How I'm able to take notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim
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There is absolutely no dearth of study material on the internet. It's one thing to take notes as part of your study process. There it helps solidify your understanding. But surely taking notes on the fly when you have been barely introduced to the subject isn't going to help with that.
A textbook is an infinitely better reference than any notes one could take in class. Read the damn book. Lecture time should be for asking questions when you have a freaking live expert professor literally presenting the material to you. Ask all the small, nuanced questions that you can think of in the moment, which you can’t find answers to easily online or in the book.
Not to downplay the efficient workflow here, but there is zero chance that this person’s notes are actually better than a real textbook.
all of these things are solved problems
I also doubt you are aware how seriously distorted the result of the speech to text conversion would be for a non-professional recording of any non-trivial lecture given in English (e.g. domain specific terms).
also remember how i said it records audio and logs in real time? yeah, just listen back to it and correct the one or two words it garbles. works just fine. people want to complain not use the solutions that exist. i'm sure writing in latex is trivial and doesn't have you googling issues every 2 hours lol
but...
>Ask all the small, nuanced questions that you can think of in the moment, which you can’t find answers to easily online or in the book.
and then what, forget them by the time you go back to the book? Why was the book so good again if it doesn't answer all the questions? It makes more sense to record the answer to those useful questions you ask, maybe in the form of some notes.
Your study notes will contain parts of the textbook, of course, but also explanations that are not in the book, maybe examples that you find useful and that might not be in the book, counterexamples, doubts, schematics... No textbook will have 100% of the contents you need to study.
So I can appreciate what OP has done here. I took notes in LaTeX for most of my undergraduate math courses (and some graduate ones), and I found it to be a fairly valuable exercise.
The mechanical task of taking notes is one of the most important parts of actually absorbing the material. It is not an either-or. Hearing/seeing the information, processing it in a way that makes sense to you individually, and then mechanically writing it down in a legible manner is one of the main methods that your brain learns. It's one of the primary reasons that taking notes is important in the first place. This is referred to as the "encoding hypothesis" [1].
There are actually even studies [2] that show that tools that assist in more efficient note taking, such as taking notes via typing rather than by hand, are actually detrimental to absorbing information, as it makes it easier for you to effectively pass the information directly from your ears to your computer without actually doing the processing that is required when writing notes by hand. This is why many universities prefer (or even require) notes to be taken by hand, and disallow laptops in class.
1: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0361476X78...
2: https://www.npr.org/2016/04/17/474525392/attention-students-...
I never had to go back and read any of them. Just the process of typing them up in the first place firmly fixed all the knowledge in my mind. When taking the final and AP test, I could see the notes I had taken in my mind.
Writing or typing didn’t make a difference. Just the rephrasing and condensing alone was enough. (Which, again, reënforces your point. I still had to consciously avoid “pass-thru” regurgitation)
What's it like working at the New Yorker?
(explanation: this is a joke based on the way nobody uses diaresis marks anymore for any word other than naive, except for the New Yorker style guide. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-curse-of-... )
Note that I'm not at all belittling the study of history...just trying to show the counter to the parent post isn't 100% relevant here IMO.
Yeah, Math is a much different subject when it comes to notetaking and processing the information you learn. There are a few equations to memorize, but to really excel at the subject, you need to learn more why's than you do what's
This might very well be anecdotal, but in my experience, note taking in class (by hand or on computer) was nearly always how you describe it here. Everyone was expected to copy out every word on the board, from 6 years old to ~20 years old. Maybe it works for some, but to me class was to some extent an exercise in mindless dactilography.
I have gone through most of my middle-school and some high-school in Italy, and after that completed high-school in Moldova. Classes in Moldova were exactly how you described, and I hated it, while in Italy it was exactly the opposite.
Having the teacher explaining and expanding on the content in the course books while students take their own personalized notes is much more efficient and productive.
I'm sure history is maybe different where the note taking is probably easy enough and reinforces what you learned, but with math you're not exactly comprehending everything you write down at the same speed as human language. When you're in high school: "The storming of the Bastille happened in..." is different than scribbling down the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus and wondering WTH is on your paper.
The best I think is still to come prepared for class by having read the required readings before hand.
According to this highly interesting HN thread, Alan Kay apparently doesn't take (much) notes [2]. I also found Warren Buffett's tip to focus on information that "doesn't expire or expires very slowly" an excellent rule of thumb for daily life. Obviously, with decades of books under their belts both of them are outstanding systems thinkers, so it must be true that they just don't need to take notes that much.
I'm a 30-something, but I like to trust my brain's tendency to forget more and more. Most of the stuff I don't remember probably wasn't relevant for my current mental models. If it's important, it sticks in one way or another. (I try to reinforce this by using the aformentioned method of loci, but I'm not as confident with this as I would like to be. It involves creating "sticky" images for the brain, and thus it always requires at least several seconds for me to "store" something that way.)
One probably won't be an A-level student with this approach, though -- but in trying to live a meaningful life, letting things (information) go often helps a lot. It's a great bullshit filter for everything.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci
Mathematics already is a sort of hierarchical interconnected structure that allow you to easily remember everything, as long as you understand it. The understanding is the hard part, not remembering it. Mathematics is not a set of random facts that you have to memorize.
There's almost certainly an advantage to learning to think about math using a publishable symbol set like LaTeX.
We learn by reinforcement; with feedback loops that may take until weeks later in a typical university course.
> There are actually even studies [2] that show that tools that assist in more efficient note taking, such as taking notes via typing rather than by hand, are actually detrimental to absorbing information, as it makes it easier for you to effectively pass the information directly from your ears to your computer without actually doing the processing that is required when writing notes by hand.
Handwriting notes is impractical for some people due to e.g. injury and illegibility.
The linked study regarding retention and handwritten versus typed notes has been debunked with references that are referenced elsewhere in comments on this post. There have been a few studies with insufficient controls (lack of randomization, for one) which have been widely repeated by educators who want to be given attention.
Doodling has been shown to increase information retention. Maybe doodling as a control really would be appropriate.
Banning laptops from lectures is not respectful of students with injury and illegible handwriting. Asking people to put their phones on silent (so they can still make and take emergency calls) and refrain from distracting other students with irrelevant content on their computers is reasonable and considerate.
(What a cool approach to math note-taking. I feel a bit inferior because I haven't committed to learning that valuable, helpful skill and so that's stupid and you're just wasting your time because that's not even necessary when all you need to do is retain the information you've paid for for the next few months at most. If course, once you get on the job, you'll never always be using that tool and e.g. latex2sympy to actually apply that theory to solving a problem that people are willing to pay for. So, thanks for the tips and kudos, idiot)
On the other hand for something like a psychology class where the material is mostly in English prose, then I feel like typing does help. Typing English is not so mechanically different than writing down English since each letter is still in a one-to-one correspondence.
The entire article is very clear and well thought out. To me it signals a disciplined and methodical mind, that learns from doing. And we are lucky it's willing to share.
I fully agree with your parent comment that this article is a demonstration of multiple positive traits of the author, I respect him/her a lot. But also, I cannot help but laugh a bit at myself and the others who up-voted the article. That in no way diminishes my respect for anybody, including the author.
FYI - I've relied on LaTex for submitting to multiple peer reviewed journals, my thesis and my thesis defense presentation (LaTex Beamer), so I fully understand and appreciate the skill level of the author here
Cheers!
I found that taking structured, detailed notes in lectures forced me to pay close attention & work constantly to keep up with the lecturer. For the courses I did that for, it felt like it was equivalent to doing an entire extra revision session with the lecture material for me - I had to do much less work to go over the material after the lecture in order to make sure I understood it, so it was a far more efficient use of my time that just 'attending' the lectures and then doing revision work afterwards.
Some people can maintain that level of connection with the lecture without taking notes of course, but that’s what worked for me.
Me neither. However, what I do once in a while is after I've sat through a tutorial (in person or video) I recall and make notes. It helps me immensely to a) Structure my thoughts b) Recall the actual content which reinforces it in my memory.
As a student, I always found that writing notes/answers on a topic/question made me understand the concept that much better as well as connect them to form a larger picture (e.g., connect concepts in math and physics).
And precisely because math is so content-dense, having your notes is important, as they will be organized in a similar way to how the content is organized in your mind. Yeah, there is a lot of study material but most of the time, unless the class follows a textbook literally, you'll want your own set of notes with only the class contents, and you'll want to organize that in a way that is easy for you to understand.
The point of the lecture is to assimilate structure and basic understanding, not to produce a neat set of notes instantly. To take notes to this detail means you're putting more time into the note taking than the work.
Use a pen and paper. Write down structure as it happens. Write down things you understand, short hand. Write down things you don't for later review. After 2 hour long linear circuits lectures I regularly waltzed off with a couple of pages of loose A4 for review. A lot of the time, our lecturers would give us a copy of the OHP stack if we asked them as well.
Write your notes up at the end of the day with reference material at hand and no compromises. You can structure, extrapolate and transform things into your own understandable language then.
As if the average modern day student is going to do this.
I did what OP did and it worked for me because instead of dozing off I was focused on keeping up with the lecturer. It worked for me personally.
More on topic, the standard vim-latex bindings are so incredible, for example "`a" (backtick + a) expands to "alpha", "`b" (backtick + b) expands to beta, then we also have "`/" (backtick + slash) which expands to "\frac{<++>}{<++>}" where "<++>" are called bullet points that you can jump to using <C-j>.
I too, was able to write LaTeX notes in class, it was awesome.
This is the problem.
Yes I dozed off in lectures too but only when I knew the material already (preparation - another modern day student failing!) or had a heavy night or a starchy breakfast.
Like I said I'm fairly experienced with LaTeX. I've used it for technical documentation for 20 years.
Picking an example, I did an EE degree. I sat there and watched a hundred students scribbling out a lecturer's slide with basic function laplace transforms in it. The lecturer moved on leaving 99 people with half a table of transforms. Me, I'm sitting there with <<laplace basic transform table>>. I took this home, reviewed notes and added a reference to my textbook which contained it, added a sticky note to the book page sticking out of the side. Then I spent some time playing with them and trying them out and building valuable real understanding.
Now I've completely forgotten what you even use a laplace transform for 20 years later but I can find out in 10 minutes with that textbook and my notes which I still have in a concise manor.
If I were a professor, I’d ban all electronics from the room. All the decent professors handed out copies of the notes anyway, or wrote them in real-time on an overhead projector, for easy copying later.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.ksnt.com/amp/news/local-new...
The act of writing them actually helps one to remember -- I never went back and organized, edited, or searched through notes I took, because I remembered most of the material, and what I didn't was in the book.
They also used to write cuneiform :p What's your point here?
>The act of writing them actually helps one to remember
Source for this, in comparison to typing?
www.medicaldaily.com/why-using-pen-and-paper-not-laptops-boosts-memory-writing-notes-helps-recall-concepts-ability-268770%3famp=1
Assuming that everyone learns the same way you do is just false. Some people really like mind maps, I don't find them personally helpful but I don't tell people it's a useless technique or that they're wrong. If a student can't be trusted to have a laptop without spending the lecture browsing Facebook, then why should the lecturer care? That student is only hurting their own academic performance, it shouldn't stop others from being able to learn in a manner that benefits themselves.
Laptops are generally disruptive to the entire class, and (anecdotally, but I’ve done a lot of higher learning) almost all of their use is not for note taking or anything related to the class.
So why not ban them? Many professors do.
Because some students are using them to take notes, and banning electronics harms the learning of those students.
They can, but do they ?
Given my experience as a student in the US long time ago, it rarely seemed so. I am all for treating them as adults as long as its not disturbing/distracting others in the class.
> As if the average modern day student is going to do this.
Why wouldn't modern day students do this? It's one of the best way to study that I ever used.
I imagine a lot of that could be avoided with some assistance from the education sector along the way.
My eldest wants to be a doctor so I've tried to share as much of my experience with her on how to learn so she doesn't have to make my mistakes as they still don't teach them any of this today, at least in the UK.
If that is the case, then I fear little from the upcoming students chomping at my old ankles in the jobs market!
Transcribing my lecture scribbles to neater notes later in the day (or sometimes later in the week depending on scheduling) was important in solidifying the knowledge or, more importantly, realising that something hadn't twigged in my head as I thought it had (giving me chance to look up the matter and/or ask the lecturer for clarification next time, instead of being surprised by not understanding when new information was built on that part or it came up in an exam).
It was the implication that people don't have and won't make time to review, tidy, and, where relevant, expand upon or question those notes afterwards, that I was responding to.
Another possible method would be taking written notes during lectures, then typesetting them afterwards. However, I found it was preferable to revise my notes soon after the lecture, at least 1-2 days following, while my memory was still fresh.
It takes a lot of discipline and time to write very high quality notes and to study. I spent more time thinking about things and experimenting with ideas and writing notes than I did in lectures or tutorials or labs.
I am fairly sure he passed more than one course with this approach. The blogpost says that he started using LaTeX to take notes during his second semester. The screenshots show introductory complex analysis, which is usually taught somewhat later.
Another vote for paper or neutral formats here. They persist longer than vendor whims!
Case in point I wrote a lot of my work up on TechWriter on an Acorn RiscPC. Where are we now with that. Hmm...
This one totally caught me by surprise for ref when I upgraded, perhaps foolishly. I installed OneNote 2016 and am sticking my fingers in my ears until I have some time to deal with it.
Annoyingly they're going to EOL the cloud connectivity for it in 2023 and then the product in 2025. I've taken all my notebooks offline and will deal with it at some point, probably in 2025 :D
However they also misunderstand people's reluctance to put all your eggs in a large basket out of your control that disappears in a puff of smoke if you stop paying for it plus their ability to want to avoid paying a monthly fee.
At some point it'll backfire.
https://www.google.com/url?q=https://linguistics.ucla.edu/pe...
"Participants using laptops are more likely to take lengthier transcription-like notes with greater verbatim overlap with the lecture"
In other words, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with taking notes on a laptop if you don't copy everything verbatim. If you force yourself to process the material you should have no problem.
Assuming a class isn't already being recorded (many/most at my university were), the best solution is probably to record audio on your phone and take hand written notes. Then go back and transcribe the hand written notes while referring to the audio in to the computer.
I sometimes do this; it's also nice that I can snap a photo of a slide with the tablet and insert it into the notes.
TBH, I mostly type notes, in part because my handwriting is really bad and, if I'm going to write something up about an event cutting and pasting is easier. OTOH, I sometimes prefer to have fairly cursory notes knowing that I can always go back to exactly what was said if I need/want to.
Outside of mathematical lectures, I find writing notes in something like notepad++ more fruitful. I can attempt mirror the structure of the speakers' argument using tabs/indentations, and quickly reformat the document as the logical structure becomes clearer.
In the study, there was no measured difference in memory between the two note taking styles; the groups' factual scores were not significantly different in any of the tests.
Where things vary is the non-memory questions: are the notes helping you understand and apply the material better, and how advantageous are they to your studying?
In both of those categories, handwritten notes win out.
Finally, there is no "because"; the authors can only speculate. I am not aware of any studies that can actually purport to say why handwritten notes are better.
The point of notes for me is to refresh my memory after the fact because my human memory isn't reliable enough. They are especially useful for capturing finer quantified details.
During a typical lecture or discussion/meeting, I find it far more useful focus most my cognitative abilities on what's being described/presented to me and only commit critical information to memory. The majority of my energy spent is processing the language and concepts discussed, linking language and concepts togethe, connecting those concepts with previous experiences/knowledge, and generating new ideas/relationships... all in what seems a fairly random order as needed. This allows you to ask informed questions when I see things missing in the conceptual structure I have that I might otherwise miss later and have no means to extract that information because my notes may not have the relationship or fact I need.
Later on when reviewing the information, I utilize the critical conceptual structure/framework I created about the discussion to reason through it. If there are pieces of information missing, it's pretty obvious and I can refer to my notes. If I missed the concept I at least have a second shot at recovering the idea from highly detailed and clear to read notes I took.
I could not imagine trying to write LaTeX on the fly during a in depth mathematics discussion, I'd have far too much focus on syntax formulating correct notation structures than the concept at hand when it's far easier to translate using a camera phone or handwriting.
I personally like this idea of vim+LaTeX. It is close to what I did while studying math, though I write notes down with pen and paper. Mostly I wrote down them once and read them once before exam. I remember some issues with this approach, but the one I remember most was due to incomplete recording, not due to "I didn't managed to understand this mess of greek letters while listening a lecture".
I remember some problems due to inability to understand, it was Galua theory, but I solved them by reading books. I had read three different authors on topic, and I think it was the only way, I think that any style of keeping records would not help more then mine.
And I hate to write greek letters by hand. There is one names xi, I never managed to figure out how to write it, so xi looked in my recordings as some messy knot of lines. All my xi's was different, but there was a bright side of this: xi was the only one, that was so messy, so I could understand that it is xi when I saw this mess. With LaTex xi looks nice and clear.
At first it's just to understand how my hand has to move to write it efficiently, then I move on to attempting to write precisely. Finally, I write it over and over pushing myself to get it to the speed at which it will not interrupt the rest of the notes when it happens. This approach has be wildly successful for me and while it does take some time it is always time well spent.
Recently, I ran into § and just had to figure it out. Honestly, I was out of my depth in the Wikipedia article and I don't even know what it represents. It was fun, though.
This is the symbol for section, it means that a new section is starting, or it may be a reference to a section number.
As I understand, Spanish is much like this, it keeps spelling simple. If so, then there are nothing surprising that transliteration from cyrillic into latin make sense from Spanish point of view.
If you remember only one thing about teaching: There are multitudes of learning styles and only a minority of students will have similar ones than you. Probably, the (as I imagine) magical experience of remembering after writing something down is so intense that it is hard to let that feeling go and let others have their different styles.
Edit: Xi was the worst for me, too. I think the standard letter form as portrayed in print does not lend itself to quick handwriting. Also, if I compare how much time is spend in elementary school teaching how to efficiently write the Latin alphabet to how there is no introduction in university regarding the Greek alphabet (except if you are lucky a complete table with their pronunciation), it is almost ludicrous. Yes, we are all adults at that point in time, but for some reason I still didn't get the idea to google for "how to write greek letters efficiently" back then [1][2].
[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=how+to+write+greek+letters+efficie...
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-learning-secret...
So while there are certainly some people who are better with digital notes it is absolutely not " pointless to agree or disagree."
This discussion is timely as I have been researching smart pens the last few days which can give you exact copies of your paper notes into an app. Anyone here used them? Do you like them?
I've found that live-TeXing lets me keep half my attention at best on the lecture. The people I've talked to about it agree. Also, when the professor requests for the class to be transcribed, the live-TeXing duty is rotated among the students as to not unduly impose on one of us.
I eventually gave up and moved to taking notes with an iPad and an Apple pencil, which has the quickness of handwritten notes, and the availability of digitized notes -- if I'm looking for something I can usually find it pretty quickly by navigating to the class and the (labeled) lectures.
Of course if live-TeXing works for someone, more power to them!
Nonetheless, there's definitely a lesson to be learned here with respect to the usage of templates. In essence it seems like OP developed his own shorthand language for both text and mathematics. I'm always curious to hear about approaches that try to solve the bandwidth problem (as we have quickscript [1] for hand-writing and stenography [2] for typing). Most interestingly, I'd be curious to know whether these short-hand notations are actually capable of improving learning and assimilation, and whether they'd work for a general audience.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quikscript [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography
That's an absolutely incredible feat, especially considering that the notes look pretty much textbook-quality!
Although personally, I have never been able to both absorb a lecture and take electronic notes. If I need comprehension, my notes have always had to be pen-and-paper.
Once again, this is an incredible feat.
I agree. However, if I want to be able to refer to them afterwards, I really need to take electronic notes.
I've never seen ascimath before but I wish I had because I think I partially reinvented the wheel. I wrote some extensions to Pandoc (and an associated emacs major-mode) for scientific note-taking, with a main portion being a "simplified latex" for writing equations in a more readable way. The key features of simplified latex format are matlab-style matrices, UTF8 support, easy exponents, and better formatting (e.g. functions automatically use roman instead of italics). There are still a few edge cases mine doesn't catch, but I'm in the process of rewriting it in Haskell and rewrite is more stable.
https://code.launchpad.net/~mwshinn/+junk/notes3
or for documentation:
https://bazaar.launchpad.net/~mwshinn/+junk/notes3/view/head...
Open/LibreOffice math formulas use a syntax that's clearly inspired by it. Unfortunately it's very lacking in documentation.
Another important question is are you looking for presentational or semantic math? For presentational fine tuning I'm afraid nothing can beat the flexibility of TeX combined with a huge body of Q&A (on stack exchange and elsewhere)...
* You coded since you where 15 years old, wrote your own game engine, wanted to cure cancer and save the world, and now your job is to copy text from one document to another.
He managed to get another job. But figured out he wanted to work with actual software development, and it also seems to be a shortage of software developers. But it was virtually impossible to get a job without a degree or experience. So he's now at age 45 enrolling a five year university program to become an engineer on paper ...
The process of writing things down on paper helped me absorb the information, but beyond that I never really looked back at the notes.
Generally I could find the information I needed in a better form somewhere else. If anything, the notes mainly helped me review broadly which topics were covered on which days.
For math specifically, I always found that what helped me most was to come up with a general "shape" of how I used the paper when solving a problem of a particular type. Then I would end up with a visual that helped me know which bits of information I was missing and what I needed to do where to find the answer.
It's different from the "draw a picture" thing, really more of a knolling[1] of the problem down on paper. If all the things are in their places, then the answer to the problem is straight-forward to come up with.
Edit:
Mise en place [2] might also be a good way to describe it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Sachs_(artist)#Knolling
If your use case is similar to the author's, perhaps consider taking your environment and leaning hard into customization. As he's proven, it's very much worth it. Seems like it would be much less useful to copy his configs rather than building your own organic system after years of use, though - which is what he did.
I really like vim, personally, but I encourage my coworkers more familiar with Windows to use nano over vi (nobody wants to type that extra m, for some reason) because they're less likely to mess things up. Better off for them to learn their own way rather than being dumped in the middle of the vi desert with no way to exit.
This is a great point and one I've been thinking about more recently. Tools and/or setups like the one displayed in the post with this level of specificity or complexity seem like they would be almost useless packaged up as a standalone. Much more valuable would be the system on which this was built (vim and the collections of extensions he used, not saying this is anywhere near an idea workflow but as you know if you use vim - it is extensible in its own right). Or, rather than that system, to take inspiration in it and design tools with much more intentional flexibility to allow people to build their experience.
I recently had a great conversation about how science educators might wish to have 3 brown 1 blue style animations or experiments, but such a programming tool would be much too difficult to teach to the educators. I think that is totally true, 3b1b generates his videos programmatically and while I believe some version of his tool is open source, he does not offer any support. But there is something to the idea of having one's own publishing tool and workflow to allow the exploration of ideas in whatever field it may be. For Science teachers, they ought to be able to play in a tool like 3b1b uses, but it can't be his exact one, it seems they'd need some well thought out foundation upon which to express their mental models of physics or geometry or whatever it is.
3b1b about page; first item is his modeling approach: https://www.3blue1brown.com/faq
3b1b animation: https://github.com/3b1b/manim
In retrospect I think this was completely insane. I was so preoccupied with the mundane details of layout and presentation that many of the important technical details the professors were talking about went right by me. I'm amazed I managed to get by with this style.
One of the courses I did best in was one for which the blackboard presentation was drawn from the textbook, and in that one I did not bother with the elaborate note taking, just relied on the textbook. For some reason I never made the connection between me doing unusually well in that course and the fact that I wasn't distracted by note taking.
If I were to do it all over again I would make my notes merely capture the information (and if I knew the information was in my text, just capture enough to identify where), and if I really wanted beautifully laid out notes I would rewrite them after class, with the added benefit that the rewriting would be an implicit review.
Although some students try to take notes on a computer during the first day of my classes, I have never seen one who tried to do that after the second or third lecture. The paper method (or, equivalently, using a stylus to hand-write on a screen) is simply better suited to the dynamic of a class. An effective class is not a linear presentation of material, a sort of recitation of a book by a professor. And effective notes are not transcriptions of the class material. An effective class weaves around through a topic, building on interactions with the students. This often involves departures from a simple path that, transcribed in real-time, would be footnotes within footnotes within footnotes, "Inception" style. And of course mathematical material tends to involve a lot of diagrams. Hand-written notes, with lots of arrows between ideas and boxes with sketches, are not just a good way of making a record of a class, but they are a great way of understanding what's going on in real time.
The only place I could see this detailed note-taking method working would be in a class where the teacher essentially reproduced a book in class. But is that the kind of class that justifies the cost of tuition?
I have two anecdotes I'd like to share.
1. A student came to me to ask a question about something that came up in class. I asked to see her notes, to get a clearer idea of what was confusing her. The notes were amazingly insightful and clear. I asked how she took those notes, which contained some things I had said and others I had not said. She replied "I don't write down what you say, I write down what I think you mean." This student will likely be a professor in a few years, and I envy the students who will take her classes.
2. Last term, I recommended that my students try the Cornell note-taking method. (See http://lsc.cornell.edu/notes.html for an example, although there are many treatments of the method online, including videos.) The students who tried it seemed to enjoy it, and it may be no accident that the class leader was one of them.
This way I could focus on the lecture itself - and as you can't learn this stuff without doing it my "real" notes were made later while doing exercises.
- Formula auto-buildup with automatic replacements of \stuff with Unicode keeps the mess of backslashes and braces more readable (and it also allowed me to immediately spot where I mistyped something)
- I used snippet-like things for parts I had to type a few times, such as a formula that's revisited a handful of times alter.
- Some things are simply easier to type in Word (with UnicodeMath) than LaTeX, such as a^12 being automatically what a^{12} is in LaTeX or fractions being written as a/b, thus requiring fewer braces. Also, as a user of a non-US keyboard layout back then, UnicodeMath's use of () instead of {} for invisible grouping and automatically resizing parentheses meant a lot less typing in general and less syntax to inadvertently break the layout.
The only thing I could not do in real-time was figures where I often did a quick sketch on paper and in the evening converted that into a nice drawing. But text and math was (at least for me) easily writable in real-time and generally required no post-processing or prettification. Assigning certain styles to keyboard shortcuts was also something the author probably used snippets for, but the end result for the typing experience is pretty much the same.
I did write notes by hand the preceding year, averaging about 7 pages of notes per lecture. Others have mentioned it too, the very act of writing notes helps remembering. For the handwritten notes I could just as well have bought the book by the professor, but I didn't do that on purpose. For me, there was no difference in being able to remember my notes between handwriting and typing. And generally I did spend most of the lecture writing and understanding came later when solving the assignments.
A couple of things I love about this setup:
I can write in Markdown and drop to LaTeX when I need to forumalate any equations.
For homework, I can implement a quick Python script inline to build intuition behind a topic.
I can use Sympy to simplify and solve for more complex derivations. This outputs LaTeX which I can paste into the requisite Markdown cell.
With Plotly, I can quickly create a nice 2D or 3D visualization.
E.g. find critical points on a surface:
e = (x-y+2)*(x**2+y**2-9)
solve([e.diff(x), e.diff(y)], [x, y])
I also decided that I wanted to keep lecture notes in LaTeX, and the best advice I have for anyone is to just practice. Start from LyX if it helps, but just make sure that you grind down the rough edges. It takes a long time, but like many skills that are worth learning, it takes lots of effort but the payoff is worth it.
Fully enough, I would have exactly the opposite recommendation: Start by writing LaTeX out manually, then move on to LyX when you have a good understanding.
This is due to a combination of (1) needing to already know about LaTeX features before you can know to look for them in LyX (buried in menus or whatever) and (2) although LaTeX errors are much rarer when you're using LyX, when you do get them they're often really confusing ones. I'd say that using LyX requires greater knowledge of LaTeX than using LaTeX directly, just applied less often.
The benefit of LyX is not that you avoid needing to know about LaTeX. It's that you don't have to see it when you're editing your content. Equations with a lot of subscripts and superscripts come to mind; anyone who claims that it is easier to find and fix mistakes in a nested superscript in the raw LaTeX rather than just clicking directly in rendered representation and fixing it in place is, frankly, lying, if only to themselves.
Easy to install, wysiwym, works out-of-the-box!
It is not wysiwyg though. But for me the convenience of distributing my Markdown+LaTeX source itself that can render in any browser without a separate compilation/processing step is a huge win!
See https://github.com/susam/texme#get-started if you are curious how it works.
It was fine. I was in the habit of TeXing up my homework anyway so was fairly practiced, and I have shit handwriting and know I'll never reference anything I write on paper, or have it to look at in a few years. I also don't get that much out of lectures.
YMMV
It's nice to have it to reference now though.
This helped most in doing assignments and is what I’d recommend to others. I would write by pencil and paper then type as LaTeX. This forced me to review my solutions and fix mistakes or improve them.
I didn’t attempt to get too fancy with plots in real-time (I kept a notebook for those courses) but I did do graph theory and commutative diagrams (category theory) with tikz.
There are some lectures where every week something truly unique happens that is not available in any one book in the whole world, AND you have to know it well for your area or bc of a hard test.
But in all other cases, where the information can be found in some textbook or it is some well studied subject, my opinion is it's not worth it. Texing can turn into an escape from actually learning the stuff
For those who aren't already familiar with Vim, Kile 3.0 beta is a fine substitute. It does most of what's described in the post in a GUI environment.
If you are writing a considerable amount of latex his setup is really cool. I will you these ideas but using emacs in stead of vim. Wonderful job!!
https://vi.stackexchange.com/questions/7466/what-is-the-diff...
And there is a community-maintained repository of snippets: https://github.com/honza/vim-snippets
I wonder if there was any meaningful improvement on this approach. Even just adding a nice UI to fix errors would've made it really useful.
Think of a big Kindle, good battery, and really good writing experience (much like paper). I can note on pdfs, it has handwriting recognition, exports well and is otherwise a joy to use. I used to have a top of the line Samsung tablet before, and was never really happy with it for taking notes and reading.
It looks really cool, but pricey for what it can do.
And all the notes look so beautiful.
I'm looking forward to seeing how the author live-TeX's figures - I'd love to get better at creating figures in TeX even in a slower, more offline context.
Having to drop to Python in some cases seems non-ideal though. If only there were some editor with good, customisable scripting built-in.....
I want to ask if this is common. Do students not find that other people do it?
But really the takeaway is the auto-completion. Incredibly useful.
Just one grievance: if you are concerned with parsing your latex (even if that's only possible while you restrict yourself), you should use the parentheses as math delimiters: `\( x + z\)`
There is no way I would be able to take these notes, live, and learn the mathematics simultaneously. So this approach wouldn't be a good idea for me, and perhaps most people.
But if you're able to do that, then it's doubly impressive.
https://www.quora.com/Can-people-actually-keep-up-with-note-...
> There, I explained my workflow of taking lecture notes in LaTeX using Vim and how I draw figures in Inkscape.
Looks like the author was using Inkscape earlier but may have switched to something else recently. You can draw impressively beautiful diagrams in LaTeX with TikZ although it can be a lot of work to do so with TikZ which would make it difficult for live note taking.
Polar allows students and researchers to keep all their research in one place, take notes, highlights, annotations, etc.
You can tag your books and suspend resume reading without losing your place.
It also supports sync with Anki which is rather nice.
The one caveat is that I don't (yet) support math as well as I would like.
Latex is supported by summernote but I haven't enabled the module yet. I usually wait for enough people to complain but math is definitely something I want to support.
So I write plain text files with Markdown + LaTeX, slap a single line of TeXMe JavaScript either at the top or bottom, and open the file with browser to see the rendered math.
Like the OP I use Vim too with some customization with :ino and :ab. Nothing beats the editing productivity and convenience of Vim!
Say I perform these mappings:
:noremap jk <Esc>
:inoremap jk <Esc>
For example, try:
:ab hn Hacker News
what is the point of recreating everything in the textbook again?