{"id":11,"date":"2011-01-01T23:49:33","date_gmt":"2011-01-01T23:49:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.readytext.co.uk\/?p=11"},"modified":"2013-11-28T08:57:20","modified_gmt":"2013-11-28T08:57:20","slug":"mathjax","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.readytext.co.uk\/?p=11","title":{"rendered":"Why I admire MathJax"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It is, in some ways, a deep irony that the community which spawned the web (i.e., physicists and mathematicians) should, until recently, have had such a hard time using the web to fluently and easily communicate in the natural language of their disciplines: mathematics. Certainly, domain-specific solutions have evolved through the use and combination of tools and techniques such as jsMath, MathML, SVG, bitmaps, LaTeX text and so forth. The author of this post wrote a COM-based (i.e., Windows!) DVI-to-SVG conversion tool 6 years ago but, at the time, the ultra-specific environment in which it worked precluded its mainstream use. Anyone recall Adobe&#8217;s SVG plug-in for Internet Explorer&#8230;? It has taken nearly 20 years for the cluster of associated technologies to catch up and coalesce into providing a viable and mainstream solution: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mathjax.org\">MathJax<\/a>, which delivers into the browser the exquisite beauty of the typesetting algorithms developed by Donald Knuth in the late 1970s. Anybody who has read the infamous Appendix G of the TeXBook or the article <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ntg.nl\/maps\/34\/09.pdf\">Appendix G illuminated<\/a> will, or should, have profound respect and admiration for the work of jsMath and MathJax. Replication of the TeX math-typesetting algorithms in JavaScript (or <em>any <\/em>language!) is an <strong><em>incredible <\/em><\/strong>achievement for which the authors and financial sponsors of MathJaX should be applauded, for they have made a major contribution to the future of scientific communication via the web ecosystem. Three cheers to them!<\/p>\n<p>Just in passing, from deciding to set-up this WordPress blog, to downloading + installing WordPress and MathJax installation was about 1.5 hours in total, which just goes to show how easy it is, even for a non-expert like me! Here&#8217;s a simple formula typeset in TeX\/MathJax. Assuming you&#8217;re using a modern browser, right-click over the formula to see the options presented by MathJax.<\/p>\n\\(\\vec{F}_g=-F\\frac{m_1 m_2}{r^2} \\vec{e}_r\\)\n<p>MathJax, you totally rock!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It is, in some ways, a deep irony that the community which spawned the web (i.e., physicists and mathematicians) should, until recently, have had such a hard time using the web to fluently and easily communicate in the natural language of their disciplines: mathematics. Certainly, domain-specific solutions have evolved through the use and combination of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mathjax"],"blocksy_meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.readytext.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.readytext.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.readytext.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.readytext.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.readytext.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11"}],"version-history":[{"count":34,"href":"https:\/\/www.readytext.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4014,"href":"https:\/\/www.readytext.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11\/revisions\/4014"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.readytext.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.readytext.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.readytext.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}