Activities for Class 1

Help your neighbors!

Computers can be frustrating; if the person next to you looks lost, offer assistance. If you are both lost, get your instructor's attention.

Introduction to Maple

Do the Generic First Week Maple Lab. There are instructions for this on a paper handout. The Generic First Week Maple Lab is what calculus students do on their first day; make the obvious reinterpretations of parts that do not apply to you as written. This generic lab has the following parts.

1. Make sure you can log in and log out of the calclab computers.
2. Work through the Maple Quiktour.
3. Be sure you can send and receive email with pine.

Make a copy of the first-day handout

Use the Print feature of your Web browser (typically on the drop-down File menu) to make yourself a reference copy of the opening day handout containing important information about the course.

Computer accounts

If you are a graduate student from a department other than Mathematics, you will probably want an account on the university's general access UNIX machine tam2000. You can set up such an account by using the TAMU CLAIM system.

If you are a graduate student registered in the Mathematics Department, and you do not yet have an account on the main mathematics server, ask your instructor how to apply for an account.

Editing

You need to be able to access and use a text editor. If you do not know how, or you are not sure what editor to use, read my howto on editing files. If your favorite editor does not exist on the calclab machines, you may log out and log in to another machine. Then you will need to reload this Web page.

Here is a little game to make sure that you can perform basic editing tasks. Use the mouse to cut out the following:

Izalp3aalp3ak Walp3alotwoedelotwoeatwo wrdelotwoeaotwoebeotwoea, ``Atwoglgammatwog malp3ay bbeotwoea 2alp3agammad otwoedelotwoea bbeotwoea 2delotwoea lgammakbeotwoea otwoe3beotwoea malp3aotwoe3beotwoeamalp3aotwoegammac2, otwoe3alp3aotwoe gammaotwoe calp3atwo twobeotwoeavbeotwoear bbeotwoea fep2ilotwolly lbeotwoeaalp3artwootwoe.''

and paste it into your text editor. To unscramble this mishmash, use the editor to make the following global substitutions in this order: 3->h, 2->s, two->n, one->t, epsilon->u, delta->o, gamma->i, beta->e, alpha->a. What does it say?

LaTeX

The first section of Leslie Lamport's book LaTeX is titled ``How to avoid reading this book.'' There he suggests looking at two sample LaTeX input files and comparing them with the corresponding output. Your first LaTeX exercise is to examine these files, process them, and preview the output on the screen.

You may want to open a second window in your Web browser, so that you do not lose track of the instructions you are now reading. In the second window, look at the file small2e. If you want a copy on paper, you can use the Print facility of your Web browser. Now save the file to disk, naming it small2e.tex.

Open a terminal window and issue the command latex small2e. You will get some messages from TeX (the program underlying LaTeX). When the UNIX prompt returns, issue the command xdvi small2e &. (That ampersand is optional: it makes the command run as a background process, so that your command prompt is still available for further commands.) A preview window should open which shows the processed file as it will appear when printed. (The printed file will look better than the screen image because the screen does not have very high resolution.)

Now compare the screen output with the input file. You should get a basic idea of how LaTeX works as a ``mark-up language.''

Now try the same procedure with the longer file sample2e.tex.

How do you get hard copy of the LaTeX output? After you have run latex, issue the command dvips small2e or dvips sample2e. This will produce a PostScript file named small2e.ps or sample2e.ps. This PostScript file is what you send to the printer to get hard copy on paper. On most UNIX systems, the command to send a file to the printer is either lp filename or lpr filename (you need to include the extension .ps in the filename).

More Maple

The Department of Mathematics will lend you a copy of CalcLabs with Maple V for the semester. Work through Chapter 1. Don't just read: do the examples on the computer as you go through the chapter. Work the exercises at the end of Chapter 1.

A few of you may already know the elements of Maple. Please help the other students to get started with Maple.

Finished?

If you have done all the above activities, and there is still time left, here are some other activities you can do.

• Help someone else.
• Start on the homework.
• Start on Chapter 2 of the CalcLabs with Maple V manual. We will be going further with Maple next time.
• Start thinking about the projects.
• Surf the Internet. If you are using Mosaic, click on Navigate and then Internet Starting Points; from Netscape, click on Directory and then What's Cool.

Comments to Harold P. Boas.
Created Sep 2, 1996. Last modified Sep 4, 1996.