LaTeX is a markup language that is particularly useful for typesetting mathematics. Several teachers at WWU recommended or required that assignments be written in LaTeX. I learned it my Sophomore year and made a lot of mistakes on the way, so I decided to put together a class to help other students who were trying to learn it.
This picture was taken while I was teaching the Winter 2011 class. It was taken by Carly Vester to accompany
an article that was published in the Western Front.
I taught the class, which takes about an hour and a half, eight times. In Spring Quarter of my Senior year I handed it over to Andrew Wray, who I’m confident will do a great job with it.
The teaching materials, written in LaTeX (of course!) include:
- A slideshow.
- A book-style document with a more detailed description of the topics.
- A worksheet that has an example of most of the topics in the class. I ask students to try to make their own document mimicking the worksheet.
The documents that students need are here. The source code for everything is on GitHub.
The university newspaper wrote a small article about the class.
Topics covered in the class
- the Preamble
- Comments
- Math Mode
- Subscripts and Superscripts
- Fractions
- The Align Environment
- Matrices
- Theorems
- Tables
- Code
- Source Code
- Pseudocode
- Pictures
- a brief overview of useful packages
- geometry
- amsmath
- verbatim
- multicol
- listings