LateX on the Site

When I first attempted to use LateX during my Masters (years ago), my unfamiliarity with it made me think that it was too complicated and needless.  "Why not just use Microsoft Word?" I asked?  Because LateX, once you do familiarize yourself with it, is a lot more functional than Microsoft Word's in-built equation editor.  Plus, that source code isn't available for use outside of MS Office anyway.

 

Let's see what we can achieve with a few simple LateX commands.  Einstein's famous equation that equalizes mass and energy perhaps?

$$ E=mc^2 $$

Seems pretty sweet no?  Let's try another.  You're a math student and you're struggling with a pretty gnarly integral.  You come here for advice and you post this:

 

$$ \int_0^\pi \frac{2 \tan x }{1 + \tan^2 x }$$

 

Ok ok, we're having fun.  So a chemist comes along and claims that she cannot remember the Arrhenius equation.  You, a model citizen, vouches to remind this chemist by writing the equation here:

 

$$ k = A e^{\frac{-Ea}{RT}} $$

 

As a high quality type-setting system, LateX makes it really easy to illustrate and share technical and scientific documentation - primarily in the form of expressions and equations.  LateX functionality is available for viewing on the blogs and is available for use on the forums.

 

Please check out https://www.overleaf.com/learn/latex/Learn_LaTeX_in_30_minutes and https://jblevins.org/log/greek for basic tutorials and LateX cheat sheets.  Inline equations can be created using  "\(" (and closing the bracket using a backslash too!)  whilst stand-alone, centre-aligned equations can be created by calling " $$ " on both sides of your equation.

Have fun!