I am preparing a talk for an advanced graduate course in mathematics, where I am supposed to use slides (the Beamer type, not handwritten).  Since it's the first time I'm giving a presentation talk as opposed to a blackboard talk, I was wondering whether any of you have some advice on preparing a good presentation, and presenting it (in particular, if you come from a scientific background).  Thanks!
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I enjoy creating presentations a lot and I think I have an eye for nice design, however, I tend to always have the same layout/colour scheme/etc. and I'd like to try something new for my defence.  So I've been googling great presentations for hours, and there are heaps of innovative designs but usually these are from outside academia. I still want to convey information in a serious manner. But when looking at websites that intend to give advice for scientific presentations I find the examples horrible and very much 1990s (bullet points...)   So, in short, can you think of any scientific presentations with unpretentious but great design, which can be found somewhere online?  Edit Thank you for your comments, which definitely include heaps of helpful advice, however, I was less looking for "basic" presentation guidelines but more for design elements, which do not distract the audience but which make the presentation a bit more interesting. For instance, a colleague of mine recently gave a presentation and before each section she'd have a slide with just the title of the section and a photo (e.g. "Methods" and a picture of her lab equipment). I liked that because it structures the presentation and is a nice break from charts, diagrams and (in the worst case) bullet points. So, yes, I am really more looking for inspiration on fonts, colours, using white space, ...
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I have been attending a number of academic / professional conferences recently and one thing that really awed me was the flawless and natural way in which the speakers presented on their topics.  Sure, they had the occasional mispronunciations or awkward pauses but they spoke with authority and confidence.   Some of them used powerpoint slides but were not reading from the slides; they were just talking on the points and they had so much to say on each point that I felt they could not do it without notes, but they were not even looking at their notes most of the time.  (The advantages of not looking at their notes too much was that they could maintain eye contact and could use very interesting slides that were not crammed with the dot points of their speeches.)  I hate to think that they had memorised their speech notes but some of the presentations went for more than an hour.  I know rehearsal is important but I wonder how could anyone remember so much in a nervous situation. (Its one thing to know everything on your topic; its another thing to present that 'everything'!)  Question:  What background / foreground things do presenters do that make their presentations flawless and natural?
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I never really understood the point of having a course with lectures when the course has a textbook. Sometimes the subject is so high-level or specialized or so modern that the contents are changing rapidly that there is no textbook (for example at the graduate level). But more often the textbook includes everything that will be said in the lecture, and much more: extra content, exercises, answers to exercises, appendices, etc.   I assume a STEM context, that is we can assume the textbook is available in the sense that there is one comprehensive source that contains undisputed facts, as opposed to a broad literature with lots of interpretations and opinions (as may be the case in non-STEM contexts).  So what is the point of a lecture?
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I am a Ph.D. student in theoretical computer science. I meet my research supervisor once a week for around 2 hours. I prepare some of my research and try to present in front of him. I always try to make a list of theorems and claims given in the paper to discuss with him in a certain flow but most of the time he starts asking questions and then we go in other directions (which is okay from a research point of view). Due to this, it sometimes takes 2 months to read a single paper.  I always try to follow my designed plan but it rarely works. Also, I don't feel satisfied most of the time because many times I am only able to discuss 50-60 percent of what I have planned. Please help.
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I'm a math TA and I find that my most consistent comment for improvement involved my board handwriting. Anybody have some tips or techniques I can use to make things a little neater on the board?  There are, of course, time constraints with teaching any course, so I don't want to simply write more slowly in order to assist in writing more neatly. Thankfully in a math course much of what I write is symbols which are easier to (borrowing a typography term) kern than sentences, but I still feel like I need to vastly improve my handwriting on a board if I plan on teaching for any length of time.  This is a sample of my handwriting:   Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!  EDIT: After checking the room in which I'm assigned to teach this semester, it turns out I do actually have a whiteboard instead of a chalkboard. Like I commented below somewhere, I'm sure 90% of the answers mentioned (those not expressly about chalk, anyway) will be completely cross-transferable and I'll try to make them all work. Thanks again for all the great answers!
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I have started solving problems from the American Mathematical Monthly. While I will definitely continue this, I am not sure how much this will help for math graduate school admissions (assuming I submit my solutions and they are recognized by the Monthly). How significant would multiple solutions to Monthly problems be in admissions? What about having the published solution to a problem? One issue is that I don't know how difficult the problems are presumed to be: all I know is that I personally have solved at least one of them!
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I usually prepare my talks using powerpoint/openoffice-impress/keynote, where I explaing programs, pseudocodes, etc. Recently I was thinking about creating text-only, code-only and pseudocode-only slides with beamer and then exporting them somehow to powerpoint where I modify them to add figures or some minor details for polishing the presentation, which are usually hard to do with beamer. I googled a bit around and found that beamer can export to PDF or PS but not to powerpoint. I wonder anyway if you know some possibility of conversion from beamer to on-screen editable powerpoint/openoffice-impress/keynote.
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I am preparing slides for a short (10min) talk at the group meeting. The talk is about a fairly serious piece of (pure) mathematics, and it so happens that there is a very relevant one-panel webcomic. A thought appeared to me, and got some support from my fellow PhD students, that it would be cool to include this comic, perhaps at the final thank-you-for-your-attention slide.  I am probably not going to do it, so I'm asking mostly out of curiousity: Would this be a bad idea to go ahead and include a comic on the final slide?   Note: The comic is genuinely funny (based on a sample of 6 non-randomly selected students). It is not - as far as I can tell - offensive in any way. It could come across as somewhat silly.
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I found  presentation document by D. J. Bernstein. Is it possible to create it in latex?  Screenshot
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Edit:  Ok, user  made comment that truly helps narrow the focus of my question. Basically, I'm asking for a self-study course of Mathematical Methods.  Thanks to his recommendation I identified a book that is very close to the answer:  Mathematical Methods in the Physical Sciences by Mary L. Boas  Supposedly, the book covers most of the Math a person needs to learn in order to understand the simulations I presented.  Does this book suit my needs?    Hello,  I have always been interested on the idea to study Math at an Undergraduate level to be able to implement simulations like the followings:  Finite Difference Simulation of the Wave Equation    Heat Equation in Two Dimensions    Besides my precollege experience in Math, I have only been able to do very simple simulations due to my lack of knowledge of Advanced Math. Every time I ask about the inner workings of the simulations I get redirected to papers that look like foreign language to me and, unfortunately, I depend on easy-to-read tutorials to understand them, and while I have found   I'm more interested in reaching the solution myself.  I checked some of the questions related to book recommendations for self-study and while they are very helpful I'm interested in learning by example (There is a book called: "Accelerated C++ Practical Programming by Example" that fits very well my study habits)  Thanks in advance.
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I used to work as a consultant and have been spoiled with nice looking slides. For instance, being able to create slides that have 2, 3, or 4 graphs (perfectly positioned and with nice headers!) at the click of a mouse button via macros.  Similarly, there are many other kinds of word slides that had multiple columns, etc. that would be nice to recreate as well as objects like "main point" boxes at the bottom that summarize a main point and ways to add a transparent highlight to any part of the screen.  Is this kind of functionality far beyond anything that LaTeX presentations can do or is there an archive somewhere of code for making more intricate presentations?
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I've attended a lot of seminars and lectures by now, and it's typical for the chair of the seminar to offer audience members a chance to ask questions of the speaker about their work after the presentation.  Most of the time, the questions seek clarification of some aspect of the presentation or focus on a more comprehensive understanding of the research involved.  However, occasionally, I've noticed that questions are purposefully designed to embarrass the speaker.  Things along the lines of "That method won't work at all for what you're trying to do.  Your results are completely invalid" or "So-and-so's group already did that work years ago.  Did you not read their paper?"  Perhaps more disturbingly (I just got back from a really large conference if you can't tell), is that women seem to be more harshly criticized than men, and over trivial issues.  For instance, in a few sessions I went to, female graduate students were given really hard times over their presentations while the male grad students were not.  All presentations were about the same quality.  I guess I'm a little shocked; I'd heard of sexism in academia but hadn't actually seen it (or noticed it) until this conference.  Oddly enough, I've observed that it's typically prestigious professors or researchers that are asking these ostentatious questions.  I suppose they figure they have enough "fame" or whatever that their job isn't in jeopardy, and there's no easy way to really prove they're being rude or sexist.  I don't know what's going on here, but it seems to me that these questions, even if they do have technical merit, should be held until after the seminar, where they can be discussed privately with the researcher.  My question here, specifically, is what can be done to minimize these (uncomfortable for everyone) instances?  My thoughts are that a session chair should remind the audience to refrain from questions that are accusatory in nature.  As a presenter, I'm not sure what can be done in advance to preempt and avoid these questions.  Any ideas?
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What are/ were some of your good mathematician's study habits that you found really worked for you?  I'm a CS major at a respected school and have a solid GPA...  However, I definitely lack when it comes to getting great grades in relatively higher level maths (300 and 400 level).  I feel that even though I study a lot, I perhaps don't study effectively enough.  I would like to ask for any tips/ tricks as to how you keep yourself focused, motivated etc that could perhaps help me or others.  Thanks in advance.
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I've a Skype interview for PhD application (it will make me miss  today.) I've been asked, in advance, to prepare a short presentation and then there would be some discussion with the panel (I guess.) I expect that they will ask if I have some questions so, I'm wondering what are the best (type of) questions one might consider?
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I am teaching a freshman science course for the first time and I am doing also outreach activities in high schools. To be able to attract the young generation to science one has to connect the concepts with everyday applications.  So I build my power point slides using pictures from the textbooks which we officially use. Unfortunately when one does a Google search on any subject by images, one gets much more appealing and fascinating pictures. Some of these pictures are even related to simple applications which are explained in popular science sites on very recent discoveries. The problem is that I cannot use those pictures from Google sites in my slides because they are copyrighted.  What should I do then? Should I stick to the boring-looking textbook pics to avoid copyright problems, or bring life to my course by using images Google shows up (but then I might go to the jail!)?  Is there something that says one can use images shown by Google for educational purposes with no copyright issues?
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Hello I'm writing a beamer presentation and I would like to change the colour of the text in the theorem block from one place and it will affect my whole presentation.  Is this possible?  My example:  \documentclass{beamer}   \usetheme{Madrid}   \usecolortheme[RGB={201,20,35}]{structure}   \setbeamercolor{background canvas}{bg=black}  \setbeamercolor{normal text}{fg=white}   \setbeamercolor{theorem text}{fg=black}    %\useoutertheme{shadow}  \useinnertheme{rounded}   \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}  \usepackage{default}   \begin{document}   \begin{frame}{Primul Slide}   Bla bla bla    Bla bla bla   \begin{theorem}  This is a theorem it is very important!!  \end{theorem}   \end{frame}   \end{document}
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I see that there a number of questions (, , , , ) on best practices, none of them answer the issue I am going to talk about.  We all need to prepare large documents (or slides) from time-to-time. And once you have reached a certain number of pages, you find that compiling the whole document takes a substantial time, which you need to do to check that the part you have written is error free, specially if it contains a number of images.   To circumvent the situation, I have used the following practices over years to keep compile time at minimum.   Divide the document in to many chapters: The chapters are put in separate files. Only the one I am working one is uncommented.  \documentclass{book}  \begin{document}  %\input {chapterone.tex} \input {chaptertwo.tex} %\input {chapterthree.tex} %\input {chapterfour.tex}  \end{document}    The above technique can also be used for \include.   Keep a preamble replica of the main file in a temporary file (build file): I use this technique when I am preparing a presentation with many slides, say a hundred. Prepare a main file, copy it to another build file. Delete everything between  \begin{document} and \end{document} in the build file. Prepare a slide (or a group of slides) in the build file. Cut and paste the contents between \begin{document} and \end{document} in the build file to relevant location in the main file only when satisfied with the output (image locations, overfull boxes etc.)     We can hear your inputs about the best practices you practice when a you are preparing a document or presentation from scratch.    Now, I have failed to find a good answer in the case when you have finished the whole document or presentation and now you need tweaking the small things, may be edit a text here, add an image there. What will be your best practice?  Perhaps, again keeping only one chapter uncommented will be usable here. But what about large presentations? May be adding a \end{document} just after the point-of-change will be beneficial, but only if you can put that before midpoint of the file.  Commenting a part of the file will also work, but that is error-prone, at least for me.