authoring math documents (tex?)

[Ric Werme]

On Mon, Jun 11, 2007 at 06:38:47PM -0400, Lloyd Kvam wrote:
> My daughter is heading back to school and will need to write Math
> papers.  She is now running Fedora 6.  (The conversion from Windows to
> Fedora happened after graduation.)  She asked me what software she
> should use for writing her Math papers, and being an old ascii text guy,
> I did not know what to tell her.  

I haven't used any of this stuff, so my advice is worth less than 2 bits.
(Except for my advice to avoid http://www.theodoregray.com/PeriodicTable/ .)
Is she writing papers with lotsa equations in them?  Then Tex is probably
the way to go.  (Think papers that look like Knuth's _Art of Computer
Programming_ books, the original impetus for Tex.)

OTOH, if she is writing papers looking at the results of those equations,
i.e. visualations, stunning graphics, and that sort of good stuff,
then Mathematica is the top shelf commercial product.  I see a student
version for only $140 at http://store.wolfram.com/view/app/mathforstudents/

  Mathematica for Students 6 gives you all of the functionality of
  professional Mathematica 6 for a special low student price. It lets you
  finish your homework assignments and lab reports in record time and do all
  of the computations you need from elementary to postgraduate level. The
  current version introduces dynamic interactivity, symbolic interface
  construction, load-on-demand data, high-impact adaptive visualization, and
  over a thousand powerful new functions and enhancements.

  Mathematica for Students 6 is available for most Windows, Mac OS X, and
  Linux configurations.

If I were in a math/science program, I'd have trouble resisting it even if
I didn't need it.

Other random links:

http://mathworld.wolfram.com/EschersMap.html
http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/
http://www.theodoregray.com/PeriodicTable/

The last is about The Periodic Table table located in an office at Wolfram
Research.  Warning - do not visit that link unless you have at least an hour's
free time.  Seriously.

  I decided to build this table by accident in early 2002, as a result of a
  misunderstanding while reading Uncle Tungsten by Oliver Sacks. ...

  Then I started building a website to document all my samples, and that's
  when things really got out of hand. A few months later my little table won
  the 2002 Ig Nobel Prize in Chemistry, clearly the highest honor for which it
  is eligible.

You've been warned.

       -Ric Werme