You are expected to type your final project, as opposed to writing it
by hand. This has the dual virtue that I'll be able to easily read it
and, more importantly, you'll find it much easier to make revisions.
Here are some methods for typesetting mathematics. This list is far
from exhaustive. If you have a different way please, tell me, and
I'll add it to this page.
- Latex Most mathematicians write using latex, a variant of
Knuth's TeX project. The bad news is, it doesn't act very much like a
word processor at all; you edit your file in one window, and then
compile it in a different window, and look at the output in a third.
The good news is, after the initial start-up cost of learning the
system you'll find it effortless to produce gorgeous documents.
Some references:
Most Linux distributions come equipped with latex. On Windows,
use either miktex, or protext, which is apparently
based on miktex.
I have no experience with Macintoshes; if you let me know what version
of tex you use and how you got it, I'll post that here.
- LyX Lyx is a document processor which runs on top of
Latex. It gives a nice user interface, which insulates you from the
details of typing mathematics, and sits on top of Latex, so you
have access to the powerful typesetting engine.
This apparently now runs on Windows, Linux and Mac OSX. You can get
it at www.lyx.org.
One nice benefit from using LyX is that you can see the latex output,
so it's a relatively painless way to learn latex.
- Word processors The OpenOffice suite has, I'm told, a
decent equation editor as part of its word processor. I suspect most
major word processors have equation editors, too.
- Maple or Mathematica You can use the rendering engine on
many mathematics software packages to write decent looking papers!
Make sure you understand how to toggle between math and text mode.
Alternatively, you can cut math images from one of these programs and
paste them into the word processing document of your choice.