## Bananas are better.

### LaTeX

(It’s Infomercial Time!)

Hello viewers! Today we have a product that could CHANGE YOUR (mathematical) LIFE! It’s called LaTeX, and this amazing product allows you to write mathematical expressions in WordPress in a nice, professional form! And it could be yours free if you blog with WordPress! Let’s go to the demonstration, shall we?

*walks over to demonstration table*

So if you’re writing a post about math, and you want to write some complicated expression that you can’t figure out how to… express, then use LaTeX! Let’s transform this ugly expression, A = π(r^2), which is the formula for the area of a circle. You can’t write exponents with normal text, so we’re gonna use LaTeX. Ready? 3, 2, 1!

$A = \pi r^2$

WOW! What a makeover! LaTeX has done it again! You have all the symbols there! Let’s try with something else, like a square root. It’s possible to express square roots with the special character √, but that has some ambiguity on where the square root ends. LaTeX makes it unambiguous.

√(a+b) ≠ √a + √b

$\sqrt{a+b} \neq \sqrt{a} + \sqrt{b}$

You can change colors, too.

So yeah, LaTeX is great. But how do you use it? Simply put “$latex” without the quotes when you want to start a LaTeX expression, then to end it, just put “$”. There’s a whole lot of things you have to do to produce your equation, AKA special notation, but to bypass that, use this link: http://www.codecogs.com/latex/eqneditor.php It automatically generates the code for you, so all you have to do is copy that and paste it between “$latex” and “$”.

Gecko Out.

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#### Comments on: "LaTeX" (5)

1. I’m expecting that I can expect a lot more posts about math?
I don’t use WordPress, but I’m not sure that I’ll be doing many math posts. Or any at all.

2. Nix said:

LaTeX is awesome. It’s on AoPS too. So easy.

3. One more thing: Make sure that you don’t have a line break in your code. On WordPress.com, all LaTeX code has to be on a single line. You can still do multi-line equations (as I did near the end of this post), but each line must be coded separately.

4. [...] LaTeX (climbinggecko.wordpress.com) [...]

5. [...] the Internet. I’ll spare you the math. It would be too complicated to write it all out in Latex anyways. Of course, the next solar eclipse coming over Everest will be in 2064, around perihelion, [...]