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To clarify, are you saying you've met people who have been successful at Olympiads and the Putnam who fail out of grad school because they can't learn LaTex?
by woopwoop 8y ago
To clarify, are you saying you've met people who have been successful at Olympiads and the Putnam who fail out of grad school because they can't learn LaTex?
- pmiller2 8y agoI'd be shocked if that's the case. Basic LaTeX isn't that hard to learn, and the basics will take you really far.
- wolfgke 8y ago> Basic LaTeX isn't that hard to learn Basic LaTeX is probably not that hard to learn. But LaTeX is a really deep rabbit hole and you need a lot more knowledge of it if you write math papers.
- pmiller2 8y agoYou don’t have to go very far down the rabbit hole to write papers. If you can draw a commutative diagram, and insert a PDF graphic, there isn’t really anything much more complex than that.
- wolfgke 8y ago> If you can draw a commutative diagram, and insert a PDF graphic, there isn’t really anything much more complex than that. Not true. I know what I am talking about since I work in mathematical research (I like math, of course, but I openly admit not to like LaTeX).
- pmiller2 8y agoWell, I’ve been to grad school, done significant amounts of mathematical writing, read my share of papers, so I know what I’m talking about, too. The depth of the rabbit hole isn’t that deep for any one person; it’s more like a gopher hole, but everyone has their own little gopher hole.
- j7ake 8y agoCould you give an example where advanced LaTeX skills is required to write a paper?
- wolfgke 8y ago- TikZ wizardry. - Often, I had to look deeply into forum posts to get LaTeX to format a formula in the way that I imagined (often the solution involved deep LaTeX wizardry) - Creating a document that involves text in multiple alphabets (e.g. Latin alphabet, Greek alphabet, cyrillic alphabet). Actually trivial with Microsoft Word. ;-) Not to even mention problems where I have no idea how to start such as how to do reproducable build processes for LaTeX documents (i.e. each run of the build process produces a binarily identical PDF document).
- klyrs 8y ago> - TikZ wizardry. Yesssss
- pmiller2 8y agoTikz: don’t do that. Either use an editor that spits out a Tikz snippet (https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/80418/list-of-tikz-editor https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/80418/list-of-tikz-e...), or draw your figure in Omnigraffle or something, export to PDF and insert the figure that way. Multiple languages: \usepackage{babel}
- chongli 8y agoYeah, that seems very odd to me. I sat next to a successful math Olympiad student in first year advanced algebra. He typed his lecture notes in LaTeX in real time, producing textbook-like results on the fly. It looked like he was running Linux on his laptop. Suffice it to say, I think he could accomplish anything he wants to with his math and computer abilities.
- klyrs 8y agolol no, nobody (within epsilon...) fails because of latex. But they aren't exactly endeared to programming as a result of the experience. I came from the other direction -- a hacker who had a dozen programming languages under her belt, including bf and Perl, before I was introduced to the moderately arcane latex. They're quite frequently brilliant mathematicians... but far too often, they're steeped in the "pure" math culture that favors pencil over keyboard. In the context of this crisis, my opinion is that their education is not preparing them for the future. They succeed in academia... but their work is too often unverifiable.
- mcguire 8y agoIt probably doesn't help that all of the proof tools I've seen are incredibly obscure and unrelated to any formal techniques taught to human beings.