I wrote my last book (my only book, that is) using LaTeX. I had a large bibliography with close to 400 entries. I stored all of the bibliographic items in a BibTeX file (a text file ending in .bib). Each item looks something like this: @book {Richeson:2008, AUTHOR = {Richeson, David S.}, TITLE = {Euler’s gem:…
Category: Academic Technology
Coffee stains and the Simpsons in your LaTeX document
A few weeks ago John D. Cook posted a tweet asking for suggestions for his @TeXtip Twitter feed. Usually @TeXtip posts are useful tips or factual tidbits about the typesetting program. I decided to send him a humorous suggestion instead. He posted the tip on Twitter yesterday. I sent him a link to Hanno Rein’s coffee.sty package…
Interview on Strongly Connected Components
I had the pleasure of chatting with Samuel Hansen on the telephone a little while ago. Our conversation is now online as Episode 16 of his Strongly Connected Components podcast series. Check it out! While you’re at it, check out his other interviews as well as his other podcast series, Combinations and Permutation (he discussed my book…
John D. Cook’s daily Twitter tips
One of the most prolific and interesting math bloggers and Twitters, John D. Cook (his blog is The Endeavor and he is @JohnDCook on Twitter) has been using Twitter in a very interesting way. In addition to his personal account, he has set up more than half a dozen daily Twitter messages on a variety of…
Mathematical cousins and collaboration numbers
A couple days ago Michael Lugo at God Plays Dice shared a link to a mathematical relationships search. Enter the names of two people with PhDs in mathematics and it will spit out their academic relationship. For example, my advisor, John Franks, is my academic father and my good friend and collaborator Jim Wiseman is my academic…
An Euler line geogebra applet
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about Euler and his many contributions to mathematics. So, just for fun I decided to make a Geogeba applet showing the “Euler Line.” In 1763 Euler proved that three different centers of a triangle—the centroid, the orthocenter, and the circumcenter—are collinear. This line is called the Euler line. The centroid…
Using wikis in mathematics classes
Wikipedia describes a wiki as a website that allows the easy creation and editing of any number of interlinked web pages… [Wikis] are often used to create collaborative websites, to power community websites, for personal note taking, in corporate intranets, and in knowledge management systems. I have used wikis in three of my classes: two…
Posting items to my blog using wplatex
This blog post is aimed at other mathematicians who write on WordPress blogs. I’m writing this blog post completely in TexShop on my Mac! Recently I discovered that Eric Finster at Curious Reasoning wrote a Python script called wplatex that converts LaTeX documents to HTML that is WordPress compatible. Then it posts the files directly…
Three applets illustrating parametric curves
In my multivariable calculus we’re talking about parametric curves. I’m using this applet for displaying parametric curves. You can use predefined curves or enter your own. Although the applet is on my web page, it was created by Marc Renault, a friend who teaches down the road at Shippensburg University. I only tweaked it slightly when…
Three applets for linear algebra or multivariable calculus
This semester I’m teaching two sections of Calculus III (multivariable calculus) and I happen to be teaching the first four weeks of Linear Algebra. The first couple weeks of both courses cover properties of vectors in Rn. (Of course, just to confuse the instructor and the students who happen to be in both classes, the…
David Richeson: Division by Zero 