How can I make math diagrams like the ones I see in textbooks?

January 29, 2009 6:55 AM

Looking for software recommendations to make math diagrams for a study guide for my students.

I work as a tutor at a university, helping students with mathematics. Lately, I've been compiling some notes into a study guide. I'm using Mathtype for the math notation. But, I was wondering if anyone knew of a piece of a software I'd be able to use to make diagrams of the quality I see in math textbooks. For example, I'd like to be able to easily make a counting tree (or a probability tree). For the linear algebra course I'd like to be able to construct diagrams involving planes, lines and vectors.

posted by Proginoskes to Education (11 answers total)

Best answer: LaTex with a tree drawing package might be a good start.
posted by gene_machine at 7:14 AM on January 29, 2009

As far as the diagrams go, I've been using Inkscape to good effect for my own scientific diagrams. If your university has a site license for Adobe Illustrator, that would be a good option too. Both of these programs can export to PDF or Postscript formats, which are easy to include in LaTeX documents.
posted by Johnny Assay at 7:23 AM on January 29, 2009

You might be able to use Graphviz. When I need to make pretty graphs it's the first thing I think of. (It's not a 'drawing program' in that you don't have a free-form canvas, though. It generates graph/network diagrams from declarative statements about the structure of the graph/network.)
posted by PantsOfSCIENCE at 7:54 AM on January 29, 2009

It looks like the OSX version of Graphiz (here) actually has a I nice GUI so it might not be such a pain to use in OSX.
posted by PantsOfSCIENCE at 8:03 AM on January 29, 2009

You want Asymptote.
posted by dmd at 8:53 AM on January 29, 2009 [2 favorites]

Best answer: LaTex is the defacto academic standard... it takes a little getting used to.

Does your university have Mathematica? I used that in school. Works great and it has a poweful math kernel behind it to solve complicated systems. It types similar to LaTex.

I would commit to learning LaTex.
posted by teabag at 9:32 AM on January 29, 2009

I typically use a combination of Geometer's Sketchpad and Mathematica, augmented with Lineform (or CorelDraw) to tweak things. Plus LaTeX, of course, to actually produce the documents.

As I re-read your question: if you want to produce nice mathematical documents, LaTeX is imperative. (I require all my students to learn it as part of our "writing across the curriculum" course---I feel that learning to use it is part of learning to write mathematics, these days.
posted by leahwrenn at 9:38 AM on January 29, 2009

I've found LyX to be a great tool for writing LaTeX if you don't want to mess with the notation - admittedly, messing with LaTeX source is sometimes necessary, but LyX does at least make 95% of the work easier.
posted by wanderingmind at 10:25 AM on January 29, 2009

While I sometimes use Illustrator, and nowadays Inkscape, it's hard to beat the control of using plain old Postscript, especially for mathematical diagrams. It's a very simple language to learn, despite its oddness. Also writing directly in SVG is nice, because then you can do some editing in Inkscape.
posted by iconjack at 2:42 PM on January 29, 2009

Mathematica produces beautiful and very tweakable plots. I've had profs use xfig for physics & math figures. It's crude, but apparently very fast once you're used to working with it. And its output is easily embeddable in TeX. It won't plot functions though, so if you need that I'd go with Mathematica.
posted by devilsbrigade at 8:28 PM on January 29, 2009

Response by poster: Thanks for everyone who suggested Latex. I'd tried that route in the past but found it a bit intimidating. After giving it another look and finding some helpful communities, I wish I'd stuck with it from the start.
posted by Proginoskes at 10:10 PM on February 17, 2009