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I went to a talk by a grad student historian who studied how mathematical ideas evolved in Europe roughly 1600-1900. He started his talk by quickly drawing a da

I went to a talk by a grad student historian who studied how mathematical ideas evolved in Europe roughly 1600-1900. He started his talk by quickly drawing a damn near photorealistic map of Europe on the chalk board. Very impressive way to start a talk and make it memorable. It really impressed on me how lecturing can be developed like a performing art. I never leveled up my chalkboard skills, but there were definitely times when I distracted myself from proofs that wouldn’t work by learning how to make beautiful diagrams in latex + tikz. Beyond improving the presentation it’s a nice way to get a break from the words and symbols part of the work and blow off some steam.

Rayhem 4y ago
> but there were definitely times when I distracted myself from proofs that wouldn’t work by learning how to make beautiful diagrams in latex + tikz. I have never, ever, regretted coming to the table with eye candy like this. Were some of those investigations the most "profitable" thing to be working on at the time? Probably not, but a good, clean visualization buys you so much cred with both your audience and yourself.
- cubefox 4y ago
  You can waste ours and hours to something in tikz which could probably be done in 30 minutes with SVG. Sigh.