A guide to the forum

Shaun Culver · 25 Mar 2008, 22:41

This post will provide up-to-date information on the modus operandi of this forum:

Layout

The exercises have been divided into the "Mathematical world" and the "Physical world". This categorization corresponds to the layout of the chapters in Roger Penrose's book, 'The Road to Reality'. The "Mathematical world" category corresponds to the first 16 chapters. Chapters 17 to 34 correspond to the "Physical world" category.

Posting solutions

Solutions are to be posted in the corresponding "Solutions" forum. You may post solutions using various methods. A few examples being:

LaTeX code (See below)
Attaching images, documents, etc.

All posts are to adopt the following format for the subject (See the reason for this in Note 1 situated towards the bottom of this topic)

Exercise [xx.xx]

If an alternative solution is to be posted, the subject of the post should appear as:

Exercise [xx.xx] b

For a third alternative:

Exercise [xx.xx] c

and so on...

Solutions are continually improved through the debate that follows after the first post. The first post is where the solution is situated. Improvements are made by editing the first post.

LaTeX mathematical typesetting

LaTeX is a document markup language and document preparation system. 'The Road to Reality' Internet Forum supports LaTeX typesetting.

To include a LaTeX image in your post, place your LaTeX code within the following BBCode tags:

Code:

[tex]LaTeX code goes here[/tex]

Example:

$\int \frac{1}{2\pi i}\sum _{n=1}^{\infty } \frac{1}{n^z} dz$

To include a LaTeX image on the same line as your text (an inline equation), place your LaTeX code within the following BBCode tags:

Code:

[itex]LaTeX code goes here[/itex]

Example: $\int \frac{1}{2\pi i}\sum _{n=1}^{\infty } \frac{1}{n^z} dz$

To learn how to use LaTeX, please consult "Art of Problem Solving" for tutorials.

For a brief overview, "S.O.S. Mathematics CyberBoard" offer a crash course in LaTeX.

For a comprehensive dictionary of LaTeX symbols, download this *.pdf file. (1MB)

Please test your code here: http://at.org/~cola/tex2img/index.php

Notes

Note 1

When sorting solutions to exercises by their subject (There are options towards the bottom of the forums which allow visitors to sort topics according to various criteria), the forum script fails to sort the subjects logically (according to the layout in the book, when sorted using the "Ascending" option). For example: Exercise [11.1] would be placed before Exercise [9.1] , because the "1" precedes the "9". In order to overcome this diffiiculty, the following format needs to be adopted:

When inserting the exercise number between the brackets, please ensure that all four slots (e.g. xx.xx) are filled. For example, if a solution to exercise 2.1 is to be posted, then the subject/title of the post should appear as follows: Exercise [02.01]

In other words, for all exercises situated between chapters 2 to 9, the format should appear as: Exercise [0x.xx]; In each chapter, exercises 1 - 9 should appear as: Exercise [xx.0x].

The essential addition being the zeros.

A guide to the forum

Who is online