Doing pure mathematics research is quite unlike other scientific research.
I don’t run experiments, nor do I have data to crunch through. A computer is surprisingly often of little to no help. It’s just you and pencil and paper.
Or in my case, me, my laptop and a Wacom tablet.

My research workflow is hybrid: it consists both of (digital) handwritten notes and typed LaTeX notes. I like having these two options. Handwritten notes allow me to think completely freely, while taking notes in LaTeX forces me more to write down things neatly, which sometimes results in finding mistakes in the handwritten notes.

LaTeX Notes

Doing a PhD in mathematics, it makes most sense to take notes in LaTeX, especially since I have a very efficient system set up already, as explained in my previous blog posts.
My LaTeX notes look as follows:

This LaTeX document automatically concatenates the notes of the previous 14 days, adds the date of each note in the margin and adds a link to my handwritten notes of that day. The global directory structure looks as follows:

• phd
  • scripts
  • teaching
  • papers
    • title – authors.pdf
    • …
  • notes
    • master.tex
    • preamble.tex
    • references.tex
    • theorems.tex
    • symbols.tex
    • 2022-01-03
      • note.tex
      • note.xoj
    • 2022-01-04
    • 2022-01-05
    • …

Since I have a note for every day I never have to think about where to write something down. I just press Alt + N to open today’s note.tex, and I’m set.
To open the handwritten notes I can press Alt + X, which opens Xournal — more on that later.
You can find the source code on Github.

Reference management

Doing research means dealing with a lot of references to papers and books.
I wanted to have a minimalistic approach that is friction-free, having three goals in mind. First, when I am reading a pdf document, I want to be able to add a reference to the current page to my notes with a single keystroke. Secondly, when browsing the Arxiv, I’d like to add a paper to my library with a single click and lastly I want a way to instantly open papers I have in my library, which is really useful during meetings.

Instantly creating clickable references

Have a look back at my notes and notice the parts that are in bold, such as [definition, p. 29] or [Section 5. Infinitesimal deformations, p. 23].
These are links to papers, books, … and when I click them, my pdf viewer opens the file at the corresponding page.
This makes it easy to get back in the flow reading old notes: I don’t lose time searching for certain definitions of concepts, I can just click the