In the summer I agreed to give a talk to the Cambridge University Physics Society a.k.a. CUPS. I took the opportunity to talk about the Kardar–Parisi–Zhang equation – one of my current obsessions – but also to learn about some new presentation tools. For quite a few years I’ve used Beamer to create presentations in LaTeX. Presenting mathematics in PowerPoint or Keynote involves too much dragging around of little boxes, which really breaks up the workflow.

Things move on, however, and in recent years a number of browser-based options for rendering slides in HTML have appeared: things like Slidy and reveal.js, to name just two. I plumped for reveal.js just because it seemed popular and was easy to get going with (and because I was having a crazy term and there was less than a week to go). Also pandoc. You can see the result here. I was pleased with how it turned out, and see myself making the transition to one of these tools in my conference presentations. I’d like to give the very impressive looking impress.js a try, but perhaps that’s a bit too flash.