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I'm another academic mathematician. I'm not really convinced that all this would be a time-saver for me as far as research productivity; maybe I'm just old-fas

I'm another academic mathematician. I'm not really convinced that all this would be a time-saver for me as far as research productivity; maybe I'm just old-fashioned but I just have a few folders for paper notes and that's it. But certainly this could vary from person to person. To me, the place for the real time savings is organizing your teaching workflow. If you're a grad student, make sure to get on top of that ASAP. A lot of it is very repetitive both within a given semester and also from year to year. I have a ton of scripts built up over the years for things like organizing lecture notes (especially if you are teaching a class you have taught before, you don't want to have to rewrite all your lectures), creating problem sets / solutions, inputting grades into the LMS,... I even have automatic solution generators for a few rote calculations that I assign many problems about (Gaussian elimination, for example).

mistrial9 4y ago
> maybe I'm just old-fashioned but I just have a few folders for paper notes paper, like.. pieces of paper.. yes, that is old-fashioned! however, in deep math, maybe this is something.. I was told after attending a world-class lecture week in pure math, that it is common for PhDs and post-docs in math to have very little to talk about between each other.. since their interest and subject area is almost certainly deeply buried in some specialty. Aside from the quip "all roads lead to cryptography" perhaps just an excuse for certain people, I can see how this "different worlds" problem in post-doc math might be real.. The fellow writing this post is first-year however.. maybe its different.. Also I just cloned and built pdfgrep .. I am definitely going to try that out immediately .. thx!
mhh__ 4y ago
For me at least my reasoning for trying new things to make notes with is that I very very rarely actually read them again, so I need to get as much learning done from writing the notes, and to do that I need to write more notes e.g. make writing the notes fun.
evanb 4y ago
After I taught a few semesters ago I took the material I had prepared and turned the skeleton into a github template https://github.com/evanberkowitz/course-base https://github.com/evanberkowitz/course-base I keep questions, slides, written notes, etc. controlled and semester-specific things in a directory that isn't tracked.

mistrial9 4y ago

> maybe I'm just old-fashioned but I just have a few folders for paper notes paper, like.. pieces of paper.. yes, that is old-fashioned! however, in deep math, maybe this is something.. I was told after attending a world-class lecture week in pure math, that it is common for PhDs and post-docs in math to have very little to talk about between each other.. since their interest and subject area is almost certainly deeply buried in some specialty. Aside from the quip "all roads lead to cryptography" perhaps just an excuse for certain people, I can see how this "different worlds" problem in post-doc math might be real.. The fellow writing this post is first-year however.. maybe its different.. Also I just cloned and built pdfgrep .. I am definitely going to try that out immediately .. thx!

mhh__ 4y ago

For me at least my reasoning for trying new things to make notes with is that I very very rarely actually read them again, so I need to get as much learning done from writing the notes, and to do that I need to write more notes e.g. make writing the notes fun.

evanb 4y ago

After I taught a few semesters ago I took the material I had prepared and turned the skeleton into a github template https://github.com/evanberkowitz/course-base https://github.com/evanberkowitz/course-base I keep questions, slides, written notes, etc. controlled and semester-specific things in a directory that isn't tracked.