From Scribble To Readable: The guide to writing mathematical symbols like you're in kindergarten

by Lourens Touwen, Tristan Trouwen

How did From Scribble To Readable come to life? We (2 mathematics students) were sitting in a lecture hall, watching the professor write down eigenvectors on the blackboard and denoting them with the greek letter xi. The small tornado that was supposed to be a xi was not only difficult to read, but even more difficult to reproduce. Over the next months we noticed that this problem comes up constantly, not only with the xi but with so many other difficult mathematical symbols. We decided that it is time to tackle this problem once and for all, and that is how we came up with the concept for this booklet! It is similar to the ones we all had back in kindergarten, but instead of teaching you your abc’s, this will teach you the alpha’s, pi’s and xi’s. Our Kickstarter got to over 900% of the initial funding goal, and thus From Scribble To Readable became a reality! Since then we have shipped over a thousand copies to 38 countries! What’s in the book? From Scribble To Readable contains 37 of the more difficult to write, but commonly used symbols in mathematics and other technical fields. Includes essentials like the curly brackets and the integral sign, and notorious letters like the xi and zeta! For each of the symbols, the booklet contains 2 pages with writing exercises, some brief but important information (including the LaTeX command for the symbol) and an additional exercise copying an important result/theorem. All contents were checked by Dr. Georg Prokert, Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e). With his many years of mathematical experience, the content is in good hands. So who is this booklet for? Any (aspiring) mathematician, physicist or chemist has something to learn with From Scribble To Readable! You can surprise some of your friends, colleagues or even your professor!

80 pages, Paperback

Published March 29, 2022

Reviews

[Lourens]

Lifechanging.

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

If, as I do, you work with a passel of science nerds, then having this book on your desk becomes a weird and wonderful bragging point.

Furthermore, I could really have used a few sessions with it back in college. Even now, I learned a few things about how to write.