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How To Enter Equations Quickly In Class?
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."
http://www1.chapman.edu/~jipsen/mathml/asciimath.html
Firstly, the Mac has an incredibly rich simple character set. This is NOT coincidental, as Apple copied their editing capabilities from the publishing industry decades ago. E.g. in TextEdit type alt-b and you'll see a '' integral symbol (looks correct as I type it, hopefully the post wont change it). If you can learn these keyboard shortcuts (learning-curve arguments aside), you *may* be able to type these directly into your mac in class, BUT... If you take notes by hand, then transcribe them into your mac using these short cuts, or simply via the Mac's Font (e.g. TextEdit --> commant-T) and characters (e.g. via the gear drop-down in the Font) pane, you're doing yourself a much bigger favor.
âoeThe wall between art and engineering exists only in our minds.â -- Theo Jansen
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...
If you're just interested in organization and searching, I'd highly recommend the LiveScribe Pulse smartpen - all the smarts are in the pen, which isn't too expensive compared to a tablet, and you can buy the compatible notebooks cheaply. All your notes get backed up to your computer when you dock your pen, it does a great job searching for a specific piece of text. My handwriting is a disaster, and I have never seen a search fail so far - I believe that it actually uses the sequence of pen motions (not just OCR on the final result) and it can tolerate some of the letters being unreadable. It has other features as well, such as recording audio (the mic has a decent gain) and syncing it with your notes. They also have an SDK and are launching an app store, so in the future you should be able to make good use of the ARM processor in the pen.
This is not the old Equation Editor 3.0 from Word 2003, which is a crippled version of MathType, but rather a brand new equation facility in Word 2007, which is also the basis for the new equation support in the OneNote 2010 beta another poster has referred to.
The Word 2007 equation editor supports a "linear format" for completely keyboard-based input, which is based on TeX-like commands like "\sum" and "\int" and is documented in this Unicode technical note: Unicode Nearly Plain-Text Encoding of Mathematics
I've been using this for my math classes since last semester, with great success. Once you master the linear format, it's not difficult to keep up if you have a reasonable typing rate to begin with.
Hi, I'm a physics professor. I say, take your notes on paper. Math is the most computer-incompatible writing system ever designed. You'll never ever be able to type equations fast enough to keep up with me on the blackboard.
And even if you manage to find a math entry system that's fast enough, it won't help you with the diagrams, graphs, and sketches.
Of course, I don't practice what I preach: my own lecture notes are in text files. But that's because to me, "block ramp friction mu=0.2, 1 kg 30deg 1m long, find final v. U=4.9 Wf=1.7 v=2.5" is a complete set of notes for a 20-minute segment of lecture.
Oh, also: write in pencil. I guarantee you that whenever you bring a pen, I will spend the entire lecture correcting minor mistakes by erasing with the heel of my hand, changing variable notations, and editing diagrams and drawings halfway through working a problem.
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.)