Greetings from a Mathematician in Washington DC -- new to Zettelkasten

bradfordfournier

I'm looking forward to getting to know some of you: I'm a 37y/o living in Washington DC, USA. My PhD is in mathematics and my research is in itterated inverses, preimage complexity measures, and sigma matrices. I'm thrilled to have recently discovered both the Zettelkasten note taking technique and this forum.

All the best.
Bradford

Sascha

You are warmely welcomed.

Removed202201121

Hi Bradford,

in the past years I've tinkered with combinations of the following building blocks:

• methods of "thinking on paper"
• problem solving tools and
• zettelkasten principles.

These items allow for fairly straightforward specific adaptations to math problem solving.

The main posting tracing the evolution of these ideas is here.
More math-related older ideas can be found here.

davecan

@thomasteepe Thank you for providing those links. I've spent the past hour reading through comments and some of your papers and presentations. It's given me a lot to think about, since I'm also interested in strategies for problem solving using the ZK approach.

carolyn

Hi @bradfordfournier and welcome!

I'm fairly new here also, still finding my way, and also a mathematician. I'll be interested to hear what methods work for you, and what tools you find useful.

GeoEng51

@bradfordfournier

Welcome to the forum (from a humble engineer )

ZettelDistraction

Also a mathematician (Erdos 2--well, I don't deny earning a PhD in subject). On account of extensive familiarity with MikTex and LaTex, I settled on Zettlr+MikTex+Zotero+Pandoc. Also, Zettlr will understand tex files in addition to markdown files. But what really tipped the scale in favor of Zettlr was its built-in Karl-Marx-Stadt theme.

The learning curve is almost horizontal--a steep learning curve would require less time, to be pedantic about the meaning of "steep." It seems one must have written numerous fleeting notes with pen (or mechanical pencil--a 2mm Rotring 800 in my case) before writing the inaugural digital Zettel.

A paucity of concise, concrete examples of Zettelkasten in Action is an impediment. Surely there are generic examples to which one could refer. I'm skeptical that one cannot do better than to say everyone has to arrive at their own implementation of ZK. Not that anyone in this thread has said so--it seems to be "in the air." Replicability is a virtue, after all.

ZettelDistraction

I am mistaken about examples, e.g. https://github.com/Zettelkasten-Method/ba-zettelkasten-justice-for-hedgehogs

ctietze

There's also a demo Zettelkasten about Zettelkasten-ing: https://github.com/Zettelkasten-Method/The-Archive-Demo-Notes