Seeking Math Note Nirvana

Over the past few weeks, I’ve come to realize that my note taking needs immense work. Like, “I should start taking notes” levels of immense work. Throughout my entire life I’ve never bothered to put effort into writing notes, and that’s starting to bite me now that everything in college is more self-guided.

Isn’t it ironic that I can maintain a blog but can’t maintain a note set? I’ve done “good” with my Geology notes and “okay” with my Data Structures notes since I type those, but in terms of Calculus II notes I have nil. Nada. Nothing. I write equations and calculations (unorganizedly) in my notebook while the prof zips through the lecture slides, and look back over the nonsensical chicken scratch when I’m doing my homework or a review.

Not a great system by any means. I’m passing the class breezy (so far), but I could optimize a bit. So I’ve been exploring the wonderful world of LaTeX and Nvim.

I haven’t actually put it into practice in the real world yet (I’m still learning the syntax) but I like how it makes what I write look, a lot. Problem is I can’t get this down to an optimal speed. I think I may have to forego LaTeX and just use straight Markdown, and find some way to parse math.