## MathJax success!

After somewhat neglecting my blog for a while I decided to come back to it today to write about something…anything – at first I couldn’t think of anything to write about. It always happens – you have loads of ideas of things to write about when you are out and about but as soon as you sit down in front of your computer everything just goes out of the window and out of the millions and millions of things that there are to write about in this world you just can’t settle on a single one.

So I started Googling things and just decided to Google something like ‘how to put maths symbols onto a blog’. I knew that there must be a way to do this – after all, if you look on Wikipedia there’s maths symbols all over the place so someone, somewhere must know how to do this but….I thought….I bet it’s really difficult to do. I bet you need to know all about computer programming and programming languages to be able to do it. I was pleasantly surprised.

After a couple of minutes I came across something called MathJax – this does exactly what I wanted. Better still, if you are a WordPress user then there is a plugin called Simple MathJax and once installed you can begin putting mathematical symbols on your blog straight away – no need for any complicated installation process, no expert knowledge required, just install and away you go. Perfect!

MathJax allows you to display mathematical symbols on your blog using the same code that you would use to type a LaTeX document. Fortunately I know how to do some basic stuff in LaTeX so I have been playing around with it and here’s a sample of what MathJax can do….

$$\frac{\mathrm{d}}{\mathrm{d}x}(uv) = u\frac{\mathrm{d}v}{\mathrm{d}x}+v\frac{\mathrm{d}u}{\mathrm{d}x}$$

$$\int\!{u\frac{\mathrm{d}v}{\mathrm{d}x}}\;\mathrm{d}x = uv \;\;- \int\!{v\frac{\mathrm{d}u}{\mathrm{d}x}}\;\mathrm{d}x$$

Thanks to MathJax I will have much more freedom about the kinds of things that I can write on my blog.

Watch this space…