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Why Students Should Type Math Assignments
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People generally write better proofs when they are typing. There
are several reasons for this.
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Subconciously, the writer is in more of an expository mode. This
leads to fuller explanations than in hand-written work. Generally,
this means that the ideas of a proof will be more fully explained.
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When writing by hand, it is easier to use symbolic shortcuts.
When typing, it may be easier to say things in words. On the whole,
typing then leads to expression being in full sentences, which is what
proofs should consist of even when hand-written.
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The author can revise it more easily. The ordering of statements
in a proof is crucial. It is very hard to get them to come out
correctly the first time you write them out. When typed into a
computer, it is much easier to revise them so that they are correct.
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In this course, assignments often need to be revised and
resubmitted. This process will be much faster if the student has
typed and saved the initial submission.
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For the same reasons you type up assignments in other courses -
it leads to a nicer, and often more legible, presentation of your work.
Typesetting Programs
Here are the two main contenders.
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LaTeX:
This is the program which is used by research mathematicians, and used
for many mathematics textbooks. It may make a bad first impression
because in some ways it is "old school", documents are just plain text
with commands built in to indicate typesetting. Then a program,
pdflatex, is run on this text file to produce the
typeset version of the document.
On the positive side, the output is top quality, both the text file
and the resulting pdf can be easily used on different platforms (PC,
Mac, Unix), and with a little experience it is the fastest way to
produce documents. Also, LaTeX is free.
The initial time to get started is with LaTeX is greater than with
other programs. However, your classmates and your instructor can
help.
For help with LaTeX, see
LaTeX help
and
installation on PCs and Macs (LaTeX
usually comes installed on Unix and linux).
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Word: The learning curve is fairly small, so this is a
popular choice. However, some typesetting might be quite difficult to
do with Word, and even simple stuff can take much longer with Word
than with LaTeX. As a result, the result often doesn't look as good.
So, on the whole we don't recommend it except for a quick and easy
documents. If you do use it, be sure to convert the result to pdf.
You may want to use PrimoPDF, a free pdf converter.
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