How I'm able to take notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim

As a feat in itself this is definitely very impressive, but I wonder if it's really worth anyone's time to spend precious lecture time with your mind fully occupied in the mechanical task of taking notes rather than actually absorbing and engaging with the content. Especially for an extremely content-dense subject like Mathematics, where you need all your concentration just to process what you are reading and follow along the logic. There is absolutely no dearth of study material on…

When I was studying, I sometimes saw classmates typing the lecture directly in LaTeX. To me, they always seemed very busy and a little stressed. Also, it seemed that learning and understanding wasn't their primary goal rather than having beautiful lecture notes. I would have liked to have a tabled with a nicely working pen. But good old paper and pencil also did the job. Some professors even recommend not taking notes at all but rather preparing the lecture. Then…

I would advise against trying to typeset lectures live, at least for my courses. I structure my lectures as an abstract detective work: start with a motivating problem or example, experiment with it, distill the key ideas, formalize them into definitions, deduce consequences (theorems, new problems). I expect my students to be active participants at each step. Paper notes work well for this, because they are both low overheard and sufficiently free-form. From my experience, students that typeset or try…

In my math classes there was one guy who took notes with LaTex. He was quite fast due to his tweaked Emacs environment. He also uploaded his notes and the sources to some public SCM server. What sounds like a good idea turned out to be nonsense. His scripts where ridden of typos and serious errors. There where only a few people who tried to volunteer and edit the sources, but it did not do any good. The lecturers weren't…