Mathematical Resources Relevant for Project Work

A good way to find published research articles is via the MathSciNet database run by the American Mathematical Society. This contains short reviews of published papers and often links to the original articles. A similar service is ZentralBlatt. For current articles not necessarily accepted for publication there is the arXiv, the mathematics part of which is best accessed by the front end at UC Davies.

There are some notable resources for older articles, including JSTOR and the European Mathematical Society's electronic library which includes for example the collected works of Riemann and Hamilton in electronic form.

If at all possible, use the TeX typesetting system: it is capable of outputting both postscript and pdf, and has proved its worth over time. The pdfLaTeX variant is well supported and includes good macros from the American Mathematical Society to help with the highest quality layout (see AMS-LaTeX and the Short Math Guide contained there). As an alternative to the standard document classes consider the memoir package. Packages can be downloaded form CTAN, although many are included with standard distributions, and the UK FAQ is an essential reference. Lars Madsen also has a guide in Danish. I recommend pdflatex over latex as it handles a wider variety of graphics formats directly.

For bibliographies, (pdf)latex comes with a program called bibtex. One good way to create bibtex entries for articles, is to look them up in MathSciNet, where one can download the data in bibtex format.

Good laptop presentations can be created with the beamer class for pdflatex. See also the description at the latex for logicians page.

Using pdflatex and the graphicx package one can include jpeg, png and pdf files directly. Files in these formats can be generated from most common drawing programs.

For line drawings I recommend the pdflatex package called pgf that comes with the beamer package mentioned above. It has a good user interface via the package tikz and a comprehensive manual. An alternative is metapost and André Heck's tutorial. There is a graphical interface to metapost known as metagraf.

For three-dimensional graphics try gnuplot or for an interactive environment Maple; Hans Joergen Munkholm has a good introduction in Danish to Maple. For a good free ray tracer try povray.

There is a whole issue of the PracTeX journal devoted to graphics in latex. See other issues of this journal for helpful advice.