CS 880 - Pseudorandomness and Derandomization Spring 2013

Scribe Guidelines

You should email Holger a draft of your scribe notes within 24 hours of your lecture. Be sure to use the \draft command included in lectureXX.tex to let us know you intend to submit another, final version at a later time. Send both the LaTeX source and the PDF file. We will make the draft available to the class at that time via our webpage. The final version should be submitted at the latest one week later.

Take time to prepare notes that are of high quality. A student who has missed a lecture should be able to learn the material from the scribe notes alone, and the notes should be easily readable. Make sure to clarify any points of confusion in the material with the instructors before submitting the final version. The expectation is that the quality of the notes is similar to that of the text books that are used as references for this course. Your fellow students and the instructors will greatly appreciate the time you spend preparing excellent scribe notes!

Files

• lecture01.tex: The source of the first lecture. You should model the layout of your file after this file, and you can use this file as a reference of Latex syntax.
• lecture.sty: This style file defines some simple environments (e.g., theorem, lemma, proof) and also creates our lecture banner using the \lecture command. \lecture takes 4 arguments: \lecture{lecture number}{lecture title}{date}{scribe name}. The file lecture.sty needs to be in the same directory as the .tex file.
• references.bib: This bib file contains the references for the lecture notes and will be kept up-to-date. If you add any references to this file, please include it in your submission. The file needs to be in the same directory as the .tex file.
• lecture00.tex: This is a template file. It has some examples of the new environments we've defined.

Basic Instructions

To compile the lecture notes, either use latexmk:

latexmk -pdf lecture00.tex

pdflatex lecture00
bibtex lecture00
pdflatex lecture00
pdflatex lecture00

Style

• General: We suggest you don't type beyond the 80th column in your source file. Latex ignores single newlines, so manually wrap your text when necessary. This makes reading/editing your source easier.

• Predefined Macros: To typeset complexity classes use the provided macros, e.g., \P for the class P, \NP for the class NP, etc. Take a look at lecture.sty to see the list of predefined classes.

• Paragraph Breaks: Separate normal paragraphs by a blank line. Don't use "\\" to separate them-- let LaTeX do the formatting for you. This helps us keep a uniform look and feel to the scribe notes.

• Intro: Start your scribe with a few lines' summary of the lecture. Do not use a section heading for this material.

• Theorems, Proofs, Definitions: Notice that lecture.sty provides theorem and proof environments. The following environments are available: theorem, lemma, proposition, corollary, definition, remark, conjecture, example, claim, exercise, and proof. To give the theorem a name, just add square brackets:

  \begin{lemma}[Schwartz--Zippel]
  ...
  \end{lemma}

• Figures:
  • We suggest using either tikz or inkscape for the figures that you want to include. Whatever you use, please make sure to include the source files and that everything compiles smoothly with pdflatex. When providing additional files, please prefix them with the lecture number (e.g., 07.fig.pdf).
  • If you want to use xfig, here is a great link for typesetting formulae into xfig drawings.
  • If you are familiar with some other image/figure making software and know how to import its results to LaTeX documents, feel free to use it. Just submit everything needed for your document to compile, and follow the naming convention (number.name.extension).

• LaTeX References: Make cross-reference labels of this form: \label{lectureNumber:labelType:labelName}. So, a reference to a figure of a NAND gate in the first lecture would look something like \ref{1:fig:nand}. This will help us avoid reference conflicts when we compile all the lectures together.

• Bibliographic References: Please include the bib-entries you would like to add to references.bib.

• Structure: Do use sections/subsections where appropriate. Use the environments defined in lecture.sty when applicable.

• Algorithms: Typeset any algorithms using the alg.sty macro package.

• Please don't use personalized Latex macros/environments! We'd like to keep the lectures somewhat standardized, so if you want your favorite environment or macro included, just send us an email with your request and we'll include it in lecture.sty. Also let us know if you have any suggested improvements to existing environments.

Latex Resources

• Not So Short Introduction to Latex
• Latex math symbols