MathJax / LaTeX math on social media

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Jonathan Fine

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Feb 4, 2021, 6:43:14 AM2/4/21
to MathJax Users
I'm interested in promoting the use of MathJax / LaTeX on social media web-sites. Leading examples are https://math.stackexchange.com/ and https://mathoverflow.net/. Arising out of the user experience for beginner I've formulated 3 questions.
  1. A social media site for learning LaTeX math. It this a good idea?
  2. Are there already such sites?
  3. How good are they, and can we improve matters?
I'd like to hear your comments on this. By the way, I've written a longer blog post on this subject:

I'm also available tonight (4 Feb) on zoom, 6:30 to 7:30pm UK time if you're interested. The zoom link is on my blog post.

Jonathan

Christian Lawson-Perfect

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Feb 4, 2021, 6:54:34 AM2/4/21
to MathJax Users
The mastodon instance I run, mastodon.xyz, uses MathJax to render LaTeX.

Have you seen https://texnique.xyz/ ? It's set up as a challenge for experienced TeX users at the moment, but with the addition of hints it could become a good tool for learning TeX.

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David Farmer

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Feb 4, 2021, 6:59:14 AM2/4/21
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MathJax is used on mathoverflow.net, and there is a TeX
stackexchange, so I am not understanding that you are asking.

On Thu, 4 Feb 2021, Jonathan Fine wrote:

> I'm interested in promoting the use of MathJax / LaTeX on social media web-sites. Leading examples
> are https://math.stackexchange.com/ and https://mathoverflow.net/. Arising out of the user experience for
> beginner I've formulated 3 questions.
> 1. A social media site for learning LaTeX math. It this a good idea?
> 2. Are there already such sites?
> 3. How good are they, and can we improve matters?
> I'd like to hear your comments on this. By the way, I've written a longer blog post on this subject:
> https://jfine2358.github.io/post/2021/02/03/latex-math-social-media/
>
> I'm also available tonight (4 Feb) on zoom, 6:30 to 7:30pm UK time if you're interested. The zoom link is on
> my blog post.
>
> Jonathan
>

Jonathan Fine

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Feb 4, 2021, 9:54:16 AM2/4/21
to mathja...@googlegroups.com, akshay.r...@gmail.com, christia...@gmail.com
On Thu, Feb 4, 2021 at 11:54 AM Christian Lawson-Perfect <christia...@gmail.com> wrote:
The mastodon instance I run, mastodon.xyz, uses MathJax to render LaTeX.

Have you seen https://texnique.xyz/ ? It's set up as a challenge for experienced TeX users at the moment, but with the addition of hints it could become a good tool for learning TeX.

Thank you, Christian, for both those links.  They're both new to me.

In some ways https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastodon_(software) reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Postal_Union. I notice you've published your patch that adds MathJax to Mastodon. It gives me hope that other systems can also be patched. https://gist.github.com/christianp/617d5673fb28d130d552253182315af4

There's a lot I like about https://texnique.xyz/. I'm particularly impressed that it recognises correct answers, even when not in normal form. However, I find the problems too hard, even though I think I'm an expert LaTeX user. I'm most grateful to Akshay (copied) for creating this game.

I produced a couple of widgets that are similar, but much simpler. The second widget has some elements of hints.

I like the game concept for learning LaTeX. Debugging a LaTeX error is sometimes like solving a riddle. I think that https://texnique.xyz/ plus my work plus simple examples can give something that's useful for beginners.

-- 
Jonathan

Jonathan Fine

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Feb 4, 2021, 10:12:58 AM2/4/21
to mathja...@googlegroups.com, David Farmer
On Thu, Feb 4, 2021 at 11:59 AM David Farmer <far...@aimath.org> wrote:
MathJax is used on mathoverflow.net, and there is a TeX
stackexchange, so I am not understanding that you are asking.

I'm asking for a social media website that helps me learn LaTeX math, with a focus on helping beginners.

MathOverflow is a q+a site for PROFESSIONAL mathematicians. And TeX Stackexchange doesn't support MathJax.

Let's put it another way. A beginner wants help with superscripts. So they search the site, as follows.

And the top results are

I'm looking for something more like the top result for this search
which is

I'd like a site for beginners learning LaTeX that is more helpful than google search. I'd say Math Overflow and TeX Stackexchange are for this purpose less helpful than google search.

-- 
Jonathan

 

Akshay Ravikumar

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Feb 4, 2021, 1:22:38 PM2/4/21
to Jonathan Fine, mathja...@googlegroups.com, christia...@gmail.com
Hi, glad you like TeXnique! The verification is pretty silly actually, we convert the answer/input to images and check that they're the same, with some logic to allow small variations on the correct answer (like \implies vs \Longrightarrow). It is hard though...we could potentially add a difficulty field to each problem, then play the game on various modes (easy/medium/hard/extreme). If someone's interested in implementing this, feel free to submit a PR. :)

Jonathan, the widgets you made are really neat!
--
Akshay Ravikumar

Jonathan Fine

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Feb 5, 2021, 12:45:17 PM2/5/21
to Akshay Ravikumar, mathja...@googlegroups.com, christia...@gmail.com
Hi

MathJax is a very important part of the solution to problems here. But I'd like to shift the focus to helping beginners. And we'll come back to the MathJax list when we have technical suggestions and questions.

I suggest we continue this discussion on a new mailing list I've set up:

I hope you don't mind me doing this. I've been inspired to do this in part by the python-ideas mailing list.

Akshay: Thank you for your feedback and support. I hope we'll work together on unifying our two projects sometime this year.

-- 
Jonathan


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