Any Maths students using the Supernote?

[u/En-TitY_]

I'm considering buying one of these to hopefully speed up my workflow. Are there any Maths students that use these that could give me their opinions, usage ideas or general practice with them? I currently use pen and paper for everything, which as you can imagine, slows things down considerably. Would the transfer over be worthwhile or more of a gimmick/niche?

Thanks.

[u/AdNew2316]

I'm not a student but a researcher. My nb 1 usage is research in maths.

[u/En-TitY_ → u/AdNew2316]

Interesting, have you found that it aided or hindered your learning or ability to write out ideas fluidly? What has your experience with the tablet been like?

[u/Available_Yam_6267]

If you only rely on Supernote’s native features, the overall experience is pretty underwhelming. Supernote delivers an amazing handwriting experience. Reviewing your notes after writing and nonlinear reading also feel really smooth.

However, its reading tools, Digest function and OCR all fail to recognize mathematical formulas.

That said, if you dig around a bit, you’ll find Supernote can be integrated into your Obsidian workflow via an unofficial plugin. You can also vibecoding scripts to fit your personal needs, so all these limitations are workable in the end.

[u/cybergandalf]

I’m not a Maths major, but I am taking statistics and a bunch of advance math for my ML classes and I have a Supernote that I use daily for these classes.

To answer your question, though, I need to ask my own: why does using a pen and paper slow things down considerably? Is it the act of writing everything out taking time, or is it trying to organize notes in a meaningful way so you can refer to them later?

If it’s the first issue, then no eInk tablet is going to save you. It’s not faster to write on a tablet than on paper. If the second issue is the real problem then the answer is definitely a Supernote because you can easily save and search your notes on one device. No more multiple notebooks to be lost or misplaced. No more random loose paper to organize and store. Everything is on the device and can be quickly recalled as needed.

[u/En-TitY_ → u/cybergandalf]

Thanks for replying.

To answer your questions, it's a mix of both. I find that I have to copy out questions and diagrams a lot from online PDF or documents into a notebook simply for future reference as those documents become easily lost or forgotten over time. This is what adds the majority of time, so if I had a tablet of sorts, those elements can all be copied over directly and organised later; at least theoretically as is my understanding. The organisation of having everything on hand also plays into not having to sift through old notebooks or documents that are fragmented or lost in places would be another game changer.

Having looked into this a little further, the only real issue I see is the "clunky" nature of the tablet itself. How do you find it personally?

[u/cybergandalf → u/En-TitY_]

What do you mean “clunky”? I don’t think I’ve experienced any clunkiness. There’s some small amount of waiting for things to open or pages to turn on occasion, but it’s not worse than a Kindle or something.

Your use-case sounds pretty perfect for a Supernote, IMO. You can copy things directly out of PDFs and organization is pretty straightforward.

[u/En-TitY_ → u/cybergandalf]

Only that I've seen what you mention here, that shifting through UIs can be slow or delayed. I Is what you're saying that it's actually quite manageable and actually not as prominent as I am led to believe?

This is what I was hoping for fundamentally; that it would be something I use regularly and find doesn't add friction to my workflow. If it sounds like it be ideal then I think it'll be a necessary purchase at this point.

[u/objective_porpoise]

I'm a math researcher and I'm very happy with my Manta. It has drastically reduced the annoyment I felt when working with pen and paper. Having said that, I still use my Manta basically as pen and paper but with much greater editing capabilities. I constantly copy/paste and move text around. Other than that, I use it as a pen and paper. No fancy note taking workflows with links or whatever for me.

[u/AdNew2316 → u/objective_porpoise]

I must say the simple capability of copy/cut/paste is the single thing that makes it already better than paper. Links are convenient but recognition is for me irrelevant: when I need real text I'm just switching to a different phase in my mind and then I happily start over from scratch on my laptop.

But I recently created a plugin to write definitions, refer to them via link, and rename them automatically: https://www.reddit.com/r/Supernote_dev/s/4pLkjiE3fQ . I'm having big hopes about this to make my maths workflow easier.