ProcrastiBlog

I have need of a LaTeX package. I think a lot of people would find this package useful. I would prefer not to write it myself.

This package would take a mode argument in the preamble and format the document in one of three ways: as a conference submission, as a camera-ready conference paper, or as a tech report.

Suppose I have a theorem and that theorem has a proof.

• In a conference submission, the theorem would appear in the main text and would be re-stated along with its proof in an appendix.


• In a camera-ready conference paper, the theorem would appear in the main text and the proof would not appear at all.


• In a tech report, the theorem and the proof would appear inline in the main text.

Preferably, proofs could be included in the main text or sent to an appendix on a case-by-case basis. Proofs could also have "sketch" versions and full versions: the sketch version appears in the main text of a conference paper (either kind) and the full version appears only in a tech report.

Suppose that, in proving a theorem, I first prove a lemma.

• If the proof of the theorem appears in the main text (or an appendix), then the lemma and its proof should also appear in the main text (or the appendix), before the theorem.


• If the proof of the theorem is omitted, or if a proof sketch is included which makes no reference to the lemma, then the lemma and its proof should not appear at all.

One should be able to conditionally include text depending on the mode. For example, in camera-ready conference mode, one would probably include the sentence: "Full proofs of all theorems appear in a technical report [citation here]."

The only package I've found that does anything like this is thrmappendix , but it doesn't allow for a proof to appear in the main text at all. It's primarily concerned with the appearance and re-appearance of the theorem, with or without its proof; I'm primarily concerned with the appearance or suppression of the proof.

In the midst of some unrelated Googling, I came across Luca de Alfaro's style guidelines for student co-authors. This is good stuff. I particularly like "one sentence per line" b/w "fill-sentence macro". It's an elegant solution to a frequently annoying deficiency of diff, which is unfortunately the baseline for anyone collaborating via CVS or SVN. I tweaked his macro to get nice indentation in AucTeX:

(defun fill-sentence ()
  (interactive)
  (save-excursion
    (forward-char)
    (forward-sentence -1)
    (indent-relative)
    (let ((beg (point)))
      (forward-sentence)
      (if (equal "LaTeX" (substring mode-name (string-match "LaTeX" mode-name)))
          (LaTeX-fill-region-as-paragraph beg (point))
        (fill-region-as-paragraph beg (point))))))
(global-set-key "\ej" 'fill-sentence)

[UPDATE 1/20/07] Fixed an off-by-one error when the cursor is on the first character of the sentence by adding (forward-char).

"There is no silver bullet—but there are no werewolves."
From No Name: Just Notes on Software Reuse by Robert Biddle, Angela Martin, and James Noble. In response to Frederick Brooks.

It's always been a problem and, apparently, it's getting worse. (Though, in fairness to the discipline, enrollments in CS are down dramatically across the board and seem to be down proportionally somewhat less for women, especially at the doctoral level (which I inferred from squinting at this graph)).

What can I say, ladies? It's not all programming, but programming is an important part of it. If you don't like staring at a screen all day... well, then you're probably not cut out for 21st century office work. You can only read so many papers (and even papers don't have to be on paper if you don't insist on it).

CS could do a better job of selling itself as a mathematical rather than an engineering discipline—it's really a little of both, and you can choose the proportion that works best for you depending on your interests (for instance, my work is probably 60/40 math/engineering; most of my peers/colleagues are probably more math-centric). Neither math nor engineering are at gender parity, but math is better than CS and engineering is worse.

On the glass-half-empty side, CS is—and is likely to remain—a male-dominated discipline. And the men you'll find, while not necessarily the classic pocket-protectored nerd (I've never once seen a pocket protector on a computer scientist; I think that's a slide-rule-era stereotype), tend to be socially awkward in one way or another. (But academia, in general, seems to attract introverts.)

On the glass-half-full side, universities, research labs, and funding agencies are absolutely desperate to encourage women to pursue computer science as a career. If you are a math- or technologically-inclined female (especially if you are an American female: China and India produce proportionally more female computer scientists (I think, no data to back that up)), you'll have a comparative advantage in CS vs. math and the physical sciences. Which is not to say you'll get a free ride. But there will definitely be a thumb on the scale in your favor.*

* Must... suppress... white male... resentment... So hard... being white... and male...

So you want to give an equation a name in LaTeX, instead of the number it gets automatically... For some reason, Google will resist telling you how. You may be tempted to use the eqname package. No need! No need at all! Use the \tag command. Why isn't this easier to figure out?

UPDATE: I apologize to the writers of the amsmath documentation, who mention this pretty much immediately after they introduce the concept of equation numbering. I always assume that Google can find these things for me.

Fill in the blanks: You are ___% more likely to get cited if you include BibTeX and/or EndNote entries for your publications on your web page. You are ___% less likely to get cited if the PDF of your paper doesn't support cut-and-paste.