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Comment by LanceH | Hacker News Reader

Bad handwriting.

At age 40 I started taking a masters in stats and had situations where I had exponents on exponents. This lead me to buy a higher resolution tablet for reading pdf's with tiny math.

I also bought a finer point pen and this helped me improve my handwriting a lot. Closing loops on "o's" or backtracing the upward line of a cursive "t" to not make a loop. With the finer point, I was able to see my imprecision and improve it.

I used to rewrite my finished work in undergrad and now my writing was improved to the point where the first draft was entirely legible.

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This right here was such an infuriating discovery for me. Math never made sense to me until I had a kindly old teacher who insisted she watch me write out every step of a problem (in community college). She pointed out that the logic was fine, I was just being sloppy with my notes which led to errors.

It was like a dam broke over night. Everything clicked and I was so pissed off that it took so long to find such a stupid issue. Better late than never I suppose...

When I was 9 I failed some question about fractions because I saw one 6 and it was just a bad written 5.

At that age it took me a while to understand where the problem was and too late to ask my teacher to reconsider it.

Well, was so intense that I remember it until today, 30 and some years later.

Ever since I failed similarly I write my sevens with a line through them to prevent them being confused for ones

I always do that, but people confuse 1 with 7 anyways, even when both are written in the same number.

I had a soccer teammate who was a grad student in mechanical engineering. I was having problems in my Trigonometry class and asked for his help. I was absolutely shocked at how precise his handwriting was when he was writing stuff down and explaining it to me. It looked like he had typed out his notations, it was crazy.

He said something similar to you, "I'm not a doctor writing prescriptions, I need to be precise. If my writing is precise, its easier to read, easier to understand now and later."

I was really blown away by how much a finer point on the pen helped me improve my writing -- something which seemed like a lost cause.

When I was 14 my math teacher requested a conference with my parents. I was mortified. All he said was that I needed to write neatly. He was correct. That's all it took to go from a B student to A+. I make a ton of mistakes if I don't write out every step (turns out, the very mistakes on this list).

In the Intro-to-C class I TA'd, we dedicated several minutes in lab to instructing students on how to properly draw an ampersand (&) character, and the other ways of drawing it so potentially confusing (especially since a + means something completely different).

Personally, the +/t handwriting issue has never been an issue for me: make sure you get a good tail on the t, and it's pretty easy to distinguish from a +. It's the x/× distinction that was always the most painful to distinguish for me.

I write the times as two crossing lines, and an X as two vertical arcs that touch in the middle. Now they are easy to distinguish. It isn't until I went looking for an image of it that I figured out how weird this is.

I also draw a y with one stroke so that it has a visible curve. That keeps a bad y and bad times from looking like each other.

I had an English calc teacher in high school who drew his 'x' as approximately ")(" (With the arcs touching-ish) and the cross in the normal way, which made it much easier to distinguish the two.

I blew several minds at my first job when I pointed out the ampersand is just a mirrored capital cursive S. Suddenly it wasn't such a mysterious character to any of them anymore.

I wish someone had forced me to learn LaTeX back in high school.

I took a course taught by a nice lady with a PhD in pure mathematics, no English skills, and handwriting that made differentiating between mu, u, and w very difficult. It was not a good time.

FWIW, if you use a pencil you should get to know your tool. Investigate different pencil options. There are quite a few cool features on mechanical pencils for instance. Try different lead hardnesses and thicknesses. Get a quality eraser.

I'm 45 and finally discovered I like softer lead. It's easier to read and smudging isn't a problem for me. I took drafting in high school but never retained any of the knowledge or put it to good use when writing.

\tangent can you recommend what to look for in a tablet for mathematics? I've got a lenovo M8 - only 8", 800p, but I think that's OK; it's the insufficient contrast of IPS screen that makes my eyes tired (suggesting AMOLED or epaper) - but I don't know the cause for sure... What did you find?

I mostly use an Amazon Fire 10" for math. It shows that it is IPS, but it really looks good, imo.

Do you have a big contrast between your screen and your room? That's a big deal. I run a blue light filter at night.

I do prefer eink and anything oled looks fantastic, but the fire looks really good, well beyond its $150 price tag. Better than my computer monitors (which are nice).

Are you reading tiny, detailed print? Is it just a resolution thing?

Lastly, are you getting older (40ish) and need reading glasses? That happened to me when crossing 40. I could still focus sharply at reading/screen distance, but I got tired. I went through that a couple years and got reading glasses -- actually just weaker versions of my nearsighted glasses. I had the doctor dial in the focal distance for screen distance, then got another pair for 12 inches are so (for a reading a book up close).

So I have three pairs of glasses, one for distance (everything sharp from 3 feet outward). These strain my eyes from 3 feet inward. You don't need reading glasses if your arms are long enough...

I have computer classes dialed in at roughly 28 inches. I can read up close, and see nearly perfectly at distance. I'm probably 20/20 at distance, but with my regular prescription I'm around 20/10.

Then the reading glasses for up close things. These are fine for computer as well, and just slightly more blurry at distance.

Thanks! I hadn't considered room lighting - though I also need it bright enough for pen and paper.

Resolution seems ok - I zoom in when needed, which is rare. Some pdf's have lines too long to fit on the screen, for the text to be large enough - but they are also rare. I think a 10" would solve that (held lanscape, 10" is basically A4 portrait width, if you zoom out the margins). So it doesn't feel like resolution is a problem - although some people say fuzzier text tires eyes.

I went from something like 0.5 to 0.4 and then 0.2. Now I'm finding 0.3 pens ideal.

I have 0.28 and 0.38 and I probably choose based on the paper. If I choose one pen, it's the Uniball Signo DX 0.38. That seems enough for cheap paper and precise enough that everything is legible without extreme care.

If I were doing math I would prefer to use the 0.28 version and make sure my paper is good. Anything smaller and it feels like I'm drawing and not writing. I think the 0.2's are mostly used for art.

I stopped handwriting math to turn in my freshman year of college, LaTex was just too good looking.

that seems like a ton of work, especially for problem sets

You get very fast at it, especially if you start early in college - I actually live tex'd the lectures I went to starting sophomore year.

Nowadays I mostly use markdown with inline latex as formatting with latex can be a pain.

It’s a matter of practice. My kid takes lecture notes live using LaTeX. Of course that reflects a ton of practice on PSets and papers over the years.

For the most part, just a matter of practice. One advantage that it has is that you have less incentive to make multiple simplifications in a single step. Copy a line, make a rearrangement. Copy a line, combine two like terms. Since you aren't re-writing everything that is unchanged, there isn't as much of a cost to showing your steps.

I did get a rather funny look from a professor in grad school when I turned in a fully typeset document on a timed take-home exam.

I copied (most of) my method for taking live LaTeX notes from this guy.

https://castel.dev/post/lecture-notes-1/

I love this setup! I mostly used Macdown in college (and now obsidian.md).

I had a few professors require LaTeX solutions. After a little practice it was only slower than handwritten answers for some symbol-heavy assignments. So much time was spent comparatively on solving the problems that it was a negligible overhead regardless.

Extra fine Japanese fountain pens are the solution to all your problems.

They're great...just not for math. Use a decent pencil instead, like a Graphgear 1000 and some HB lead.

Pens are fine for math. I often used a fine point gel pen in college. However, you have to have a high degree of confidence in what you're writing. If you make a lot of mistakes (either actual mistakes or just wrote down something incorrectly or with a misspelling), then pencils are definitely better.

Only if you make sure to have the right kind of lead, eraser, and paper.

A crossed out line followed by a legible one is better than a line written over gray mush. Or mush from papers rubbing against each other over months.

But pens also assume that scratch space isn’t a limitation.

Pens seem crazy until you get used to writing that way, then you can’t turn back.

I got to a point where I would just write down all my solutions on a final paper to turn in for my math assignments.

I did everything in pen, bc of handwriting issues and pencils. I simply burned through sheets and sheets of paper with my preliminary work- then copy everything to something both legible and presentable.

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