Miscellaneous

This page is intended as one of those highly useful repositories of stuff that belongs nowhere else in the limited scope of structured pages. The ordering is essentially meaningless. Topics deemed too worthy of their own space to remain on this page shall be removed to separate pages in the ’site.

Typesetting

If you have any ambitions towards being taken seriously as a mathematician, you should learn how to put together a readable LaTeX document. For those of you who have not yet begun this arduous task, in the spirit of “well-begun is half-done”, I shall take this opportunity to prevent you from picking up anyone (else)’s bad habits.

1. Use the right editor. For Mac users, this is simple: download MacTeX from here (possibly giving your network administrator a heart attack if your connexion still lives in the dark days of 2003) (or via sneakernet if necessary), install (and give your hard drive a click of death), open TeXShop and start reading instruction manuals. A colleague’s standard comment on the subject is “I just use Emacs,” which is an entirely valid method, if you can use Emacs. (You should be using Emacs, by the way, but this is the same sort of advice as being told to eat five portions of fresh fruit or vegetables a day: easy to give and practically never practised.)
2. Use the right typesetting engine. The current correct answer to the question “What typesetting engine should I use for my LaTeX document?” is XeTeX. Why? Because unlike the antiquated pdfTeX, XeTeX supports modern necessities such as Unicode and fonts not called Computer Modern. (Okay, the latter is an exaggeration, but XeTeX is easily capable of rendering in, for example, Hoefler Text or Linux Libertine. It is also able to seemlessly include images that are in standard image formats like JPG, PNG, etc., rather than having to convert them to EPS files first.).
3. Read the help documentation for packages, and muck about with your document source at the same time. LaTeX documentation, like its colleague Linux documentation, is in general somewhere between nonexistent, dreadful and adequate. It was in my day, it is in your day, and no matter how far ahead in time you plan to end up, do not doubt that the one package you want to use is poorly documented.
4. Use AMS-TeX packages. align is your friend. As are fancy theorem environments.
5. Avoid the really stupid mistakes. You would not believe the amount of research papers I have read where authors (of many different backgrounds) have done the following:
   • Not noticed that operators have not been \’d. LaTeX is not designed to typeset words in plain Maths. \exp, \sin and their friends must be written with the backslash or they turn into an ugly pile of characters. If you need to use an operator once or twice, the correct way is to use \operatorname. Beyond that, consider a \DeclareMathOperator{}{} placed sensibly. If text is required in math mode (for example in a condition in a cases environment), use \text{}.
   • Not correctly employed resizable brackets. Your default bracketing for anything that is vertically larger than, say, \( a^b \), should be \left( ... \right). \big, \bigg, \Big, \Bigg are there for fine-tuning, not as defaults.
6. Underlining has a reputation of cheapness in professional typography. (This obviously originates from it having no requirement for the specialist sorts used for bold and italic. It is also added by hand to manuscripts, and was the only way to highlight text on fixed-type typewriters.) It should therefore be avoided in TeX; Microsoft Word has much to answer for in people’s typographical habits. (Similarly, ordinal markers such as “th” should not be superscripted, despite what Word would like you to believe.)
7. General really obvious tip. Have someone else check your manuscripts for typos and spelling and grammar errors. You certainly will not notice them all yourself.
8. If you think the above is perverse and too specific, read the Wikipedia article on dashes. Hours of fun. Or mind-numbing tedium. And naturally you’ll discover you’ve actually been using some incorrectly your whole life.
9. You may think none of the above is that important to know, since the journal editor will clean it up for you. Firstly, you should probably give them as little typesetting work to do as possible. Secondly, editors also make mistakes, and more mistakes will be introduced into your papers in proof. And thirdly, what if you need to write something that needs to appear in public but won't be edited, like a presentation or a handout?

If you’re wondering where I got my cool st and ct ligatures and lowercase numerals from (and you should be), read this, and then spend many happy hours fiddling with this sampler, only to discover you have to write your own ligatureful font with all correctly implemented OpenType features.

If you can’t see my fancy ligatures, download and install Linux Libertine from LinuxLibertine.org’s SourceForge. It also makes nice TeX documents. (I have avoided using @font-face to avoid dumping a few MB of data in your cache only for viewing this site. You’re quite welcome. (By the way, if anyone has worked out how to use Hoefler Text’s fancy ligatures with CSS, do drop me an e-mail.))

Writing presentations in Beamer

Firstly, do. It makes it a lot simpler. However:

1. Do not expect to be able to turn your paper into a presentation in half an hour. You'll be able to steal the equations from the paper, but the text, titles and sections at least should be reconsidered and rewritten.
2. Please do not make blue a dominant colour in your theme. I am entirely serious: having sat in a fair number of seminars, the bright blue of Beamer’s default colour options is dull and corporate, and is just not nice to look at for an hour.
3. On the other hand, do not make your presentation a stupid colour combination: a dark background’s probably a bad idea. Fluorescent anything's probably a bad idea. Technicolor equations need a great deal of justification, or your audience just feel they're being presented with Picadilly Circus.
4. See also David Tong’s How to Make Sure Your Talk Doesn’t Suck.

Cambridge

Cambridge is Great Britain’s second-oldest university (after the Other Place), and as such has some (many) peculiar and unusual traditions. Here I shall point out several I consider pertinent, and also include links to useful sites that discuss other aspects.

• Queens’ possesses a selection of miscellaneous information about the historical peculiarities of Cambridge. (It claims to be out of date, but 2002 was only last week in Cambridge terms.)
• Ds: An abbreviation for Dominus, the title due to one who has attained the Baccalaureus in Artibus (BA), and used in the same way as Mr. Also rendered in English as Sir. The feminine form is Dna. However, Mr in Cambridge is an abbreviation of Magister, used of those who hold the Magister in Artibus (and in particular, certainly not for undergraduates). Logically the feminine of this should be Mra, but this never appears to have been in use.
• Doctor, Dr The sensible choice for addressing a member of the University senior to oneself: no one will take offence, and those who are not will (probably) own up politely. The feminine should be Doctrix, abbreviated to Dx or Drx, but isn’t (presumably because no one noticed at the correct moment).
• Professor, Prof One who holds a particular professorship at the University.
• Cantab. Abbreviation for Cantabrigia, the Latinate name of Cambridge. Adjectival form is Cantabrigiensis. A subsequent coinage is Cantabrigiate: essentially, to come up. One may then also form such words as reCantabrigiate, deCantabrigiate, &c.. Cantab is what those in the know write after their Cambridge degrees in full postnominals (when to use full postnominals is an entirely different matter). For example, the author’s full qualification postnominals are at present “MA (Hons) with MMath (Distinction) (Cantab)”. The shortened forms are, in decreasing order of formality, “MA with MMath (Cantab)”, “MA with MMath” and “MMath”. It is hard to imagine an occasion that would warrant use of this last.
• To the bafflement and bewilderment of many of its members, the University no longer issues degree certificates inscribed in Latin. This is despite the degree ceremony being conducted in Latin (see below).
• After a lengthy struggle to enforce the Regulations in the post-war decades, Academical Dress for lectures was finally phased out in the Statute ammendments in the 1970s.
• The Statutes and Ordinances are now kept online, and have an index for ease of reference. Of general interest is Academical Dress, detailed in Chapter II, Section 12, especially important for Graduation, and for those of you who wish to understand what the ceremony actually involves, Chapter II, Section 10 is the key document, and includes the Latin words used.
• Mathmo: Cambridge slang for students of the Mathematical Tripos. Plural disputed; consensus is that quidquid id est, it is not mathmos. The author uses mathmi, but has heard claims for mathmodes.

Keyboards

If you do a lot of typing, you need a decent keyboard. My definition of “decent” in this context is “built like a tank, with mechanical parts”.

The gold standard is provided by the IBM Model M, which was first manufactured in 1984, but of such durability that many have survived, completely functional after almost three decades of heavy use. The modern manufacturer is Unicomp, based in Kentucky, and they are sold in the UK by The Keyboard Company, under Part Numbers UB434HA, etc.. I own one of these; it weighs a ton, takes up a great amount of desk space, and I fully expect it to survive me.

Buckling springs provide better life and tactile actuation features than the rubber domes used in most cheap, flimsy, fall-apart-in-two-years keyboards. It should probably be pointed out to the interested party that the noise level is also somewhat higher than the average keyboard, which those who work in the same building as other people may feel is significant. If coworkers complain, I recommend switching to a typewriter.

For the more modern amongst you who would like a smaller or quieter keyboard, look into Cherry switches, which are used in most other mechanical keyboards, such as the Das Keyboard (available with blank keys to drive those who want to use your computer mad).

My old website

I recommend in the strongest possible terms that you do not look at my previous attempt at a website. It contains almost no content. Since you cannot resist, however, it is here. One fan provided the comment: “Conglaturations. I like that. I really like conglaturation. It might be the process by which milk congeals ... like when milk is nearly sour, and it conglaturates when you put it into hot tea, leaving a disgusting sort of curlded gunge at the bottom of the tea cup.”, so there you are.

Aside: Typography

My handouts are currently written in Linux Libertine in Deep Dark Brown, which as far as I am concerned has HTML colour codepoint 5C4033. The marks on st, ct, &c. are called ligatures, and were a common feature of typography. (I have decided that, despite the obvious appeal, I will spare you the Long s.) See my Miscellaneous Page for the full rant, when I write it.

Conclusion: History of Maths lectures

If you have made it this far and enjoyed the content, go to Dr Piers Bursill-Hall’s History of Mathematics lectures, which this year are on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday at 1600 (although not known for punctuality) in MR3 in the CMS. This goes for everyone who has the remotest interest in the subject: specialist knowledge is not necessary; non-mathematicians are welcome (and, indeed, encouraged, since they tend to know more about some topics than the mathmi). Bring food, booze and a sense of humour, and expect the lecture to end at some point in the evening, generally some time after 1730. Donations of whisky (or any other alcohol that is not mead) gratefully received.