TABLE OF CONTENTS My recommendations amount to this Make your lecture simple (special and concrete); be sure to prove something and ask something; prepare, in detail; organize the content and adjust to the level of the audience; keep it short, and, to be sure of doing so, prepare it so as to make it flexible.
PAUL R. HALMOS, How to Talk Mathematics (1974)
I always find myself obliged, if my argument is of the least importance, to draw up a plan of it on paper and fill in the parts by recalling them to mind, either by association or otherwise.
MICHAEL FARADAY [16]
An awful slide is one which contains approximately a million numbers (and we've left our opera glasses behind). An awful lecture slide is one which shows a complete set of engineering drawings and specifications for a super-tanker.
KODAK LIMITED, Let's Stamp Out Awful Lecture Slides (1979)
In this chapter I discuss how to write a mathematical talk. By talk I mean a formal presentation that is prepared in advance, such as a departmental seminar or a conference talk, but not one of a series of lectures to students. In most talks the speaker writes on a blackboard or displays pre-written transparencies on an overhead projector. (From here on I will refer to transparencies as slides, since this term is frequently used and is easier to write and say.) I will restrict my attention to slides, which are the medium...
