My LaTeX Note Taking Journey Through Calculus I

Throughout the course of my first Calculus course (grade 12 AP Calculus), I decided to write my notes neatly in LaTeX for future reference. That sparked a curiosity for the document preparation system, which I value greatly.

I first discovered LaTeX by seeing a random YouTube tutorial, I quickly recognized the font and other styling, I had seen it before! It turns out, nearly all educational documents I have read were prepared by the LaTeX system.

Early Documents

My most notable early document was one that included plots (graphs), tedious align environments, and tables.

In fact, I submitted the document previewed above instead of the traditional paper and pencil approach! It was quite an experience, the LaTeX knowledge learned from this project was invaluable for me.

After preparing that assignment, I decided that I could write my notes in a similar way. I was amazed by not only the aesthetics, but the consistent system without any need for “eyeballing.” In the style of mathematicians, I like calculated values over approximations.

Writing Calculus Notes

I always liked to write digitally. With a powerful typesetting system like LaTeX, it is now possible for me to write mathematical notes with a consistent style.

There were many theorems and definitions throughout my Calculus course, so I learned about TeX environments and styled them with the tcolorbox package.

Conclusion

Overall, I strongly believe that LaTeX is a skill that everyone should learn for technical writing. It is not too difficult to get up and running, and, from that point, your curiosity should take you on a journey to learn more!