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Physics 338 Links: Spring 2018
Getting Started with LaTeX
LaTeX is part of a freely available system for typesetting documents.
It is designed to be particularly well-suited for documents with
mathematics, but is used for general-purpose writing as well.
A good starting place is to look at the
TeX User's Group (TUG) website.
That includes links to download and install LaTeX, as well as links to
various getting-started tutorials.
There are also cloud-based versions,
ShareLatex
and
Overleaf
that many students have found convenient.
Once you have installed LaTeX or set up an online-account, you can download the
American Journal of Physics sample document from
http://workbench.lafayette.edu/~doughera/courses/phys338/latex/AJP-Sample.zip.
That document is intended as both a tutorial and a template for you to use
to write your own report. (I have added copies of the figures in additional
formats to make it more likely to work on any system.) Other
sample documents will be available as well.
LaTeX will also handle automatic numbering of figures, tables,
and references. The AJP template shows how to use all of those features.
Getting Started with Mathematica
To obtain a student copy of Mathematica,
visit the following ITS web site:
https://help.lafayette.edu/wolfram.
There are a variety of on-line tutorials available for Mathematica.
I recommend going to Wolfram.com
and exploring their on-line resources. Some students have reported the
following to be useful:
Constants, Units, and Uncertainty
The National Institute of Technology and Standards maintains a useful page
with the current best values for many fundamental constants, at
http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Constants/.
The July 2014 issue of Physics Today included an interesting
article about a proposed revamping of the standards used for many fundamental constants.
You can read about it in the article
A more fundamental International System of Units.
This page is maintained by
Andrew Dougherty