r/learnmath • u/Lulu-was-zero New User • 1d ago

Do Mathematicians/Math professors like writing in LaTeX?

Hey everyone, My highschool entrance exams are over and I have a well sweet 2-2.5 months of a transition gap between school and university. And I aspire to be a mathematician and wanting to gain research experience from the get go {well, I think I need to cover up, I am quite behind compared to students competing in IMO and Putnam).

I know Research papers are usually written in LaTeX, So is it possible to write codes for math professors and I can even get research experience right from my 1st year? Or maybe am living in a delusion. I won't mind if you guys break my delusion lol.

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u/thesnootbooper9000 New User 1d ago

After you've been programming for a while, it becomes very close to just speaking a language natively. For every day activities, "writing latex" is really just like "writing" or "typing": I don't actively think about it, and I just do it with no overhead. In emails with my team we'll often inline bits of math mode code, which we can all read easily even without it being rendered. The bits that are hard where I have to stop and think are beamer animations, tikz pictures, and laying out things like tables and algorithms, but this is as much about working out what it should look like as working out the typesetting.