## Tuesday, July 12, 2011

### Testing Mathjax

I want to ask all users who suddenly find this blog annoyingly slow because of Mathjax to complain in the comments here. If the number of complaints will exceed a certain threshold, I will disable Mathjax again. You see, the Mathjax javascript support is loading in the grey rectangles in the lower left corner...

Mathjax is the seventh web system for LaTeX I am testing on this blog. TeX - by Donald Knuth - or LaTeX - with some help from Leslie Lamport - is the experts' standard to write mathematical expressions and formulae - and texts with lots of formulae. Most papers at arXiv.org are originally written in TeX or LaTeX.

We clearly cannot afford to reserve $...$ for the inline mathematics because this blog is full of the dollar signs which usually denote the U.S. currency. However, we may be getting ready for the default of the U.S. government so if you fairly replace one dollar by three dollars, things will be fine. For example, $$E=mc^2$$$will appear as $$E=mc^2$$$.

Alternatively, you may use $$x^2+y^2=r^2$$ to type in-line maths, $$x^2 + y^2 = r^2$$.

Also, double dollars $$...$$ or the symbols $...$ are reserved for displayed equations. The resulting graphics looks like this:

$$\sum_{k=1}^n k = \frac{n(n+1)}{2}.$$

If you don't know how to type such nice equations, right-click at the equation and choose "Show source". It will show you how to type it. If you type it in between double dollars (displayed formula) or triple dollars (in-line maths), it will ultimately show up as pretty mathematics. Thank God, Mathjax respects the background color and the text color.

That's true even if the background is blue like in our "blockquote" format:
$$\sin^2 \psi + \cos^2 \psi = 1.$$\$
For you, the mathematical devices are available in the slow comments (slow feedback) and it will be so unless I will get enough feedback indicating that the people's computers and browsers are still too slow for the luxury of TeX or LaTeX to be classified as an irrational exuberance. ;-)

#### 1 comment:

1. I enabled scripting from that domain. And wow it is slow: it took several seconds. But man, it's beautiful! It brought back TeX memories. Keep it!