Tips for mathematical handwriting (2007)
23 comments
·February 8, 2025mturmon
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.
lagrange77
> 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.
dang
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)
dieselgate
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
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!
fifilura
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.
Jtsummers
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.
Unearned5161
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
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.
moi2388
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
sideshowb
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?
sureglymop
I use an iPad with pen and goodnotes. I can airplay it to linux with uxplay. All my notes are digital.
Unearned5161
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
Unearned5161
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!
jovas
Pretty much exactly how I write. (My lower case zeta is prettier)
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thaumasiotes
He doesn't mention that many people have identical handwritten "u" and "n" (both written "и").
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
There's nothing wrong with l.
> Make a point come out of the top of the p, to distinguish it from a rho.
Or make it \varrho (ϱ).
> 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-£-sign-without-the-line-through territory.