2007-12-17

MathML Support Added

For some time I've planned to add MathML support to this website. The ability to put mathematical notation inline will vastly improve my capability to expediently express the mathematics involved in my work. Many of the projects here have a lot of maths behind them, and in the past you would have needed to do extra research to make much use of what I have documented. By lowering the barrier to writing up the mathematics I hope to capture more useful detail in my projects.

I am using the fantastic ASCIIMathML Javascript utility. Its bloody marvelous, that is all I can say! I was going to add a raw MathML primitive to the wikitext language, but ASCIIMathML is a far better solution.

To make use of the MathML you will need IE6+MathPlayer, a Mozilla based browser with the MathML Fonts, or something else with MathML support. Safari seems to have issues with normal MathML, let alone the scripting used to implement this. I highly recommend Firefox, but the choice is as always yours.

Some examples:

`del*bb{E} = rho/varepsilon_0`

`del*bb{B} = 0`

`grad xx bb{E} = - del / (del t) bb{B}`

`grad xx bb{B} = mu_0 bb{J} + mu_0 varepsilon_0 del / (del t) bb{E}`

One particularly cool feature is graph drawing utilising SVG (which will require Adobe SVG Viewer in IE):

agraph width=300; height=200; xmin=-2.5; xmax=2.5; xscl=1; ymin=-1.5; plot(x^2 + x - 1); text((1.2,0.5),"$y = x^2 + x - 1$","right") endagraph

It can do dynamic graphing too, with scripting, but I haven't played with this much yet.

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