A word about LaTeX

For the uninitiated, a very brief overview:

• LaTeX is a markup language for building documents. It was built by Leslie Lamport upon Don Kunth's TeX typesetting language. (Note that Knuth and Lamport are both winners of the ACM's Turing Award, but not for their work with [La]TeX.)
• A LaTeX document consists of a text file; a LaTeX processor can convert this file into a PDF file (that's not the whole story, but it's good enough for now). LaTeX documents are structured in a manner similar to HTML files. This means that the author of a LaTeX doc doesn't need to worry about physical layout, only the document structure; LaTeX takes care of all the layout details for you.
• Inline math is written $....$, whereas display math is written

          \[ 
          ...
  
          ...
          \]
        

  Math input is written somewhat as it is spoken.
• The complete TeX distribution (including LaTeX) is installed on our Linux systems at Lincoln Center. So if you're working on these computers, you don't need to install anything. However, if you want to install the TeX distribution on your computer (be it Linux, Mac, or Windows), visit the TeX User Group website.
• There are a number of useful resources online that you can consult for learning LaTeX, among which are:
  • S. Parthasarathy's "Let's Learn LaTeX".
  • George Gratzer's "Math Into LaTeX".
  Note: When Googling for LaTeX-related material, you probably want to use something like "LaTeX typesetting" to disambiguate from other uses of "latex".
• Leslie Lamport's (the creator of LaTeX) wrote "LaTeX: A Document Preparation System (2nd Edition)" which you can find on Amazon.