Better Scientific Presentations

Last week, Freddy left this comment on  On why I hate LaTeX/Beamer : We have to think something about the theorem issue. If it is a mathematical presentation, the most important contribution is indeed a theorem. Think about a math thesis presentation: most results will be theorems :( and I replied I agree that in a math presentations theorems have a big role. The question is how you present them. As University of Manchester Mathematics Professor Nicholas Higham in "Handbook of Writing for the Mathemetical sciences write" writes "When you write a slide, aim for economy of words. Chop sentences mercilessly to leave the bare minimum that is readily comprehensible." Think about it, people may take their theorems directly out of their latex articles and dump them into their beamer slides without further thought. That is that Beamer fosters, but ultimately it Beamer is just a tool. As I wrote on the post, the responsibility lies on the person using it.   Let me ...

Yeah, I keep (really) hating  LaTeX/Beamer. Thankfully, there is a better way to make slides with LaTeX on a WYSIWYG software. It is Scribus running LaTeX as a external tool. Here is how to get started. Yesterday I got a comment from wipeout on a remix of a math presentation I did in 2011. He asked if it could be done all in Beamer. I did research and ended writing this post. I have been using LaTeX for more than 10 years. It is a beautiful tool to typeset beautiful math. But LaTeX is neither a word processor, a desktop publishing tool, nor slideware. In words of its creator Producing good slides requires visual formatting, which means LaTeX is not well suited for the task.                                                                        – Leslie Lamport LaTeX/Beamer doesn't create the v...

Designing math visuals is tough because of the level of abstraction. In this visual example I remix 5 slides of a math presentation.  I illustrate a way around the level of abstraction and show how to reduce to information per slide. In the past couple of days I have been working on remixing some slides of a math presentation. It is a project I have been wanting to do for a long time, and I'm happy I finally did it! The original presentation is called A short course on: Preconditioned Krylov subspace methods by Yousef Saad. You can download the presentation here .  Don't let the title scare you! Understanding the content is not important in this case.  I encourage you to download the original slides and compare them with the remix below. I've chosen this presentation for three reasons. First, it is a classic example of average visuals in scientific talks. Second, I know the topic, so I could be sure I knew how to remix it without making (hopefully) content mistakes. ...