{"id":148,"date":"2007-02-27T12:30:02","date_gmt":"2007-02-27T12:30:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sixthform.info\/maths\/?p=148"},"modified":"2020-03-14T19:29:30","modified_gmt":"2020-03-14T19:29:30","slug":"how-to-write-mathematics-badly-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sixthform.info\/maths\/?p=148","title":{"rendered":"How To Write Mathematics Badly 2"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In the previous post I linked to a video lecture by Jean-Pierre Sierre on writing mathematics. However I should also have linked to a series of lectures on <a href=\"http:\/\/scpd.stanford.edu\/scpd\/students\/Dam_ui\/pages\/ArchivedVideoList56K.asp?Include=knuthMath\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Mathematical Writing<\/a> by Donald Knuth and others given nearly 20 years ago in the Autumn of 1987 at Stanford University. To quote from <a href=\"http:\/\/scpd.stanford.edu\/knuth\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Don Knuth: Musings and More<\/a> <i>&#8220;I also gave a class called Mathematical Writing, just for one quarter,&#8221; says Knuth. &#8220;The lectures are still of special interest because they feature quite a few important guest lecturers.&#8221; This collection contains thirty-one tapes.<\/i> If you haven&#8217;t got the time to sit through all the videos you can download a transcript of the course (or buy the book) in plain TeX format on Donald Knuth&#8217;s site: <a href=\"http:\/\/www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu\/~knuth\/klr.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Mathematical Writing <\/a><\/p>\n<p>On a slightly different tack there are a couple of papers on mathematical research that would be useful to postgraduate students:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"ftp:\/\/ftp.alainconnes.org\/Companion.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Advice to the beginner by Alain Connes<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.arxiv.org\/abs\/math.HO\/0702396\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">What is good mathematics? by Terence Tao<\/a> <i>Some personal thoughts and opinions on what &#8220;good quality mathematics&#8221; is, and whether one should try to define this term rigorously. As a case study, the story of Szemer&eacute;di&#8217;s theorem is presented.<\/i><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I&#8217;d be very interested if there are any more online resources on mathematical writing or beginning research.<\/p>\n<p>Thanks to <a href=\"http:\/\/noncommutativegeometry.blogspot.com\/2007\/02\/good-mathematics.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Noncommutative Geometry<\/a> for the links to the two papers above. <\/p>\n<p>PS <a href=\"http:\/\/gooseania.blogspot.com\/2007\/02\/what-not-to-write.html#178863609913960832\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Gooseania<\/a> has mentioned that Nick Higham&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.maths.manchester.ac.uk\/~higham\/hwms\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Handbook of Writing for the Mathematical Sciences<\/a> is good.<br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/unimodular.net\/blog\/?p=98\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">eon<\/a> mentions <a href=\"http:\/\/www.math.ohio-state.edu\/~goss\/hint.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Some Hints on Mathematical Style<\/a> by David Goss which has been recently updated with suggestions by Jean-Pierre Serre. It contains a number of references to other papers and books on writing style. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In the previous post I linked to a video lecture by Jean-Pierre Sierre on writing mathematics. However I should also have linked to a series of lectures on Mathematical Writing by Donald Knuth and others given nearly 20 years ago in the Autumn of 1987 at Stanford University. To quote from Don Knuth: Musings and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-148","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sixthform.info\/maths\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sixthform.info\/maths\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sixthform.info\/maths\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sixthform.info\/maths\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sixthform.info\/maths\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=148"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.sixthform.info\/maths\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":294,"href":"https:\/\/www.sixthform.info\/maths\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148\/revisions\/294"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sixthform.info\/maths\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=148"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sixthform.info\/maths\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=148"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sixthform.info\/maths\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=148"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}