LaTeX

LaTeX has been a godsend to me. I'm not talking about the material used in a lot of folderol that you might buy at Egor's Dungeon near Belmont & Clark. Get your mind out of the gutter! No, I'm talking about LaTeX (pronounced "lay-tek") - the programming language used for making fancy math script. From grade school through part of college, I had all my scholastic stuff divided into two categories: things I could type up on a word processor, and things I had to write down by hand. English and History homework could be typed up in Pagemaker or Works or Word, but I'd have to jot down Math and Physics homework by hand. It was no big deal, either, because I had a pretty light load and the scratch paper was totally necessary. While I was doing "astrophysics research" (I put that in quotes because I didn't get any real research done), I heard people talking about LaTeX to each other as they got their papers ready for potential publication. I didn't investigate any further for some time. Years later, I took a grad-level course on Real Analysis and found that I was doing so much writing by hand that I thought I would get a wrist injury. When you're writing up proofs, it's like you're doing 5-page essays with a bunch of math symbols. So, I tried to do my homework in Word, but it was a real pain in the ass trying in vain to make equations look right. It looked incredibly sloppy and incomplete. I relented and downloaded some software so I could learn and make up PDFs in LaTeX. It was phenomenal! The difference in my homework before and after was like night and day. It was simple, clean and sharp. The pages came out neatly organized, and I didn't suffer from writer's cramp. When I turned in assignments for that class, I may not have had all the answers right, but I know I had the best looking homework.

I'll show you what I'm talking about. One of the most famous equations in physics is Schrödinger's equation. It deals with the wave-particle duality of everything in nature. Too bad I got only a C in Quantum Mechanics, because otherwise I'd start lecturing.



To make this, all I needed to type was

[EQ]\imath\hbar\frac{\partial}{\partial t}\Phi (x, t) = \hat{H}\Phi (x, t) [/EQ]

into a LaTeX editor and it comes out all nice and pretty. Planck's constant has a bar in it, the fraction bar is right in the center and exactly the right length, the Greek and Roman letters are elegant - it's a typesetter's dream come true. Now, contrast that with my handwriting.

Wood isn't my usual medium for doing problems in quantum mechanics, but I wanted to start this blog on a classy note. It's just a mess. My delta's and phi's are shoddy, and Planck's constant looks like chicken scratch. You know what? I must be kidding myself. This is totally unintelligible. It's a wonder I made it through any math or science class.

LaTeX is ubiquitous. If you look at almost any paper written in a math or science journal, it was probably written in LaTeX. And now that I'm studying to take the GRE Math Subject test again, I'm going to use it for making study guides. I'm still a novice right now, but I'll probably become an expert by the time I'm writing my doctoral thesis.