for Lyx - I worked through my OU maths degree using it and barely ever did my working out using pencil and paper. Instead, I'd write up the coursework "live".

You do certainly need to memorize the shortcuts and access keys for your notation, but then I can very quickly write out mathematics that I can still read a week later.

My brother[1] on the other hand does everything by hand. I even saw 7 pages of matrices & wave functions all in biro which was apparently "one equation" - I think even he thought that was a bit too much though and he finally started doing things in Mathematica.

[1] https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=9AbVcBoAAAAJ&hl=...

I did two quarters of proof-based math courses recently with pen and paper, then started using an iPad Pro with Apple Pencil, and a program called notability. I think it’s better than paper! I can erase, resize easily, move things around, but it still feels like writing with pen and paper, while making it much easier to not lose all my notes :)

Interesting. Admittedly, I haven't ever used the iPad Pro/Apple Pencil. In my personal experience, it just never felt great using most touch screens. Most styluses feel too heavy and slip too much on glossy tablet screens so it feels ill-suited to writing small stuff quickly. On a Surface Pro + whatever the Microsoft stylus is called, I find myself writing way too large and then having to constantly scroll down in order to comfortably fit things on the page. Also, all the software I've interacted with is awkward when it comes to grouping symbols so that's always an annoyance to me.

I completely agree with this problem. While I haven't solved the full problem you are describing, including graphs and diagrams, I think they will all fit nicely into this application model soon.

The biggest problem with pens is palm rejection, which some recent hardware has gotten right. This actually works find on a screen you can only write on with the pen, like a graphics tablet, but people love their mobile games, so even laptops get capacitive touchscreens in most cases these days.

I cannot wait for good tools for managing mathematical work like we have for prose today, I think it will be a real productivity boost for students as well as professionals. So many workflows get forces into Excel and Word because they are the tools that people know. While they are great at some things and pretty good swiss-army knife products, they just don't work for managing a bunch of floating diagrams/images and lots of equations.

I am actively working on this problem, see Mathpix (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mathpix/id1075870730?ls=1&mt...) which lets you create Latex by taking pictures of math, ping me at nico@mathpix.com if you have any ideas

Have you heard of these :

More recently

https://www.myscript.com/news/myscript-mathpad-the-best-hand...

https://venturebeat.com/2015/01/20/khan-academys-new-math-ha...

Wolfram Alpha is a beast when it comes to inputing farily complex math problems

It's definitely early days for me, but I've recently shifted from all pen-and-sketch-pad to just getting more comfortable with LaTeX and entering more stuff directly into LaTeX. I find it makes me think more carefully. I've put some effort into getting immediate rendering on file change using Skim and various little bits of Emacs lisp to make LaTeX editing convenient. (I'm sure I've got plenty to learn about what the LaTeX modes that come with my editor can do as well).

Have you see Paperspade (https://www.paperspade.com/)? It parses equations from English to math.

For me, expressing math as code in a high-level language like R is way more intuitive, and faster to read/write/extend/verify than formulae.

This said, my context is always data-analysis/modeling. I’ve never felt intimidated by code, though I spent many years being intimidated by certain formulae. I’m fairly certain that I’d have pursued math to a much higher level in school if the symbolic expressions were pseudo code I could mess with, but this may just be my odd learning style.

This might be a good final ending step, with a society full of code literate students, but currently we aren't anywhere near that. Students and professionals alike use math notation, and I think it is important we find ways to bridge the gap between paper and digital math representations.

Every process that has moved to computers has seen immense productivity enhancements. Production of written text, audio editing, video editing, engineering drafting, all of these things involve producing a ton of unique information in a workflow. Copy/paste, versioning (even primitive versioning saving old docs), undo/redo, and re-arranging large groups of content are just so powerful that you can't go back to life without them once you can use then second nature in a given context.

What proportion of the range of mathematical notation that professional mathematicians use would you estimate you're able to express in R?

In R, an inadequate one, but that’s not R’s goal.

I’m merely saying that in terms of symbolic representation of math, I’ve personally found code or pseudo-code the fastest to understand (but I’m not a professional mathematician!).

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