12.03.2025 (Wednesday)

ME A Random Walk in Multi-Format Lecture Notes (via the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences)

regular seminar Rosemary Harris (UCL)

at:
12:00 - 13:00
KCL, Strand
room: UCL, Room 03, 188 Tottenham Court Road
abstract:

The traditional mathematics route to produce lecture notes by compiling LaTeX to PDF gives outputs which suffer from accessibility problems and are often not optimized for screen viewing, especially on the mobile devices favoured by many of our students. Various markdown-based solutions have recently been developed to address this issue and I will report on my own attempts to get to grips with Quarto (https://quarto.org/) and use it to simultaneously produce lecture notes in HTML and PDF formats with properly typeset equations, cross-linked chapters and citations. I will demonstrate the features (and possible pitfalls) of this approach in the context of a set of notes produced for a short course given at the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) in Ghana\DSEMIC along the way, I hope to convey something of the work of AIMS and what I learnt from teaching in that environment.

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