Writing math papers in pre-LaTeX era (2010) | Hacker News Reader

Writing math papers in pre-LaTeX era (2010)

mathoverflow.net

42 pointsEndXA11 comments

I have a theory that ~50% of the games/graphics industry uses row-vector notation, rather than the column-vector style that is more common default in mathematics, because when RenderMan was created typesetting tools were still so difficult. So, it was much easier to typeset M*[x,y,z,w] than to typeset a vertical column vector. (Much like it still is in this textbox).

Direct3D 1.0 and several other early trendsetters in 3D graphics took a lot of inspiration from RenderMan. And so, along with coordinate system orientations, vector notation became yet another endian-war in 3D. Now that typesetting is much easier, column notation is slowly gaining ground in the name of consistency with the math community.

Did you mean [x,y,z,w]*M?

For textbox use, my workaround is to write [x,y,z,w]^T when I want to be clear that I really mean a column vector.

Incidentally, your comment inspired me to go spelunking through some old tech memos (Standard disclaimer: RenderMan dev, opinions my own, this is my speculation, yada yada). As best as I can tell, the row vector convention in RenderMan must have came from Newman and Sproull's "Principles of Interactive Computer Graphics" [1] by way of Alvy Ray Smith who referred to the convention as "computer graphics normal form" [2]. Interestingly, that book seems to have been inspired in turn by course material from Ivan Sutherland [3], who had previously built a head-mounted display using custom hardware with a row vector times matrix multiplier unit, among other things [4].

[1] https://archive.org/details/principlesofinter00newm/page/334...

[2] http://alvyray.com/Memos/CG/Pixar/Matrix64.pdf#page=6

[3] https://www.computer.org/csdl/magazine/an/2018/04/08506443/1...

[4] http://www.medien.ifi.lmu.de/lehre/ss09/ar/p757-sutherland.p...

Interesting to get experiences from people who lived in that era.

For those of you interested in the subject I remember enjoying reading this essay also covering the topic in a cohesive way: http://www.practicallyefficient.com/2017/10/13/from-boiling-...

An example of a paper from the pre-LaTeX era (heck pre-TeX): John Nash's dissertation https://library.princeton.edu/special-collections/sites/defa...

My points of interest:

- Greek letters aren't even available! Or even sub/super-scripts! And I thought I had it hard in highschool, writing up on math with MS Word.

- Parentheses are available (PDF p. 22) but it escapes me why he uses brackets for in-text annotation where today we'd use parentheses (as I am doing right now). And it seems his typewriter doesn't even have brackets available so he hand-writes it (PDF p. 26)

- In PDF page 10, there's a couple of lines (P_{i\alpha}(s*)...) where the space left for the math expressions are too generous. I wonder how that came to be especially as for most of the document the typesetting is pretty tight.

- I am very amused at the dedication to typewrite as much as possible. For instance, there will be short lines here and there to the effect of "Let <quantification> for <domain condition>" and the words "Let" and "for" will be typewritten! I would've handwritten that whole line by myself.

Also of note is the fact that it is only 32 pages long.

There was a time where a program that produced output like here, much worse than TeX of course, but very fast on the PC computers of that time, and easy to learn, was very popular for scientific writing with formulas:

https://nomdo.nl/cw.htm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChiWriter

What environment or note-taking tool have people found to be the best for latex + markdown? I've been using VSC + extensions with git for syncing.

TeXstudio forever. Plus it has lualatex and knitr compatibility if you're into that sort of thing.

What vsc extensions are good for latex notes?

Of late I've been modernizing ExTeX[0] for integration with my markdown editor Scrivenvar[1][2] so that the editor can include TeX. My Typesetting Markdown series[3] dives into numerous reasons why I prefer to embed plain TeX in Markdown over LaTeX (skip ahead to parts 7 and 8). The text editor's TeX integration hasn't started yet[4], but if you're keen, star the GitHub page.

[0]: https://github.com/DaveJarvis/extex

[1]: https://github.com/DaveJarvis/scrivenvar/

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_dFd6UhdV8

[3]: https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/

[4]: https://github.com/DaveJarvis/scrivenvar/issues/69

I would recommend org-mode instead and yasnippet. Inline rendering of equations, and yasnippet makes writing equations super quick and easy. Also, org is just a better format than markdown.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com