[HN Gopher] Tips for mathematical handwriting (2007)
___________________________________________________________________
Tips for mathematical handwriting (2007)
Author : susam
Score : 106 points
Date : 2025-02-08 19:20 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (johnkerl.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (johnkerl.org)
| jovas wrote:
| Pretty much exactly how I write. (My lower case zeta is prettier)
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| He doesn't mention that many people have identical handwritten
| "u" and "n" (both written "i").
|
| This barely matters at all; context will tell you what symbol is
| being used, just like it does in prose, and most material is
| typeset.
|
| It really is a very bad idea to use lowercase Ls, though.
| sfpotter wrote:
| There's nothing wrong with l.
| mkl wrote:
| is totally fine.
| sideshowb wrote:
| While we're here, any suggestions on what works better for
| writing math to a digital whiteboard? Wacom type tablet with no
| display, or an ipad type tablet with pen?
| Unearned5161 wrote:
| I would imagine something where you can see the immediate
| results of what you're writing under your pen to be better,
| otherwise you'd have to be facing the board somehow and not the
| class
| sureglymop wrote:
| I use an iPad with pen and goodnotes. I can airplay it to linux
| with uxplay. All my notes are digital.
| mkl wrote:
| A display is much better for this. I recommend Samsung tablets,
| as the Wacom stylus they use can't awkwardly run out of battery
| on you.
| fifilura wrote:
| My tip is to use white paper. No lines no squares, just white.
|
| In Sweden you were expected to use paper with squares but it adds
| a lot of clutter.
| Unearned5161 wrote:
| I've gone through so many phases on this. But lately, the more
| writing intensive my math classes get, I've settled on lined
| paper.
|
| Blank paper is too... Blank! And I'm more prone to write big
| and messy and waste pages (even though it's all digital)...
| fujinghg wrote:
| I used plain for a few years but it has some problems. I now
| use faint lined paper. Usually Muji notebooks. I leave a blank
| line between each statement. The lines are handy if you want to
| make something readable and well aligned which is fairly
| important. Scans fine.
|
| My kids were forced to use heavily marked blue squared paper.
| They had problems writing and reading. I pointed this out to
| their mathematics teacher and said that it may be detrimental
| and got a diatribe of "what do you know". Such a bad attitude.
| I had an answer to this which was embarrassing to him.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| Pencil boards can help. An example:
| https://www.jetpens.com/Hobonichi-Accessory-Pencil-Board-for...
|
| Grid or lined, placed underneath thinner blank paper (heavier
| paper won't let the lines or grid show through as easily, if at
| all). Keeps the final presentation neat while giving the
| structure you may need to keep things aligned.
| sn9 wrote:
| You can always do dot grid paper.
| fifilura wrote:
| Not in Sweden. In the 90s...
| lynguist wrote:
| I switched to plain white when I was ca 20 years old and never
| looked back. I need to use plain white since then and I am so
| used to it that I find lines or grids slightly offensive to me
| and it throws me off from layouting. You can get used to
| anything.
| Unearned5161 wrote:
| nice writeup, I always like taking extra care to view the actual
| motions a professor uses when writing the symbols on the board as
| it can sometimes be non-obvious the order or direction to start
| in.
|
| would also love tips on making right curly brackets not be the
| bane of my existence. I don't get it, I write a right one
| basically for every left and yet they feel so different!
| dieselgate wrote:
| Crossing the Z is a good one. I cross 0 but understand the point
| with phi. Something that's not mentioned is y (lowercase) and how
| they can look like a 4
| gilleain wrote:
| I never used to cross my zeros until I was spending some time
| writing a lot of diagrams that had both O (for oxygen) and 0
| (for the numeric label). It got very confusing!
| ddq wrote:
| I started crossing Z, 7, 0 and generally writing in as
| unambiguous a manner as possible in my math homework because I
| was afraid of the teacher reading it wrong and taking points
| off.
| mkl wrote:
| I always cross my zs in maths to distinguish them from 2s, but
| in some countries they cross the 2s to distinguish them from
| zs, so the ambiguities remain.
| dang wrote:
| Related. Others?
|
| _Tips for Mathematical Handwriting (2007)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32665846 - Aug 2022 (2
| comments)
|
| _Tips for Mathematical Handwriting (2007)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22983274 - April 2020 (76
| comments)
| moi2388 wrote:
| I personally prefer to use dotted paper.
|
| And I write every Latin letter in its capital form, however
| actual capitals twice as large. Put a dot in zero.
|
| That way everything looks distinct
| Kwpolska wrote:
| > Make a point come out of the top of the p, to distinguish it
| from a rho.
|
| Or make it \varrho (r).
|
| > Keep the slash in the phi vertical; keep the slash in the
| empty-set symbol slanted.
|
| Again, \varphi (U+1D711 which HN doesn't seem to like) is easier
| to distinguish.
|
| The author silently chose \varepsilon in their TeX, but chose to
| ignore the rest of the variants.
|
| My grammar school math teacher used a very large ascender for the
| alpha, almost into serif-PS-sign-without-the-line-through
| territory.
| mkl wrote:
| There are two other phis with the (non-mathematical) Greek
| letters earlier, but unfortunately fonts vary in which one they
| display as \phi or \varphi: ph (U+03CD), ph (U+03DC).
| lagrange77 wrote:
| > Put a hook on the x to distinguish it from a times sign [...]
| In 3rd-semester calculus and onward you'll be using the times
| sign quite often.
|
| I wonder if he's talking about the cross product.
| JohnKemeny wrote:
| The \times sign is x in latex. To get * you use \cdot.
| lagrange77 wrote:
| Yes, but it is rare to see \times used for scalar
| multiplication, isn't it?
| mturmon wrote:
| I used to work in a field that used \Sigma for covariance
| matrices, and pervasively needed discrete summations which also
| use \Sigma (and often with an understood index set, so the \Sigma
| appears without clarifying adornment).
|
| I ended up writing my discrete summation \Sigma's with a little
| serif on the bottom, and ordinary \Sigma's as in OP, with 4 quick
| back-and-forth strokes.
| rhelz wrote:
| _chuckle_ I 'm teaching high school math, and I have students who
| are jedi knights of making ambiguous mathematical signs. They
| make their "1"'s with a long top serif, which make it look like
| it could be either a "1" or a "7". A "4" written with a curly
| hook on the bottom can be mistaken for an "8", etc etc.
|
| Not to mention a glyph which is maximally ambiguous between "T"
| and "F" so that when grading true/false questions, could stand in
| for either :-)
|
| If the students would put half as much effort into learning the
| material as they do in trying to trick teachers they would get
| straight A's ;-)
| joshdavham wrote:
| It's incredible to realize how many of the habits mentioned in
| this post that I've unintentionally picked up while studying
| applied math. Even after graduation, I still follow a lot of
| these 'conventions'.
| gnatolf wrote:
| Most important to me was something not mentioned here: to make
| i/j les ambiguous, I but effort into explicitly add the right
| swoop at the bottom of the i, which allowed for the j to be a
| straight longish line dotted at the top.
| buescher wrote:
| For Greek I like this:
| https://www.covingtoninnovations.com/pens/GreekChartLarge.jp...
|
| There's an old joke about "mathematical maturity" meaning being
| able to write a lowercase zeta, but I took enough classes from
| professors that would confuse xi and zeta that it probably
| doesn't matter that much.
| paulluuk wrote:
| Mostly unrelated, but I wish the field of math would step away
| from greek letter notatation and just make variable and function
| names readable as programmers do. I know there are historic
| reasons, and I'm sure that mathematicians' time is so valuable
| that they can't be bothered to write more than 1 character, but
| it's a real barrier to entry in my opinion. def
| a(b, g): d = b ** 2 + g ** 2 e = d ** 0.5
| return e z = a(3, 4) print(z)
| fxwin wrote:
| the vast majority of mathematical equations/terms would become
| completely unreadable if you replaced single symbols with
| descriptive terms. You are going to have to internalize what
| the symbols refer to anyways to understand the formula, and
| once that is accomplished any additional description is a waste
| of space and cognitive bandwidth.
| lynguist wrote:
| I came up with similar rules over decades (I still write
| sometimes mathematical symbols), and I have to only take care of
| my "u" vs "n" and "r" vs "v", and write these pairs especially
| slowly because in my handwriting (especially u and n) look the
| same.
|
| But for all the others I've developed similar disambiguations.
| xyproto wrote:
| Dotted 0 (number) and a regular round O (letter) should also be
| possible, instead of a round blank 0 (number) and an O (letter)
| with a top curl.
| mysteria wrote:
| For distinguishing between the lowercase "a" and "a" without
| switching to cursive you can also use a double storey a.
| jebarker wrote:
| People that use xi should lose their math credentials
| clircle wrote:
| [delayed]
| dogmatism wrote:
| learned this by experience in...1998
|
| thanks for the insight
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-02-08 23:00 UTC)