Numerical Linear Algebra Group: Need to Know

Contents: LaTeX - BibTeX - Beamer - Version Control - Emacs - MATLAB - Computing - Refereeing - News Sources - Societies - Dropbox- Personal Web Page - Travel support - CV - eduroam

A good reference for some of the items below is Handbook of Writing for the Mathematical Sciences, second edition (1998), which is available in ebook form from SIAM.

LaTeX

• TeX Live is an excellent and comprehensive TeX system for Linux, Mac and Windows. A new version is produced each year.
• Some advice on Best practices in LaTeX.
• Some suggestions
• In your editor use hard line wrapping (which inserts carriage returns at the end of each line) rather than soft line wrapping (in which new lines are displayed on screen but not stored in the file, so are not reproducible in a different editor).
• Use a line width of at most 80 characters: 72 is a good choice.
• Start each sentence or phrase on a new line. This makes the source easier to read and also easier to edit, as many edits will simply involve moving a line from one place to another or deleting it (make sure you know how to move or delete a line with a small number of keystrokes in your editor).
• Use this template (LaTeX source, PDF form) for producing notes in LaTeX. It is important to put your name and the date on everything you write. Use this version of a4.sty, which gives better margins than the default.
• Although eqnarray is the standard LaTeX environment for producing multi-line displayed equations, it doesn't produce as good results as some of the amsmath environments such as align and gather, nor is it as versatile. See the article Avoid Eqnarray.
• If you'd like to use version control on your LaTeX files then the VC bundle is very good; use it in conjunction with a version control system such as Subversion. See also Version Control below.
• To include MATLAB listings in your document use the \verbatiminput command from verbatim.sty or the \Verbatiminput command from fancyvrb.sty.
• Useful links
  • Horrors in LaTeX. An article describing some of the many ways in which authors write bad LaTeX that infuriates copy editors. It is OK to "\def\a{\alpha}", though!
  • Comprehensive list of LaTeX symbols.
  • Detailed document about Math Mode.
  • Learning LaTeX (available as ebook to UoM people) by David Griffiths and Des Higham.
  • TeX FAQ
  • TeX tips Twitter feed.
  • Detexify: draw a symbol and find the LaTeX equivalent: Web App, iTunes App, Android App.
  • Graphs and tables: examples showing how not to do them.

BiBTeX

Bibliographies for your LaTeX files should be generated with BibTeX. Create your own bib file of all the papers you've read and may want to cite. For examples (and you may want to simply include these in your \bibliography command):

• njhigham.bib
• strings.bib

For compatibility within the group, please use keys of the form used in njhigham.bib. Thus a 2010 paper by Smith and Jones has key smjo10, while a 1990 book by Smith has key smit90.

Beamer

• Turn off never-used navigation symbols at bottom right of slide with \setbeamertemplate{navigation symbols}{}.
• If you include extra slides at the end of your talk, you can stop them affecting the page count as follows: \usepackage{appendixnumberbeamer} then put \appendix just before the extra slides.
• Beamer by Example article.
• Chapter on Beamer in Gratzer's More Math Into LaTeX book.

Version Control

• Notes on Git.
• Notes on SVN.

Emacs

Emacs is an excellent choice of editor for programming, LaTeX, and general text editing. It runs on linux, Mac and Windows. For the Mac, the vanilla GNU Emacs (Cocoa) is recommended in preference to the Mac-specific Aquamacs build.

Suggestions:

• Don't use tabs (obtainable using a package). It's much better to use appropriate buffer switching commands.
• Use Ido mode for buffer switching and loading files. See the settings in Nick's .emacs.
• Use Undo Tree for navigating the Emacs undo history.
• Use AucTeX, which is indispensable for LaTeXing and BibTeXing in Emacs.

Useful links:

• How to Learn Emacs one-pager by Sacha Chua.
• Nick's .emacs, ~/dropbox/.emacs, ~/dropbox/.emacs-custom_windows, ~/dropbox/.emacs-custom_mac. Explanation: I have Emacs set up so that it runs on Windows or a Mac. I have environment variable HOME=D:\ on Windows and HOME=~ on the Mac. The .emacs in the HOME directory is an almost empty one whose job is to read in the .emacs in HOME/dropbox and then the .emacs-custom_windows or .emacs-custom_mac also in dropbox. The .emacs in HOME/dropbox is read and updated from Mac or Windows. I also have elisp files in HOME/dropbox/elisp. The zip file elisp.zip contains the zipped version of my elisp directory. Note: on Windows I run the TCMD shell, a commercial Unix-like shell, and have a few batch files, latex.bat etc., that my .emacs depends on under Windows.
• Xah Lee's Emacs Blog. Particularly useful for information on customization and Emacs Lisp.
• Various Dotemacs files uploaded by their creators.
• Woodnotes Guide to Emacs for Writers. A nice introduction to Emacs focused on writing rather than programming.

Videos

• 5-minute intro to Emacs, geared towards programmers and (soon to be ex-) TextMate (Mac) users.
• Column editing using CUA mode.
• Emacs Rocks episodes.
• Emacs screencasts.

Org mode

• Org website.
• How to present using Org-mode in Emacs (blog post by Sacha Chua).
• Org mode files from group meeting of 23-4-13:
  • Org file used for demo.
  • Producing Beamer slides using Org: Org file, resulting LaTeX file, resulting PDF file.
• Google Tech Talk on Org mode by Carsten Dominik (2008).

MATLAB

• You can download MATLAB (and other software) from the University's Electronic Software Delivery System.
• Download the NAG Toolbox for MATLAB from the NAG website. You will need to get a license code from Mike Croucher.
• To export PDF figures from MATLAB use, e.g.,
  set(gcf, 'Color', 'w')
  export_fig myfig.pdf
  where export_fig is a MATLAB function available from MATLAB Central.

Computing

Software carpentry project: tutorials, with videos, teaching a wide variety of computing skills.

Refereeing

• See Section 8.4 (How to Referee) of Handbook of Writing for the Mathematical Sciences, Second edition (1998).
• Do Google Scholar search on how to referee a paper to find lots of articles on the topic.
• Ian Parberry's guides on refereeing and other activities in theoretical computer science (much of which is relevant to us).

News Sources

• NA Digest is the main source of information about conferences, jobs, books, questions, numerical analysis. Subscribe to receive the weekly email.

Societies

• SIAM is the global organization for applied and industrial mathematics. Postgraduate students at the University should sign up for free student membership (as the University is an Academic Member of SIAM) and join the Manchester SIAM Student Chapter (again free).
• The IMA (Institute of Mathematics and its Applications) has a free e-student membership.
• ILAS (International Linear Algebra Society) offers free membership for students. As well as organizing conferences, ILAS produces IMAGE magazine several times per year.

Dropbox

Dropbox is a great way to backup files and share them between different machines (desktop and laptop), as well as share selected files with co-workers. Create a dropbox subdirectory of your home directory and keep (e.g.) your .emacs file there.

Personal Web Page

To set up a web page you can use the template on the School intranet. Also chat to other members of the group to ask how they created their own pages.

Travel Support

The School provides support for postgraduates to attend conferences, particularly if a presentation is to be given. An application form available at this page must be completed. Please discuss this with one of us. If you are funded from one of our grants it may not necessary to complete the form.

CV

Here is an example CV: LaTeX source, pdf. It illustrates the layout and content for an academic CV. The formatting is quite basic. A good example is Lijing Lin's, created using res_yy.sty. A CV for industry might need to be quite different.

EDUROAM

Eduroam (education roaming) is the secure, world-wide roaming access service developed for the international research and education community. Many universities across Europe (less so north America) support it. It allows you to log on to wireless networks using your Manchester username and password. For instructions on how to set it up see the IT services eduroam page. Note: you must be on the Manchester campus in order to set up eduroam, so make sure to set it up before you go travelling.