Research Connections

Information for Authors

The template for articles is now available. Please download the files listed below, save them to where you plan to write your article, and follow the instructions in the readme.txt file. If you have any problems please email us at smp.maa.volume@gmail.com.

Frequently Asked Questions:

Q: Do you want full detailed proofs in the contributions section? My proofs have already been published (or will be published) elsewhere, so I would of course cite those publications in lieu of including the (often very technical) proofs.

Please don't include technical proofs in your paper. These papers are meant to be surveys/overviews of your area and contributions aimed at an undergraduate audience (as well as mathematicians outside your field). Your suggested model of citing the technical publications is precisely what we were imagining. One way to think about these papers is as a paper version of an undergrad talk about your work.

Q: How do I get the "blackboard bold" font, \mathbb?

A: In master.tex add \usepackage{amsfonts} to the list of packages at the top. Then you should be able to just call $\mathbb{R}$ (or whatever other letter you want to be blackboard bold) like usual.

Q: Images are not showing up when I compile.

A: This answer may be platform dependent. I (Emilie Purvine) tested on Windows using the "latex" command (not "pdflatex"). The only way I could get an image to show up was if the image was in EPS format. Any other image format (PNG, JPG, PDF) and the image was not found. With EPS it just worked like normal ("\includegraphics{image}" where my file is image.eps). This worked in WinEdt as well as compiling via command line.

On a Mac or online via ShareLaTeX or Overleaf the answer may be different.

Q: I can get it to compile with the latex command but I don't like dvi files, I want a pdf!

A: Use the two simple commands:

• dvips <name>.dvi
• ps2pdf <name>.ps <name>.pdf

The first command turns the dvi file into a Postscript file (same filename but with .ps extension). The second command takes that ps file and turns it into a pdf file.

Q: I'm having trouble with tikz pictures. It compiles, but in the dvi output the picture is just garbage.

A: Here the solution is to turn the resulting dvi file into a pdf using the commands in the above answer. The tikz picture may be gibberish in the dvi file but when you turn it into a pdf it should look normal. Not sure why this is, but it worked when tested on Windows.

Q: You gave us a word count and a page limit, those two things don't seem to match up. Which one should we adhere to more strictly?

A: The page limit is more important than the word count. If 10-15 pages is more than 4000-6000 words that is fine.