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I tried handwriting notes several times in my math classes. It did not work well. I am not a fast or neat writer, so it was always a desperate struggle to keep
by chongli 3y ago
I tried handwriting notes several times in my math classes. It did not work well. I am not a fast or neat writer, so it was always a desperate struggle to keep up. Many professors preferred not to distribute any notes or slides, and loved to lecture on the board at lightning speed (writing and erasing at least a dozen boards worth of material in 50 minutes). When I switched to typing my notes in LaTeX (using vim) it made all the difference. I could actually keep up with the professor and think about what they were saying without getting hopelessly behind on the proof.
The strategy of only writing down the important details that everyone advocates does not work very well in math. I can't know what the important details are until days or even weeks after the lecture, when I've had enough time to digest and work through the material while completing the assigned problems. Of course, this is much more true at the beginning of a course (when I've had no prior exposure to the topic) than it is at the end.
- hot_gril 3y agoI took math LaTeX notes in Vim too. Once I got past the learning curve, it was much faster than writing just because of the ability to copy-paste a proof line. It was even an ok form of scratch space for solving problems, though pencil+paper was usually best. But I didn't take enough math classes to really see if it'd help, and in comp sci classes it didn't.
- Sai_ 3y agoWould be interesting if someone made a hardware device to be placed in classrooms which took periodic photos of the board and transcribed it into searchable text using an LLM.
- chongli 3y agoI have taken photos of the board and I've seen lots of classmates do it as well. I had one prof who absolutely forbid any photos in class, even if they were just of the notes on the board. I saw one student defy him and take photos anyway. After class he sprinted over to that student and demanded to see his ID, which he photographed and then left. The poor student followed him all the way out of the room and down the hall, begging not to be reported to the associate dean's office!
- chongli 3y agoI was a math major and I just kept using LaTeX + vim for my whole degree. I got better and better at it and used snippets as well as wrote my own TeX macros to save tons of time. I went back and forth between pencil and paper and LaTeX for assignment work. For some courses the proofs were fairly short so it was easy enough to work on paper. For others, the proofs could get several pages long and small mistakes could lead to lots of erasing. It doesn't take very much erasing/rewriting to annoy me enough to switch over to LaTeX. I can't think of a bigger waste of time than erasing and/or rewriting half a page of material because of some mistake.
- hot_gril 3y agoYeah, avoiding erasing was a big part too. Forgot how annoying that was.