# #code

##### Git for Mathematicians (2/3): The Theory
Published on #codeDiscuss

This post is the second in a series in which I will try to explain how to use Git to write papers, with an audience of professional mathematicians in mind. The first part, which was about why one would want to use Git, is here. Let us now dive into the second part, in which I explain a little what’s going “under the hood” of Git.

While it is not strictly necessary to know all this to use Git, I think that understanding the mechanics helps in actually using it correctly and efficiently. Commands like git push or git pull are actually a bit complex and it is useful to know what words like “commit”, “branch”, “remote”, etc. refer to, especially when there is a conflict between branches.

##### Select-Exams
Published on • Updated on #code#teachingSourceDiscuss

With online teaching, I have to find ways to make many processes go faster, as otherwise teaching takes an inordinate amount of time compared to traditional teaching (and my salary doesn’t change…). I have already written about automating exam production I’ve now taken to scanning my students' exams and grading them directly on my touchscreen computer. This way I avoid all the issues that come with physical exams: I’m not scared to death of bringing them home anymore – losing them means redoing the whole exam 😨, I have a backup, I can give more detailed feedback to students, give it to them earlier and more often, etc.

##### Git for Mathematicians (1/3): Preliminaries
Published on • Updated on #codeDiscuss

This post is the first in a series in which I will try to explain how to use Git to write papers, with an audience of professional mathematicians in mind. I know that there are a lot of material online about learning Git, but as far as I can tell, none are tailored specifically for mathematicians' needs (which differ a bit from programmers' needs). Here, I will try to explain why one would even be interested in Git to begin with.

##### Exam Template for Pandoc
Published on #code#teachingSourceDiscuss

Like many people, I have been teaching online for some time now. In order to help students get an idea of how well they understand the material, I have been giving them and grading weekly homework (keep in mind that it is not common in French universities to give homework in math bachelors).

I have been using the very nice exam LaTeX class for some time. It works well, but I found it annoying to copy/paste my template each time I want to create a new exam. I decided to write a small template to be used with Pandoc, so that I can also write my exams in Markdown rather than LaTeX. It was not completely trivial since the exam class requires bullet items to use the questions and parts environment, and the \question and \part commands, which I did not want to retype manually all the time. I thus wrote a little Pandoc filter to save some time.

Update: This template is now available on GitHub. The GitHub version may be more up-to-date.

Several people have asked me for my LaTeX template to write letters, so I guess I might as well put it up on my webpage. It uses the scrlttr2 package. I think the markup is relatively self-explanatory.