Courant Institute New York University FAS CAS GSAS

### MathJAX

Sunday, September 19, 2010 - 11:36pm

I cashed in a lot of round tuits and updated the infrastructure on my site. One new addition is MathJax.

MathJax is a JavaScript suite which handles setting math in the browser. Users can type in TeX or LaTeX, and the output can be MathML or a graphical rendering in HTML of the code.

Testing: If $$ax^2 + bx + c = 0$$, then $$x = \displaystyle\frac{-b \pm \sqrt{b^2 - 4ac}}{2a}$$.

Seems to work pretty well. Server-side methods that parse the body for TeX code, then ran TeX, converted to an image, and served the image, were always kludgy. This is client-side (so it depends on the viewer's software to see), but JavaScript is used in most graphical browsers, so it makes sense to rely on it. If a user can view Facebook, they can view MathJAX.

• You can enable syntax highlighting of source code with the following tags: <code>, <blockcode>, <c>, <cpp>, <drupal5>, <drupal6>, <java>, <javascript>, <perl>, <php>, <python>, <ruby>. The supported tag styles are: <foo>, [foo].