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by OldGuyInTheClub 999 days ago
I feel good about myself if I can understand more than the first sentence of any of his posts. Some days I'll even settle for only the first.

Great mathematicians are said to be exceptional at visualization. I wonder if the modern greats think in TeX or LaTeX on top of that. It is amazing how fast they post fully-formed, meticulously referenced blog articles or upload preprints.
2 comments
pfdietz 999 days ago
This post on the cap set problem was fun.

https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2016/05/18/a-symmetric-formul...

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I_AM_A_SMURF 999 days ago
After a while writing LaTeX becomes second nature. I used to type my master's classes notes straight in LaTeX.
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OldGuyInTheClub 999 days ago
Impressive. I can't think and type fast with accuracy nearly well enough to do that for regular text, let alone a markup/page definition language.

Looking back I wish I had continued practicing typing after the one class I took in it. I should also have learned shorthand.

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ColinWright 999 days ago
Times have changed. We didn't have laptops in classes ... laptops didn't exist.

And I wrote my PhD in TeX. Not LaTeX ... that hadn't been invented.

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OldGuyInTheClub 999 days ago
No laptops in my era, either. I managed to do my thesis in LaTeX only because a student in another department made a stylesheet to the expected format. Figures and captions were a struggle back then.

But, we were 'appy in them days, though we wuz poor.

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dctoedt 999 days ago
> Times have changed ... I wrote my PhD in TeX. Not LaTeX ... that hadn't been invented.

Brings to mind when I first learned TOPS-20 Emacs in law school (long story), circa 1980-81: A few of the CS grad students tolerantly looked down on Emacs as a crutch for newbies, because any real programmer would use TECO instead ....

(IIRC, that version of Emacs was written as a collection of TECO macros.)

Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/378/

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