From: Hans Aberg (haberg@math.su.se)
Date: Sat May 14 2005 - 18:22:57 CDT
At 00:53 +0200 2005/05/15, Philippe VERDY wrote:
>Computers will be handy only for making finalized documents. But for
>day-to-day use, it will often be much faster to do the work with a
>paper and pen (except for repeative calculations for which you'll
>create a program or macro, or you'll use a basic calculator to
>compute the various divisions, powers, logarithms and so on...).
Actually, in pur math, I have done the opposite: Paper and pen for
repeative calculations, whereas theorems and proofs are directly
written into the computer. :-)
>Try asking to a student if he wants to do his homeworks with a
>computer and a wordprocessor, even if it has a fine formula editor.
Students are not expected to write correct pure math papers.
>Same thing for physics formulas and technical schemas, or other
>mathematical schemas... It's often faster, easier, and sufficient to
>produce them manually: so you create your document, leave some blank
>space or page for the schemas, and you finish your work in due time.
I think pure mathematicians often save formulas in typeset version,
written directly in TeX. The exceptions are the older generation,
grown up without computers, or those that have secretaries, able to
let the secretary do they work. But already in the nineties, they
bought computers to the faculty, as it was too expensive to let the
secretaries do the work.
I have started to use Unicode for a theorem prover I am writing on.
It looks really nice, and the formulas become easy to to read, which
helps up debugging. I do not see the point of using paper and pen as
an intermediate. I attach some example files, in UTF-8. The font
Code2001 has the glyphs needed:
http://home.att.net/~jameskass/code2001.htm
-- Hans Aberg
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat May 14 2005 - 18:24:18 CDT