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I generally enjoy technology and I mostly worked digitally in math, because it’s hard for me to organize or carry around physical copies of books and notes. This post summarizes some of my favorite digital organizers. I promise that I receive no commission for any of these software/websites, so there is no conflict of interest.

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For the PC

Notion

I’ve used Notion since college and I love Notion for everything: It’s aesthetically pleasing, easy to format and structure, allows inline and block latex, has a built-in database template, syncs everywhere, connects with external apps, and easy to share. I have used it for many things including but not limited to:

  1. Writing latex-heavy math blogs
  2. Organizing the structure of work and sharing it with my mentors/collaborators
  3. Drafting a writeup for a math paper
  4. Typing notes in class (for text-heavy notes)
  5. Making a gallery of my mangas and photography
  6. Making a minimalist homepage
  7. Managing personal finances
  8. Creating a database of my grad school applications

Zotero

Zotero is a reference manager/personal web library that helps researchers organize papers and citations. You can upload papers either by uploading the pdf’s or by searching the identifiers (i.e. arxiv id, urls, ISBN, DOI), and they will automatically organize the information. You can type notes on the sidebar and highlight/write handwritten notes in uploaded pdf’s. I think there is a list of awesome plug-ins on github that can link external databases, count citations, do bulk management, etc.

While I don’t have that many papers to read at this point, having Zotero at hand is still very helpful because it can automatically generate a bib file when I need a list of reference for my tex file. Zotero is a wonderful tool that helps you organize your references if you have trouble figuring out a document organizing system locally on your PC.

Telegram

While telegram is a texting app, it has been very helpful to me. Since I don’t usually carry my PC around, it’s helpful that telegram syncs the chat history and I can access math stackexchange links or book pdfs from my iPad when I’m out. I also write simple notes accompanying these links, such as “link A and link B is helpful to Exercise X”.

For the iPad

Procreate

Drawing is one of my biggest hobbies and I bought procreate as soon as I got my ipad. However, procreate worked surprisingly well when some of the courses require me to select the pages and submit problem by problem, because this way I can create different layers for different problems. This also avoids the need of moving solutions around when I don’t do the problems sequentially. I usually turn on the drawing guide (a grid that can guide my writing), and use the technical pen (size 5%) with everything in stabilization set to “None”. I name the layers with the problem numbers and use a green checked box emoji/red circle to denote whether or not the problem is finished.