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Learning New Software

I do enjoy learning new software when I can see how it will directly support what I do. Something that appeals to my creative side is constructing graphics in support of mathematics.

I think my first really solid focus on mathematical graphics was Metapost. Since I've been typesetting mathematics in LaTeX for quite a while it made sense to look at Metapost, since it is bundled with most LaTeX distributions.

Metapost supports a number of paradigms. You can specify points directly by giving coordinates for them, or you can focus on the relationships between them, or you can focus on the constraints they must satisfy, or you can start with a collection and apply transformations to build what you seek. The flexibility of Metapost has been appealing to me, and its manual is lucid and concise. There are some very good galleries of examples using Metapost on the internet to help someone like me see what is possible.

Metapost is a programming language however, and as my job became busier I started defaulting to a simpler approach, namely using Mathematica to create graphics by hand. I found myself limiting what I drew to match what was convenient in Mathematica.

Lately, in anticipation of teaching a class in the coming Spring that would be diagram-heavy I started looking at Tikz, a very popular graphics package for LaTeX. I quickly found how to draw the kinds of diagrams I wanted, and even more importantly, I could see how to explain the process to my students and ask them to construct diagrams.

Going into the coming week I realized that I would need to draw some pictures in my Modern Geometry class to explain some formulas in spherical trigonometry and that if I tried to draw these pictures on the spot it would not go well. I have spent the weekend trying to learn some more advanced features in Tikz. I think I have found enough samples on the web similar to what I want to do that it will get done today but Tikz is a Swiss army knife with many blades---the manual is 1100 pages or so and that doesn't include specialty packages to include. If I do end up using Tikz regularly it will be a while before I can start from scratch as opposed to downloading and revising examples from the web.

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