Sunday, October 24, 2010

MathJax: Include mathematics non-obtrusively

In this blog post I will explain the use of MathJax, a javascript based display engine for mathematics.

In an early post I pointed out that yourequations.com has a very nice solution for producing beautiful LaTeX on the web. Unfortunately as of October 31 2010 their service has shut down. As a result the LaTeX on my blog did not render any more.

So a tweet alerted me to mathjax, a display engine for mathematics. With mathjax it is possible to write mathematics in LaTeX or MathML and the javascript based engine will make a beautiful image.
As a bonus mathjax allows you to scale the mathematics, view the source in LaTeX or MathML and choice the rendermode i.e. straight to MathML or via their custom fonts.

Seeing their beautiful examples I decided that use mathjax for this blog. So once again, mathematics can be viewed in splendid glory.

\[
e^{i\pi}+1=0
\]

Saturday, October 16, 2010

Why I changed my twitter picture

In this blog I will explain why I changed my twitter picture.

After a presentation I gave at the University of Utrecht someone in the audience came up to me and asked the following question: "Can I follow you on twitter?"

This flattering request made one thing clear. My twitter pictures has no relation with me. How could anybody know my account from the following picture?

In order to be more accessible, I changed my picture. For now I have changed it to the picture I use for my blog. Maybe in the future I will pick a fancier picture.