Math Is Fun Forum

That's very nicely done by bobbym, remember: dividing through by the unknown causes you to lose solutions.

Well, linguistics is my trade at the moment, mathematics is my hobby. I devoted quite a lot of my last summer to maths and intend to continue pursuing it. I am particularly interested in the mathematics of infinity. This summer, of course, I've been working on Sanskrit a fair bit, but I don't intend to leave mathematics behind.

Well, their stated purpose is the same as any exam. Generally, they are required to progress to A-level and may well help your application for a job which wouldn't normally require academic qualifications - y'know, just something extra to put on your CV. It has also been rumoured that universities occasionally look at them for distinguishing between otherwise very similar candidates. But, in truth, they aren't worth all that much.

I'm at the University of London

Programming? Now there's a subject we never had at school. Certainly very interesting though - do you have any idea which languages you will look at? Surely C or BASIC, or perhaps - at opposite ends of the spectrum - lisp or python? And English too, I wonder how it is taught - at the moment I'm a linguist by trade, you see, so I can't help but be intrigued by language courses. Good luck with it - do you have to write papers for all of your subjects? We often got coursework (you know, essays usually) at GCSE (usually taken when you're 16) but even that was rare at A-level (usually the first  half of the exams are sat at 17 the second half at 18) and we never had papers.

Of course. What do you study - besides mathematics?

Ooooh good luck with that! What level is that for?

Oh, no no, that's alright - I just thought I'd see how you were getting on

You're quite welcome

As far as choice of editor goes, that's really up to you. Personally I run vim from the terminal for most things, unless I want to use unicode in my .tex file - vim doesn't really do unicode - when I use emacs. I could say many things in their favour, but largely, if you've found an editor you like then you may as well stick with it - and learning to use either vim or emacs means learning things on top of the LaTeX! White_Owl's advice is very good too and there are loads and loads of packages out there - there really is very little worth doing that nobody's attempted to write a package for and if you really want to you can have a go at writing one yourself - although, even after all these years, I haven't quite got the hang of that, but then, I haven't devoted too much attention to it. My advice, if you want to do that, would be to invest in Leslie Lamport's book which contains all the instructions for that.

P.S. Nice to hear you're a linux user If nothing else, if you do have trouble with rendering or where to put your packages, I'll be a lot more help than I would be with Windows

Hi, anonimnystefy, what exactly would you like to know? I remember we talked about this once before, last summer, didn't we? What is it that you're looking for? Perhaps I can be of a little more help this time

Hey

Anonimnystefy's method is certainly one way, but - personally - I would like to recommend using LaTeX proper. Now TeX was originally designed as a typesetting language for whole documents and many many people use LaTeX (LaTeX is a particular style of TeX - and the best one out there really, but it is based on TeX, it's mainly the actual language that is different, not so much the output) just for this - with no maths at all. One of my BA linguistics teachers actually uses it for her lecture notes and I have used it for all of my assignments - including my Sanskrit ones! The maths is really just an extension, but it's a good one, an example of it in use for a full document would be something like this:

www.tondering.dk/claus/sur15.pdf

Although everybody has their own styles and everybody's documents will look different. The language is even used for writing books and I've come across many mathematics books written purely in LaTeX, along with lots of academic papers. Using LaTeX proper will produce a .pdf (or, it can be used to produce .dvi - I think .dvi files are produced by the basic latex rendering engine, but usually people will use pdflatex to render with) and gives you a number of advantages. I don't quite know how Aurora works and I wouldn't want to completely disregard anonimnystefy's advice - it seems to work well for him at any rate, but I wouldn't recommend using microsoft word in general, but certainly for LaTeX, I think using the language proper gives you so many advantages and a much much better finish.

Anyway if you are to do that - LaTeX is completely free, you just need to download the latest distribution (if you're using windows, then I think MiKTeX (http://miktex.org/) is probably the one for you. On windows it should set itself up no problem. What MiKTeX does is provide you with all of the packages, the renderer and other such nuts and bolts. As you know, LaTeX is a mark-up language, so instead of pressing buttons or using keyboard shortcuts - like in word - you type commands, so \textbf{would make this text bold} - e.g:

These commands (they are called control sequences - textbf is the control sequence and the \ is the escape character, we say that it 'escapes' a 'command') must be interpreted by a renderer - in essence, your commands are like instructions, which tells the renderer what to do. It reads your .tex file and interprets all of the instructions to make a document. It is a bit like compiling computer code, if you have ever tried your hand at programming. But the basic renderer only 'knows' a few instructions and will not understand new ones, so you must load packages, which tell the renderer about these instructions, so that it can interpret them properly. For example, it is possible to typeset mathematics - as we all know. However, some of the commands you're used to, like \therefore will not mean anything to the renderer, so you must teach it what they mean by using the amssymb package - in this case.

Once you've got the distribution (trust me, it may seem like a lot of effort, but it's one download) - you only need a text editor and you're away. There are two good text editors - which are used by many many people for writing code and all mark-up languages - including LaTeX and html - and these are vim and emacs. There is what is known as the 'editor war' between proponents of both, but really you can use either. Both of them will require a little bit of setting up, though, and I don't run windows, so you should consult the internet, or there are a few editors designed specifically for LaTeX, which can be found here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_TeX_editors

Personally, I do not use these, though, I use either vim (in the case of windows, I recommend gvim) or emacs - depending on what I need to do. Personally, I prefer vim and would recommend it for mathematics, I used to typeset all of my homework in it.

Using pure LaTeX, though, will require you to write a preamble (again, I'm not sure how aurora works) so I highly recommend this manual:

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX

Which will tell you pretty much everything you will ever need as a beginner, and more.

It may seem like a huge amount of effort, but this manual should give you some idea as to the power of LaTeX - and it is powerful, there are so many difficult things that it makes easy and so much that it can do, which software like word simply cannot manage and I would highly, highly recommend using it properly, especially if you actually want a document containing all of your work - rather than just a set of equations, LaTeX will do a much better job of getting it right. I read that aurora also requires you to download the TeX distribution - although I've never used it so I can't say for sure. So, it's hardly trouble free itself. Anyway, happy LaTeX-ing and let us know if you need any extra help.

Well, all I meant was that they've stopped paying you, but all the same - if you don't mind me saying so - it's nice to hear that

I'm sorry bobbym, I think tonight is a bad time for me, but since I've put you to the effort of helping me, let's see if I can get my head around this. Delta denotes change in y, that's fine, that's old hat, so a small change in y multiplied by a small change in y is a small (albeit larger, but that's not really relevant) change in y-squared. So let's think about the expansion:

Okay, sorry, I think I'm with you? I just completely misinterpreted the notation. Yes, the rest of it now makes sense, I think my sleep-deprived state was holding me back - thank you very much for your answer and your patience