Writing your PhD thesis is a huge work (took me nine months). A burden. Everyone wants it to be THE document that the next generation will read in order to learn the wonderful stuff you have developed at IRIF.

Clearly, there are some pitfalls to avoid. Sometimes a scientifically excellent thesis turns out to be barely usable, because definitions are difficult to find, hard to parse, etc… And the reviewers get mad at you (but say it gently because they are polite). It is your duty to pay attention to all these details (it is also the duty of your PhD advisor to help you in that) and make a document as user friendly as possible.

One can find many documents describing how to write good science/a good thesis on the internet (read some of them!). I will not try to cover this wide subject. My goal in this talk will be to emphasize on some presentation points, and show you how some tools can help you in your writing (this is an advertisement for the LaTeX package « knowledge »).

If you want to test, you can bring your laptop with an up-to-date distribution of LaTeX.