Chances are that you’ve only ever written math by hand (and entered cryptic pseudo math into homework systems). Maybe you’ve never thought about it, but doesn’t that seem weird this far into the 21st century? What else do you do by hand as a college student?
If you want to write mathematics electronically and you want it to look good, you’ve only got a few options, and either way, you’ll have to learn something new. The good news is that this is way easier than it was only a few years ago, certainly something we can accomplish together without too much trouble.
Chances also are that you don’t read and write a lot of blog posts outside of school assignments, and maybe think of blogs solely as vanity projects. Yet blogs are where the vast majority of reading and writing happens on the internet. It is estimated that the open-source blogging engine WordPress is behind 1/4 of all websites. A solid majority of what I’ve learned in the last decade has come through blogs, both for professional and avocational subjects. It’s how I and many other professionals find out what’s going on, what’s out there, and make our voices heard too.
In this course, we’ll kill two birds with one stone. Each student will set up a blog where they can write about math. There are several likely unfamiliar pieces to this, and so we will take our time and help each other get up and running.
Latex
The first thing to know about math typesetting is the word “Latex” (pronounced la-tech—why? because reasons). It is a form of code mathematicians, physicists and other similar professionals use to make really great looking math. Every student entering these disciplines is expected to at some point pick Latex up. Like every computer language, this introduces many difficulties for novices.
- Your writing may not compile. Your English teachers may have complained about your spelling and grammar, but there was always something there for them to read. With Latex, your audience can only read your writing if it is correct enough to compile.
- There is a lot of overhead in setting up the basic format of a document so that it will compile.
- Although Latex is indispensable for math typesetting, and has some nice features for general writing, it is a giant pain in other ways, like making italics, bullets, tables, etc.
There are also some features of Latex that make it stand out as a particularly unfriendly computer language. We will discover this on our own, but you can read this rant to get started hating Latex:
Since it is a near universal standard for writing math, there are some redeeming qualities though:
- If you learn it, and need to write math in the future, it will be time well-spent. If not, you will still have reason to brag to your friends about how smart you are for knowing how to do this.
- There are a lot of people out there using, and consequently a lot of help to be found using simple Google searches.
- There are people working to make it easier to produce Latex-ish type, especially on the web.
One of the other “backwards” aspects of Latex is that it was created to produce paper, not images on a screen. PDF is like virtual paper, and not very much like a webpage. As a result, a lot of the math on the internet is locked away in PDFs, or translated very poorly to webpages.
The good news is this is starting to change. Thanks to a widely used javascript library
WAIT, wait, wait—JavaWHAT?—I’m feeling over my head here!
Don’t worry if you don’t know what that is. All you need to know for now is that Javascript is how people extend the web beyond what html provides. Anything fancy you do in a browser, like author a Google doc, likely makes use of Javascript to make this happen.
Anyway, there’s a Javascript library called MathJax, a collection of javascript instructions, that you can put inside a website so that it knows how to typeset Latex commands, and you only need to use Latex for the math stuff. All the other writing can be done however you like. You don’t need to make a Latex document with all that confusing overhead, or use its cumbersome interface for making bullets.
Mathjax is a fairly simple thing to add in to the blogging platforms (the easiest way to write on the web) that support it. Since this is the 21st century, you can get everything set up using a bit of help from Google and your friends.
Blogging Platforms
While there are many relevant blogging platforms, Blogger is the only free to use platform that
- Allows one to use javascript, in particular, MathJax
- Does not require hosting (i.e. it solves the problem of making stuff accessible on the internet for you)
The reasons to use a blogging platform instead of a simple paper notebook
- Learn how to write math on the web
- Learn how to write on the web
- Have writing that is not unavailable to you just because it is under review
- Make it easy to read and comment on each other’s ideas
- Begin to think about what it means to have an audience
In the beginning of the semester, we will help each other set up blogs that can be used to write for this class and get MathJax up and running on those blogs. You can think of these blogs as a reading journal, place to keep notes, and a way to produce more polished pieces of writing.
“What do I write about?”
One thing I have noticed is that students tend not to have much experience writing about math. It makes sense when you think about what most of their experiences with math are: doing math homework problems. This course may then be a chance to try something new. It’s fine for this to seem awkward and hard, but to pass this class, it is important to engage with this rather than dismiss it. I hope to be able to provide some help.
To begin, my answer to “what do I write?” is
- What is surprising?
- What else does this make you think of?
- What can these ideas be combined with?
- What else might be true or false?
- Where else might these ideas or methods apply?
- What is confusing?
- Is there something that seems wrong or off?
- What is there to revisit with commentary?
- Is there something to be written out differently or illustrated?
- Problems you have solved
- Problems you create
Ideas here do not have to be perfect or finished. Your blog is a scratchpad from which to build bigger ideas. At the same time, when reading your blog, I should not be wondering why you didn’t take 5 minutes to look something up on Google or Wikipedia yourself. Due diligence is the watchword and it means taking basic steps to include in what you write more than is already in your head.
Another way to generate possibilities is to think about the form your writing might take, not just its content. Blogs make one think of blog posts, but they are versatile machines and can support a wide variety of formats.
Write blog posts. Let’s talk blog posts, since they are a default of sorts and may also be somewhat unfamiliar. You will take some of your ideas from reading, prompts given by me, or whatever, do some additional reading, thinking and research, and put together a piece of writing worth sharing. There are different sort of posts though too.
Micro-posts may consist of a single link and a bit of commentary. Everything to something you really thought was funny to an important resource for others to know about.
Short posts may be around 250 words and just articulate a single idea or connect pieces together.
Slightly longer and more involved, there are posts 500–1000 words in length. In this space, there is enough room to say something meaningful, but not enough to get carried away. These pieces need to have structure: at a minimum, a beginning, middle, and end. They need to stay focused on the topic, and evidence, including linked citations and a references section, needs to accompany assertions and borrowed ideas.
Of course there’s nothing limiting the length or depth of what you write here. Standard academic essays can be done in blog form for sure, and there’s no reason you couldn’t use a blog to host a novel.
Perhaps the way to best understand what the format is capable of is to read some blogs yourself. I read a ton, mostly because my interests are not the sort of thing mass media picks up on. We can spend some time talking about what blogs are and can be as the semester progresses.
What a blog post is not for:
Offhand thoughts that you do not think through all the way.
When you first read through the chapter, you may want to jot down incomplete ideas to remind you to go back to them later. But this is not the same thing as a blog post that you expect other people to read. Writing that you are asking others, including myself, to read should be worth the time investment of the reader. You need to have something that is worth saying and that has been thought out and edited to the point where it is worth reading. Precision of description and aptness of analogy are especially important. Taking a few minutes to look something up on Wikipedia or a few seconds to share the link appropriately and include another author’s name are minimal criteria.
At the same time, do remember that you’re not expected to know everything. Well-asked questions can move our conversations forward as much as the answers you figure out.
Most people think about a verse chronological timeline of posts (the most recent post shows up at the top and the others follow below), kind of like a journal. But most blogging platforms also support the use of static pages: places where you can put content that you always want people to be able to see or that you want to update and revise under the same heading. Realizing this opens up many more options.
Build an annotated bibliography or literature review. One of the easiest yet valuable pieces of writing that can be produced from reading, annotated bibliographies and literature reviews are the backbone of academic research, and valuable for novices who are interested in your subject and want to start learning more. The idea of how you would end up with one of these in this course is that the readings we start with should be a jumping off point, not the endpoint, and if we are going to bother finding and reading other sources, to keep track of that for the future.
I’ve already begun [Pinterest boards][Pinterest], [a set of bookmarks on Delicious][Delicious], and [a collection of entries in Zotero][Zotero]. You may not yet know what these are, but you will soon. You could make your own page where you start out copy-pasting what we have, or you could decide to contribute to these larger collections and link to them from your blog.
Along these same lines, you could produce a collection of resources that go beyond the academic, say your favorite vihart episodes, the best references for writing in Latex, or online materials for learning calculus.
Learn how to do math on a computer. Besides not learning to write math on the web, the other aspect of a typical mathematical education is that it does not include use of industry-relevant software tools for doing math. Everyone who does math that connects to the real world, and at this point even the majority of pure mathematicians, uses computers to do a fair amount of the lifting. Whole fields even would not exist without the ability of computers to do mind-umping amounts of arithmetic.
Learning how to do math with a computer means more than asking for an answer on Wolfram Alpha or plugging something into your graphing calculator, although you may be surprised (and should learn) what can be done just in the Google search box. Crucially, it means using the repetitive and recursive abilities of computer programs to ask and answer new kinds of questions than you could before. We will be using [SAGE][SAGE], open source software for mathematical exploration, and you are encouraged to explore these too on your own or in groups to add depth to your studies.
