[texhax] Introductory examples

[Nelson H. F. Beebe]

I'll be happy to chime in with suggestions for teaching TeX in a
German high school.  Here are some ideas of how Albrecht might use our
freely-available bibliographic archives in that task.

There two large (more than 1.1 million entries) collections of
bibliographic data at

	http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/bibnet
	http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib

The lead paragraph of each Web page includes a link to a section on
mirroring all, or part, of the collections, and doing so automatically
once the first mirror is populated.

Most of the bibliographic data are for English-language publications,
but German students might prefer to have more examples in German.  For
those, I suggest the journal bibliographies

	Zeitschrift für Wahrscheinlichkeitstheorie und verwandte Gebiete
	z-wahrscheinlichkeits-theor-verw-geb.bib

	Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte
	berwissenschaftgesch.bib

and the BibNet Project bibliographies of scientists

	Hans Bethe
	Max Born
	Albert Einstein
	George Gamow
	Werner Heisenberg
	Wolfgang Pauli
	Erwin Schrödinger
	Edward Teller
	John von Neumann
	Eugene Wigner

all of whom published numerous articles in German.

There are also a significant number of books about TeX and LaTeX that
are written in German: see

	texbook3.bib

Related resources can be found in

	font.bib
	type.bib
	typeset.bib

In the last, there is a new entry Pohlen:2015:LBU for a book that I
found in a Hugendubel store in downtown Frankfurt 10 days ago. I
wanted to buy it then, but my luggage was already overstuffed, and I
lacked the space to do so.  I'll have to order it via a local
bookseller.

A project that you might consider for the school class would be to
write a LaTeX file that gives a brief description of each of the five
entries in einstein.bib labeled Einstein:1905:* (1905 is his `miracle
year'), with BibTeX references to each, and then typeset and display
an equation or two from each.  For students who want to learn more
about the science of those important papers, see entries
Kennedy:2012:SGE and Janssen:2014:CCE.  There may well be German
translations of those books.  I try to record all known translations
in the author-specific bibliographies, but new publications
continually appear, so it is always a catch-up job to find and record
them.

Entry Einstein:1905:EBK is for his paper on Special Relativity, and
most of that paper should be understandable by high school students:
there are only a couple of lines of calculus, and most of the math
needed just involves the five basic arithmetic operations.  There are
no references at all to prior work, and Albert explains his ideas very
clearly.  That paper is reprinted in several books, and in
translations to several languages.  The DOI field will take you
directly to the original paper on the Web, but Web searches will find
numerous alternate sources of copies and translations of the 1905
papers.

Many of the entries in the author-specific bibliographies contain note
and remark fields that link related papers, and indicate the
importance of particular papers.  The comment headers in each file
also give brief biographies of the scientists, with remarks about why
they are important, and what their most important works are.

George Gamow wrote several humorous small books about science that are
easily understandable by high-school students; they might therefore
enjoy reading one or more of those books, and some of Gamow's early
papers, which often introduced important ideas in physics that other
people later got Nobel Prizes for.  George was always rushing on to
new ideas, and rarely stopped to work out anything in detail: he was
having too much fun, and left the expansion work to others.


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