Update 07/02/2013: Google giveth, and it taketh away. MathML support in Chrome has been disabled until it’s “production-ready”.
Putting maths on the web has always been a tricky proposition. Typesetting notation is a highly complicated procedure, so for years people have got by either by compromising on aesthetics and writing equations in plain, unadorned text, or by using off-line LaTeX compilers to make blurry images of what they’re trying to say.
According to a post by Frédéric Wang on the Mozilla MathML mailing list, Wikipedia now supports rendering mathematics via MathJax (and through it, MathML). Wang says:
Today, a new Math rendering mode has been added to Wikipedia. You need a Wikipedia account to use it. In My preferences => Appearance => Math, choose “MathJax”. Once enabled, MathJax’s HTML-CSS output will be used by default. If you want to use MathML instead, right click on a formula and choose “Math Settings => Math Renderer => MathML”.
Paul Taylor wanted an easy way to write some maths he could take a screengrab of, for use as an icon. Before I intervened he was doing something unnatural with wikipedia, so I wrote a little applet using MathJax: “make big maths“.
Quite a few tools like this exist, using mimetex or some other CGI tool to run LaTeX on a server and produce an image file. That’s far too slow and rubbish-looking for my liking, so I made my own with MathJax.
Continue reading “A little applet to make maths for screengrabbing” on cp’s mathem-o-blog
Lots of people have blogs where they talk about maths. Lots of these people just use plain text for mathematical notation which, while it gets the point across, isn’t as easy to read or as visually appealing as it could be.
MathJax lets you write LaTeX and get beautifully typeset mathematical notation. And it’s really really easy to set up: you just need to paste some code into the header of your blog’s theme. To make it really really really easy, I’ve written some very detailed instructions of what to do for each big blogging service. (If you’re reading this after I wrote it, which you definitely are, beware that the interfaces I describe may have changed, so the advice below might be inaccurate.
Christian was asked to find some art to decorate the walls of the university maths department he works in. Here’s what he found.
29 April 2013
Are redshirts really the most death-prone members of the Enterprise‘s crew? James Grime crunches the numbers.
29 April 2013
Today is the 100th anniversary of the birth of Paul Erdős, or as most people would call it, Erdős’ 100th birthday. So, Happy Birthday Paul.
26 March 2013
A mix of interviews with interesting people and mathematical miscellanea, presented by Katie and Christian.
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Nice-looking maths & things using maths.
aka "You got your art in my maths!"
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