“English words like ‘technology’ stem from a Greek root beginning with the letters t q…; and this same Greek word means art as well as technology. Hence the name TE X […] TE X rhymes with the word blecchhh” [Donald Knuth 1984]
Leslie Lamport built LATE X on top of TE X and added part of his name to it. It is typically pronounced ‘lay-tek’.
Often computer languages such as Python and LaTeX have optional features that can be included.
In LaTeX you put \usepackage{..} in the preamble.
For example we have already seen the parskip package.
\documentclass[a4paper, 11pt]{amsart}
\usepackage{parskip}
\begin{document}
There are thousands of LaTeX packages!
Some important mathematical features are provided by packages from the American Mathematical Society (AMS).
For example, if you want to use the symbol for the natural numbers, then you want to use a ‘blackboard bold’ font.
This is provided by the amssymb package, so you need to included in the
preamble.
\usepackage{amssymb}
Then to get “Suppose .” you can write
Suppose $x \in \mathbb{N}$.
You should include amssymb in any mathematical document.
Two other packages from the AMS are amsmath and amsthm.
amsmath: provides many, many useful things you will use, e.g. the
align* environment for aligning ‘=’ signs.
amsthm: provides ‘theorem-like’ environments which you will see in the
lab.[Note, amsmath is loaded automatically by amsart but you should always include
it if you use the article class.]
Having mentioned ‘environments’ I should say what they are...
There are three basic ways to ‘mark up’ text in LaTeX.
$..$ or \[..\].
{..} following a command, e.g. \emph{hello} or
\section{Introdution}.
By putting it inside an environment,
\begin{itemize}
\item One thing.
\item Another thing.
\end{itemize}
Environments begin with \begin{..} and end with \end{..}.
I indent environments with four spaces to make my file more readable. (But as we will see this is not always possible.)
Entering computer code straight into a LaTeX document can cause problems due to the special characters used in programming. For example, showing LaTeX commands in a LaTeX document can’t be achieved by simply typing them. (Why?)
The verbatim environment solves this problem, and is useful for entering small bits of computer code.
For example, to get the output
Here’s the \emph{emphasise} command.
you can use
\begin {verbatim}
Here’s the \emph{emphasise} command.
\end {verbatim}
If you didn’t put it in the verbatim environment then you’d get
Here’s the emphasise command.
If you indent here, the spaces will appear in the output.
For long passages of computer code there are better options than verbatim.
The listings package has the lstlisting environment, which allows long scripts to appear with line-numbers, commands highlighted and more.
1# A simple python script 2 3name = input("What is your name? ") 4 5for i in range(1, 10): 6 print("Hello", name) 7 8if name == "Simon": 9 print("That’s my name too!") 10else: 11 print("Nice to meet you!")
The Python lab sheets use the minted package to colour the code. However, this
requires more software to be installed on your machine.
Activity. The circulated document was created with a fairly minimal LaTeX file. Can you work out which commands were used where?
On a print-out of the document (or a separate piece of paper), recreate the main LaTeX commands as closely as possible, looking out for environments in particular.
I hope you are starting to think more about how you write mathematics than you have before. This should not only happen when doing homeworks for this module, but also homeworks for other modules. For example, you should have now received marked homework from some of those other modules. Did you get comments there relating to how you presented your ideas?
You may have received comments about the following:
Overall, presenting maths well does take effort but the effort will pay off (in better understanding and higher marks).
In Computer Lab 3 we’ll look at using some of LaTeX’s auto-referencing features, looking at how to create numbered equations, propositions and theorems, and how to refer to them later.
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