pen and paper is far more instant than any method I can imagine of poking mathematics in through a keyboard.
Yeah… I think I just have to bite this bullet. If you do math professionally and the people you know work onto pen and paper, then that’s the answer.
It’s just.… I feel like I can imagine a system that would be better than pen and paper. There’s so much tedious repetition of symbols when I do algebra on paper, and inevitably while simplifying some big integral I write something wrong, and have to scratch it out, and the whole thing becomes a confusing mess. writing my verbal thoughts down with a keyboard is just as quick and intuitive as a pen and paper. There must be a better way...
Yes, that would also be great, but I a) I can’t afford such a tablet, and b) I strongly suspect that the OCR would be inaccurate enough that I’d end up wishing for a keyboard anyway. Hell accurate voice recognition would be better, but I’m still waiting for that to happen...
I made with my Kindle the experience that it’s better than regular paper books while reading books on a smartphone isn’t. Currently most mathmaticians use paper. If someone would design a mathematical editor that’s better than paper, I think that could be a huge commercial success.
Yeah… I think I just have to bite this bullet. If you do math professionally and the people you know work onto pen and paper, then that’s the answer.
It’s just.… I feel like I can imagine a system that would be better than pen and paper. There’s so much tedious repetition of symbols when I do algebra on paper, and inevitably while simplifying some big integral I write something wrong, and have to scratch it out, and the whole thing becomes a confusing mess. writing my verbal thoughts down with a keyboard is just as quick and intuitive as a pen and paper. There must be a better way...
Would it make sense to write on a tablet and have the computer do OCR? (Hypothetical system.)
Yes, that would also be great, but I a) I can’t afford such a tablet, and b) I strongly suspect that the OCR would be inaccurate enough that I’d end up wishing for a keyboard anyway. Hell accurate voice recognition would be better, but I’m still waiting for that to happen...
Now that I think about it, OCR would be much harder for math than for text.
Kinda-toy example
That means there’s a possible startup.
Ha, in theory, but it looks like the guys at TeXmacs are already selling the product for free, so no dice...
I made with my Kindle the experience that it’s better than regular paper books while reading books on a smartphone isn’t. Currently most mathmaticians use paper. If someone would design a mathematical editor that’s better than paper, I think that could be a huge commercial success.