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I have always wondered how professional mathematicians work day to day. It depends on their field of course, but I guess most still use pen and paper (or a digi
by filleokus 8y ago
I have always wondered how professional mathematicians work day to day. It depends on their field of course, but I guess most still use pen and paper (or a digital version, i.e iPad Pro + Apple Pencil / Wacom). I have at least never seen any tools for "explorative" manipulation of symbolic expressions. TeX etc works great for final type setting, but when going from mind to _something_ I guess that something is still paper, or an equivalent. Would be really interesting to see the equivalent of an IDE / good text editor for math, perhaps with pen input for speed.
- xelxebar 8y agoI'm a Ph.D. student in a pure math field, and just coming from personal experience, the overall relationship with TeX is a pretty strained one. The overwhelming majority of working out is done by hand on paper or a chalk board. That said, as an experiment, I did about half of my Master's thesis work in TeX. Without quick feedback on the rendered formulae, I had a much harder time reasoning through things, so having a comfortable text editing environment seems crucial. That said, I wouldn't recommend using TeX as a scratchpad. It just doesn't map well to the sets of tools that we tend to use: mini diagrams, arrows between parts of the page, strikeout and circling text, etc. What might work is something like e-paper that renders a handwritten document into text. Ideally, we could turn letters into Unicode and diagrams into vector graphics, providing tools to edit and embellish the rendered versions if desired. It's extremely common to edit equations and diagrams on the fly, so I would probably feel friction with anything other that doesn't seem to just magically "prettify" whatever I handwrite at it. Seems like a really tall order though.