University of Utah Mathematics Department LaTeX thesis styles

Last updates: Sat Nov 5 16:49:49 2022

This is the master archive site for the definitive version of University of Utah Mathematics Department dissertation and thesis styles for LaTeX. If you downloaded an earlier version some time ago, you can copy *.sty files from the latest version into your working thesis directory, taking care to preserve any private modifications in mythesis.sty.

By special arrangement with the University of Utah Graduate School, the Mathematics Department has begun an experiment for formatting dissertation and thesis documents using an entirely new design of the underlying LaTeX styles, with extended BibTeX styles available for enhanced bibliographies. For at least several months, use of these styles is restricted to students in the Mathematics Department, while higher-level committees review and modernize formatting requirements. At submission time, you will need to fill out this brief one-page approval form.

In Fall 2022, the Mathematics Department dissertation and thesis review committee consists of these faculty members:

• Mladen Bestvina,
• Ken Bromberg (chair),
• Lajos Horváth,
• Fernando Guevara Vasquez (ex officio).

Questions about the new styles, and requests for help with typesetting problems in dissertations and theses, should be directed to Nelson Beebe or Fernando Guevara Vasquez. There may be $$ rewards for reports of bugs in the styles or their documentation.

Before starting to examine the new sample theses, please read this document for a description of the new features and styles, and recommendations for their use. Its section 2, Online resources, contains pointers to other locally written documents that can help you get started with LaTeX and BibTeX. They discuss many of the finer points of typesetting and writing that, as an academic professional, you should be aware of. Graduate degrees are awarded for demonstrated expertise in complex and difficult areas of study, but you also need to be able to write effectively about your work, if you are to succeed in a professional career.

The distribution includes four sample graduate dissertations and theses, numbered 0 through 3, with increasing complexity and features, plus an undergraduate Honors College bachelor's degree thesis.

On any Unix (including Linux and macOS) system with a recent TeX Live installation, you should be able to regenerate each document by the single command-line invocation make distclean all, without any changes whatsoever to the files.

• The honors-thesis-0 directory shows an undergraduate Honors College bachelor's degree sample thesis that was derived from the simplest of the graduate samples. Its markup is similar to the others, but the front matter looks quite different. Apart from the differing front matter, all of the extended features illustrated in the graduate samples are available for use.
• The sample-thesis-0 directory shows a minimal dissertation in black-and-white only, with chapters, figures, tables, and a bibliography. While it produces documents that look much like historical ones from our old LaTeX styles, we urge you to do better, by basing your work on one of the later samples.
• The sample-thesis-1 directory contains an extended dissertation that introduces color, hypertext links, and indexes.
• The sample-thesis-2 directory adds end-of-chapter bibliographies, and a chapter made almost entirely from a published paper. If you yourself have published conference papers, journal articles, or book chapters in your degree field of study, please consider including them as thesis chapters, so as to leverage your prior work.
• The sample-thesis-3 directory has front-matter changes for a Master's degree, and additionally, produces single-spaced front-matter lists and bibliographies. New for the June 2020 release is Appendix F, showing typesetting of multipage tables, and describing how suitably marked-up tabular data can be automatically extracted and turned into TeX macros for use elsewhere in the document. That eliminates unnecessary and error-prone duplication, and ensures consistency.

Each of the sample theses is set in a different nondefault font family to encourage you to experiment in that area. Far too many TeX and LaTeX documents have been produced with default fonts, leading to the erroneous view that no other fonts are available.

Advice: Many students have found it convenient to start with one of the sample documents, and then make changes from there. When you do so, it is imperative that you rename the directory, and its sample-thesis-n.* files, to something unique to you. You must also make the same renaming in the Makefile. If you include other files for chapters, figures, and tables, make sure to update the Makefile *FILES variable assignments, so that the dependency of your final document on changes made in those files results in proper typesetting actions.

You are free to change the Makefile and any of the LaTeX files in your renamed copy of a suitable sample thesis, and the sample mythesis.sty file for localizing your personal customizations. All other *.sty files must be used unmodified.

To conform to Departmental and Graduate School requirements, you must not change the provided page layout. When you print your document for review, you must ensure that your PDF viewer or printer does not resize it; such scaling has been a too-common cause of thesis rejection in the past.