Mark Senn of ECN's User Services Group will be hosting a series of free, non-credit short courses every two weeks this semester entitled "Tools for Scientific Exposition". Each course will be a hour long talk. If you are interested in attending one or several of these talks, please contact Mark Senn at mark@purdue.edu to sign up.

Several of these classes involve LaTeX, a high-quality typesetting system designed to produce technical and scientific documentation. LaTeX is a free software, compatable with Windows, Unix, Linux, and dozens of other operating systems. The short courses related to LaTeX are designed to make technical document creation (and thesis writing) easier and more standarized. See course descriptions below for more information. Come learn more about how LaTeX technology can make your job easier!

Free LaTeX software is avaialble for PC, Mac, Linux, Unix, and many other operating systems.

LaTeX is a high-quality typesetting program, with features designed for the production of technical and scientific documents. A wide variety of free auxillary software is available. LaTeX is the de facto standard for the communication and publication of scientific documents.

If you know how to use the computer and a text editor you'll learn enough at this short course to typeset simple text and mathematics.

Free BibTeX software is avaialble for PC, Mac, Linux, Unix, and many other operating systems.

BibTeX is an auxiliary program for LaTeX. It automatically formats citations and constructs a bibliography in the format you choose by searching one or more database files.

Free MetaPost software is avaialble for PC, Mac, Linux, Unix, and many other operating systems.

MetaPost is a free, picture-drawing language that produces PostScript output. LaTeX can include PostScript graphics.

If you know how to use a text editor and have some programming experience at the end of this talk you should be able to produce simple figures. You'll know where to go for more information regarding producing more complicated figures. I find using MetaPost better than using interactive drawing programs because it is often much faster to make changes to multiple figures.

A free Purdue thesis documentclass is available.

At this short course you'll learn how to use the puthesis documentclass so you can concentrate on the content, instead of the format, of your thesis.

Learn how to use LaTeX to do PowerPoint-like presentations.

Mathematica is installed at many computers at Purdue. Half-time or more students can install it on student-owned computers for free.

Mathematica is described by its developer as ``the world's only fully integrated environment for technical computing.'' It does symbolic mathematics, numeric mathematics, and graphics. Using Mathematica's interactive ``notebooks'', one can use standard mathematical notation for input and output. Active elements and hyperlinks can be used to make a truly interactive document. Mathematica can be interfaced with C, LaTeX, and lots of other software.

webMathematica brings the power of Mathematica to the web.