Tag Archives: mathjax

JMM 2013

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Early this morning, I drove down to San Diego to be at the Joint Math Meetings 2013 for the very first time. (Well, last year, I mostly sneaked in to meet friends and didn’t even register — or got to talks, so I guess that’s fair).

It seems ironic and yet fitting that my first JMM is also the first meeting since I left mathematical research (in the traditional and definitely the (for me) previous sense). Representing MathJax is challenging, exciting, and simply a lot of fun.

Of course, meeting up with old friends is an added bonus that’s simply priceless.

self-publishing, the academic community and LaTeX fanboyism — a comment at Devlin’s Angle

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Yet another one of those “Peter babbled too long on somebody else blog”-posts. This time at Keith Devlin’s MAA column/blog Devlin’s Angle

A few comments.

About your reply to Corey’s comment. “That will surely change very quickly” is something I’ve been hearing all my (academic) life but nothing is happening — academia proves highly conservative. The main problem is that the young researchers willing to seriously experiment will often not gain enough “traditional” merit compared to those who just play the game — and those who successfully play the game will rarely see the need to experiment later.

This is a serious problem that would deserve much more effort from the few established researchers that are both influential, established, and open to new ideas: help young researcher get the credit they deserve with their experiments such as self-publishing (can’t help but add: and publish open-access or even open-source). Or in other words: it’s great to hear that self-publishing worked for you, this time, but can somebody else reproduce it?

Finally, LaTeX (as a binary) is nice for producing print output — but practically incapable of doing anything else (and actually, professional typesetters will easily complain about the quality of TeX’s output).

As Peter Rowlett and yourself pointed out, even the best reflow-PDF viewers (Kindle, Nook) are quite limited. However, that is actually the author’s fault. It’s like trying to build an iPad with manufacturing equipment from 1978 (or for that matter, teaching a MOOC in 1978).

So instead of using LaTeX to do what it can’t do — produce content for an html environment — authors need to take the next step and switch to authoring systems that can produce both good print and good html. That’s hard right now, but worth an experimental effort (good keywords: pandoc, asciidoc, restructured-text, sphinx-doc — and I’d volunteer right away to help actually.)

After all, with the adoption of MathML3 in two critical standards (html5 and epub3) and with technologies like MathJax, mathematical content in html finally makes sense.

(Disclaimer: I’m involved in the MathJax development)

Thanks to this discussion on g+, here’s I just had to add another comment

One small addendum. Here’s such an experiment going all the way to XML: Rob Bezeer’s Linear Algebra book http://linear.ups.edu/index.html which (due to it’s flexibility) is part of IDPF’s official ebpub3 sample repository https://code.google.com/p/epub-samples/

epub, mathjax and the iPad — another attempt

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It’s a funny thing. I don’t even own an iPad. But a lot of people are interested in getting an epub file with mathjax working on the iPad.

Why is that? Well, as far as I could find out the iPad remains the only “hardware” that does not block javascript within an epub file (epub uses html for its content but javascript is designated “should not” in the epub2 standard). Of course it’s really the software, iBooks, but mentioning the iPad will be much better SEO. ;)

Incidentally, the only other software I know that is not blocking javascript is the fantastic Calibre. Calibre’s reader seems to not care at all about enforcing the epub standard, it just render everything it finds (but I’ll get to that later).

So what happened?

A while ago, after an email exchange which is now mostly available online, I finally created an epub with a complete mathjax installation. Unfortunately, it was a fluke. The file was was not reliably rendered on the iPad, most likely because of its size (MathJax has 30.000 files for ~20MB unzipped). So Davide Cervone suggested to cut down on unnecessary files which iBooks should not need.

This led to a result that rendered reliably — unfortunately it rendered in a most irritating fashion: half a line below the intended one, writing happily across any other text on the next line, trailing out of the margin etc. That’s far from perfect, obviously.

In the mean time, Davide was able to use my epub file to run some tests — and yesterday told us that things are looking much better now that he can work on the issues.

Of course, iOS5 was released last week. It’s not clear to me if iBooks already supports epub3, but I know that Safari now supports (some) MathML so there’s a chance that iBooks would (since it uses the webkit variant of Safari to render html). So when I had a quick chance last Friday to get my hands on a friend’s freshly updated iPad, I cooked up a quick test file and it rendered; it wasn’t perfect but not totally bad either. With my luck, of course, this will also be a fluke and I won’t know before I get my hands on that iPad again…

In the mean time, and for posterity, here’s how I create epub files. (for the Pros: get ready to laugh at a dilettante).

The tools

Get your hands on

That’s it. (Well, unless you don’t know what those are and how to use them — I won’t cover how to install and run these).

All but ecub is open source, ecub is at least free for personal use — and of course everything runs on Linux, MacOS and Windows (I mostly use linux and sometimes a Mac; I can’t make guarantees for Windows).

Creating a minimal epub file with pandoc

I love pandoc (ecub was a great help, too, more about that later) so I’ll focus on it.

As you may know, here at Booles’ Ring I write using markdown and MathJax. I use pandoc whenever I want to convert this kind of content into something else (like LaTeX). But pandoc (as its name suggest) can handle much more.

So hit it! Take your favorite test html file (I use this post).

pandoc test.html -o test.epub

That should give you a working epub file — it ain’t fancy, but it’ll do for testing. Be warned that pandoc does not check if your (x)html actually validates. Since the iPad is picky about having valid epub files you should double check (I totally failed the first time and it took me ages to remember this…).

Fortunately, you installed calibre which includes a binary of epub-fix from the epub-tools by the fabulous people over at threepress.

So you find the epub-fix binary and run

epub-fix --epubcheck test.epub

If epub-fix finds errors, fix them: go into the epub file (which is just a zip file) and fix the (most likely html) file that throws an error; in the post I use, the html should complain about a part of the vimeo embedding.

When epub-fix is happy, send the file over to the iPad for a test spin (I use Dropbox for ease of sync). If even a simple test file does not work, throw your epub into threepress’s online validator just to be sure.

Oh, one more thing: remember to always delete your file from iBooks before your load its updated version. In my experience, iBooks does not update the file when something with the same metadata is already in the iBooks library (or maybe just sometimes, I don’t know, just watch out for that).

Slimming down mathjax

Well, right now we have a nice epub. But if you view it anywhere it will have your typical LaTeX commands all over the place — we need to add mathjax!

Davide Cervone gave me some advice to reduce a mathjax installation to a mere 1.3MB.

  • remove the MathJax/fonts/HTML-CSS/TeX/eot, svg, and png directories
  • remove the two OFT-files that start with “MathJax_Win” (guess why…)
  • remove the MathJax/unpacked, test, and docs directories
  • If you are only using TeX input (not MathML), then use the TeX-AMS_HTML-full configuration file.
  • In that case, remove the MathJax/jax/input/MathML, MathJax/jax/output/NativeMML directories, the MathJax/extensions/mml2jax.js and MathJax/extensions/jsMath2jax.js .
  • remove the “FontWarnings” and “v1.0-warnings” extensions, as well as all the configuration files you are not using.
  • remove the MathJax/jax/output/HTML-CSS/fonts/STIX directory

Now that your MathJax installation is small and tidy, just copy the remaining files into a suitable folder (how about “mathjax”?) inside the epub — an epub file is simply a zip file after all.

While you’re at it, you should add a suitable MathJax configuration to the html files in your epub file. If you’re using my post from above, you should add

<script type="text/x-mathjax-config">
MathJax.Hub.Config({
tex2jax: {
inlineMath: [ ['$','$'], ["\\(","\\)"] ],
displayMath: [ ['$$','$$'], ["\\[","\\]"] ],
processEscapes: true
},
});
</script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="mathjax/MathJax.js?config=TeX-AMS_HTML-full"></script>

If you don’t use dollar signs for inline math, just take the last line.

Fixing your epub.

After this copying, we’ll have to repair our epub file. An important fact about epub: all files must be listed in the manifest (OPF) file. Since we don’t want to do that manually, we use epub-check again.

epub-fix --unmanifested --epubcheck test.epub

The “unmanifested” option (you guessed it) will ensure that all files will be added to the manifest. Beware: don’t try this on a full MathJax! Epub-fix will slow down after the first 1.000 files…

Now transfer your file to the iPad and low and behold some mathjax will render! Of course, you’ll find that this is not working: the rendering is broken right now. (As mentioned earlier, Davide is working on it)

iOS5 to the rescue?

Now this post gets flaky. As I wrote earlier, I have only had one test run with an iOS5 iPad, so this might not work. But the process is worthwhile documenting.

As I said above, the thing about iOS5 is that Safari and hence iBooks finally has some MathML support.

Since pandoc is incredibly versatile you won’t be surprised that it can produce MathML and that it is aware of MathJax. So all we have to do is modify our earlier command.

pandoc test.html --mathml -o test.epub

This way, the html now has mathml instead of the LaTeX commands. Just shoot this over to your iPad and see how it renders. What I remember from my quick test with my post mentioned earlier was that some characters would render twice (which I had seen with that unreliable full install of MathJax I mentioned earlier). Also, MathJax’s support for commands like \\color obviously won’t work without adding MathJax again.

Alternatively, you could try using MathJax’s mathml-rendering and see what happens (I hope to test that next week).

But what if I want to have it all?

As I wrote, I also created an epub file that had a full mathjax install inside of it. This is a terrible idea because a) it rendered only sometimes on the iPad b) every other ebook viewer rejected it or crashed.

But if you cannot resist (or want to modify my approach), here’s the a hurried how-to. Since epub-fix will come to a grinding halt adding 30.000 files to a manifest, use ecub instead.

Start ecub and use the new-project wizard, it’s pretty self-explanatory. Two points might be worth pointing out:

  • At “Choose import method” you’ll want “from an existing html file”.
  • At “Convert text files” check only “add any HTML file found” and “Also find files in folders under your project folder” (this step will take a short while).

After you’re back at the main window, you’ll still need to “compile” your epub file. This will take a long time. So long, in fact, you’ll think ecub is hanging. To convince yourself that it isn’t go to the project folder you designated in the wizard and watch the 30.000 files be copied into the folder and then watch content.opf grow in size (end result is ~3.5MB).

Where do we stand?

So for now, we have two broken ways to display mathematical content in an epub file on the iPad: use slimmed down MathJax or use MathML directly. Neither works perfectly but the key point is: they work in principle. Now we can look into the specifics to make things work better. Davide is looking into the mathjax side of things and with webkit (hence Safari, hence iBooks) there’s reason to hope that mathml support will improve, too.

Of course, what I really want is an Android reader with javascript or mathml support…

And that’s it for today. Any questions?

Addendum

Here are two files at your disposal.

Why markdown, not $\LaTeX$?

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Coming from $\LaTeX$ and its text-editor driven writing style, working with wordpress can seem a step back — after all, most people, if they get excited about $\TeX$, very much despise the wysiwyg approach to writing.

Its greatest strength, its greatest weakness

One solution is to continue working with $\LaTeX$ regardless. This is possible. There are tools to convert $\LaTeX$ to html such as tex4ht and more specific tools for converting to wordpress such as latex2wp and latex-to-wordpress (yes, two distinct projects). The problem, from what I can grasp about the technical side, is that $\LaTeX$ is only good at one thing: producing material typset for print — dvi, ps, pdf. Of course, $\LaTeX$ is really, really good at that. But converting to other forms of publication seems to be its weakness.

When it comes to the web (and especially wordpress) it is useful to approach writing with a multitude of formats in mind. This is, in my opinion, a natural point of view for any researcher; our works are intended to become public and it serves our interests best if it is easy to view them whichever way is best for the person viewing it — be it in print, on an ebook reader, a giant display or a tiny smartphone screen. With this in mind it seems better to write in a format that can be easily converted to other forms. The alternative could, of course, be to rely on specialized viewing software capable of adapting print output to such extreme circumstances. To me this seems rather absurd, espcially with respect to compatibility with future technologies.

Now if you are trained in the art of $\LaTeX$ anyway you probably appreciate its (rather special) take on separating structure from content. So for the writing for the web a similar approach makes sense. And this is where markdown and other lightweight markup languages come into the picture.

Light as a feather, strong as steel

Lightweight markup languages are a beautiful tool. They focus on two objectives: simple syntax and human readability. The first ensures a mulititude of conversion tools but the second one is historically even more important since their history goes at least back to the text consoles of the 80s.

Personally, I love the aesthetics of these markup languages. The human readability is pure pleasure. I think every experienced $\LaTeX$ user can agree that, much like any code, reading $\TeX$, especially somebody elses $\TeX$ can be its own private little hell. The syntax is complicated, cumbersome and cluttered — and that’s just the plain old $\LaTeX$ syntax without the added horror of thousands of packages and personal style files…

Instead, markdown for example is always readable (well, structurally anyway…). It excels at separating content from structure. It is fast to learn and to write (much faster than $\LaTeX$) and all this at essentially no cost compared to plain text writing.

Markdown is also incredibly strong. Thanks to programs such as the amazing pandoc, you can, after your actual writing is done, convert it to anything you want — open office documents, $\LaTeX$, html, epub etc. So when you’re interested in “typesetting”, you can choose your tools for further processing — or just leave it to the professionals.

Reduce to the max

But markdown and its cousins do not come without drawbacks. You do not have the amount of options you have in $\LaTeX$, you don’t have your extra packages, your private little hacks for typesetting at your disposal. You’re forced to author your work with structural elements that can only be described as elementary (unless you move to middleweight languages like asciidoc or know some html wizardry).

I have experimented with $\LaTeX$ a lot over the years. I love typesetting and the potential of visually ingenious mathematical typesetting that helps the understanding of the reader. I often dream of meeting an Edward Tufte of mathematics — no luck so far.

When I started writing on the web, I began employing simpler and simpler tools for writing mathematics. At first, because there was no other way (presenting mathematics online before MathJax was very hard) and after a while because writing is hard. Damn hard. And any technical distraction seemd unwarranted.

The minimal style forced upon you by a tool like markdown makes one thing crystal clear: nothing will save you when you write badly. No fancy diagrams, no clever equation numbering, no colorful plots.

I believe this reduction has helped me become a better writer, mathematical and otherwise. When there’s your word and your word alone to convey a mathematical idea, a line of thought, a delicate proof, you will find the core of your mathematical writing talent, the true heart of how you write your mathematics well.

But what about mathematics?

So I invite you to try out markdown or one of its cousins. They are easy to learn, great to work with and easy to convert to whatever ends your writing leads.

If you choose markdown and you write mathematical content you may have already had the experience of combining these when you posted on mathoverflow, math.stackexchange or other stackexchange communities. The textbox they use combines markdown and mathjax. In that sense, mathematics is extremely easy to handle. You just write $\TeX$ code as you’re used to with the restriction of the (ever growing) set of mathjax commands.

If, like me, you like to write ‘offline’ there’s no reason not to. A good friend of mine has written a wonderful little text editor called Qute that allows you to write markdown and mathjax on Mac/Linux/Windows with ease. It gives you the pleasure of editing plain text files with human readable markup while producing a live preview of the content. On top of that you profit from his uncanny talents of producing visually brilliant (and healthy) interfaces. Give it a try. Needless to say that this piece was written on Qute.

Where to go from here

I’m not saying that any of the lightweight markup languages are the end all and be all — they are not. I am saying that $\LaTeX$ isn’t either (even though it is treated as such). What I attempted with this little piece is to open you up to the possiblity that your writing, and your mathematical writing at that, can benefit greatly from using tools that are backward compatible to whatever writing tools you feel safe with while allowing your writing to expand, intrinsically for yourself as well as toward reaching a greater variety of form.

And I cannot tell you how much I would enjoy hearing about your experience should you try it out.

Small update

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I just did a couple of small updates, finally!

  • MathJax is working properly again (although the firefox bug regarding mathbf-fonts persists…)
  • I finally changed my licence to CC-nc-sa 3.0-licencsing as can be seen by the footer.
  • The css is now valid although the html is still a mess (e.g., the cutting of the posts on the front page often leads to missing closing tags).

Ah well, you can’t have everything…

Welcome! (again)

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Welcome to the new home of thelazyscience. I hope the new setup makes everything better.

For myself, writing and posting has been simplified considerably by the use of Jekyll with Textile as markup. The mathematics is simply $\LaTeX$ code which gets ignored by textile and converted by MathJax . In fact, textile markup is so human-readable that I can see myself eventually writing exclusely in textile. Instead of explaining how this workflow works I invite you to read Felix Breuer’s explanation .

Additionally, the only dynamic part left is now organized by Disqus . Their tool makes commenting easy and hopefully reduces spam even further.

So, I hope you’ll enjoy the new lazy science. If you do, let me know.

Tools for your online collaboration

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So the winter school in Hejnice ended two weeks ago is long past — and despite my intentions I did not find the time to blog. This is primarily a sign of the quality of the winter school, both scientifically and socially. I do admit I spent the lunch breaks walking in the beautiful surrounding mountains instead of blogging…

Anyway, on the last evening of the winter school a couple of people gathered together to exchange tools for collaborating via the intertubes. I volunteered — also with the upcoming third Young Set Theorists meeting in mind — to make the discussion available online. Of course, the title refers to this wonderful paper by Goldstern and Judah which taught me the little bit of iterated forcing that I know.

For now I will restrict myself to freemium services. Of course, this is an open list — drop me a comment to add to this list (hm, a google wave would be better, right?).

Phones

A much better tool than a phone is? A videophone! (especially for handwaving arguments). Namely, skype comes to mind, but there are alternatives like tokbox or google talk which are web based. With possibly lower video quality they offer other useful things like actual video conferences (whereas skype restricts you afaik to 1-1 video calls) and invitation by link. There are also numerous true VoIP/SIP clients like Ekiga. But they may have the need for some firewall configuring. For more general information, check out wikipedia.

Whiteboards

But what good is a (video)phone if you cannot write on a blackboard together? In any serious mathematical discussion, notation will become an issue sooner or later. A simple, but bandwidth friendly and flash based whiteboard is scriblink — just go to the site and give your partner the invitation link. An alternative is dabbleboard which offers some shape recognition and also allows multiple pages in the free version and — most importantly — PDFs as background images. However, it is a little heavy on the bandwidth, especially latency which often annoys my voip connection.

Of course, if you want to use an online whiteboard efficiently you need some kind of tablet to write with. I personally have been very happy with a graphics tablet, a Wacom Bamboo to be exact. You can get tablets for 40€ and lower in Germany, but prices will differ regionally. Of course, I also use my Gigabyte M1028T tablet pc — although its tablet functionality is basic (no pressure sensitivity, only moving by clicking) making writing with it less suitable for real note taking — see the PDF section below.

Eierlegende Wollmilchsau Swiss Army Knives

There are of course those services which offer all of the above at once. A prime example would be dimdim which offers a nice, unified service including video conferencing, instant messaging, whiteboard, pdf viewing and collaborative websurfing — all of this available with a free account which is limited only in the number of participants (and there are premium services available, of course).  Additionally dimdim’s server technology is mostly open source, so you can set up your own server if you have the means. Unfortunately, I never got the video conference system to work correctly under linux. Although not quite with collaboration in mind there is also the awesome TeamViewer. It is a great remote assistance tool designed for efficient access to another computer screen. In that sense you could use it to access your home or office machine from anywhere — if your department allows that. But in the latest version (although windows only) Teamviewer also offers Video chat and a whiteboard to communicate. For further tools look here.

Instant Chat, Online Docs and Google Wave

Personally, I have not used instant messaging for mathematics so far — video phones seem better. However, Pidgin has a LaTeX plugin to display basic TeX code. This is of course a useful feature. I’ll come back to the general problem of displaying mathematics on the web later.

I feel I must also mention Google Wave and its competitors. These are powerful tool mixing mail, chat, wikis and collaborative document editing. I have not tried any of these yet but if there’s someone to collaborate with it’s worth a try.

PDFs I — what you can do with them

PDFs is the somewhat dominant standard for (compiled) TeX documents (sorry, dvi and ps fans). Besides the next section there is another aspect which makes them worthwhile — PDF annotation. If you are like me and like to take your notes with you (for all those typos and indices that drive you mad in some papers) there is nothing better than annotating a PDF directly — especially if you invested in a (graphics) tablet.

My favourite is the open source Xournal with excellent tablet support on both linux and windows. Alternatives are Jarnal (which also works as real time whiteboard) and (for Mac users) Skim.

Although it does not quite fit in here (or anywhere): if you feel that PDFs are inadequate to present mathematics, why don’t you take a look at prezi? It offers a different angle on presentations altogether. I sometimes dream of having a prezi like ability to zoom into papers or rather proofs giving me details where I want them and letting me quickly browse through the main ideas dynamically whenever I choose to…

PDFs II — Personal online libraries

It is convenient to store papers and other materials online. If you cannot set up a decent sftp or a version control system on your university’s server, you might want to try dropbox or teamdrive. If you frequently use public computers you might want to use something more web based like google documents or the very pretty isssu that I use from time to time on this blog.

Community Sites

Of course, all science is community driven but I think (pure) mathematics could profit more from an online community than any other science or (liberal) art. The biggest player is certainly facebook — which already has a group for, of course, the winterschool itself. Facebook attracts academia (as opposed to myspace), hence it is the more obvious place to connect — this does not mean that you shouldn’t worry about its privacy settings or rather the partial lack thereof.

On the other hand, there are a couple of science focused community sites, among them researchgate which offer science specific tools like (p)reprint lists, online references, database searches etc. This might be better for purely professional intent but I have no experience using it.

A young and incredibly successful new site is mathoverflow — a mathematical version of the great stackoverflow. You can ask and answer questions of all sorts in a very efficient manner — just don’t get lost in all the fun.

Databases

Of course the mother of all things is the arXiv — do I need to explain it? And then there are Google’s products scholar and book search. A somewhat different database is gigapedia where you can easily search for books and find free ones. In all things beware of legal issues though.

LaTeX or displaying mathematics on the web

Of course mathematicians are used to LaTeX. On the web the best way for displaying mathematics is (from a web standards point of view) mathml. The problem is that mathml is a) too difficult to write as code directly, b) difficult to view since not all browsers view them correctly and from a visually impaired point of view it seems to be a disaster, too (see the discussion on Terry Tao’s blog) and c) it is difficult to convert back to LaTeX.

There are numerous workarounds. On the one hand you can (as I do) use tex4ht to convert LaTeX to mathml. Of course, as my blog shows this is a rather tedious thing if you do not have (or want to have) control over the webserver. Alternatives are jsMath which might be superseded by mathjax. If you have a wordpress blog you can (even on your free account on wordpress.com) use this plugin — which converts basic LaTeX commands into (rather ugly) PNGs.

The winner for best practices with mathml, I think, is the n-Category Cafe. Besides being a very active group blog they have developed impressive technologies such as mathml inclusion, the LaTeX dialect itex, the itex capable instiki with itex2mml to convert tex to mathml on the fly and all of this available in the comments, too.

Blogs, blogs, blogs

Almost last but in no way least, there are blogs.  This would be worth an independent post and there are plenty of examples for this, but here we go.

They come in all colours, for an impressive list go here. Also, go to any of those blogs and check their blogroll to find many more mathematics blogs. If you don’t understand what blogs are good for you might read John Baez’s article. To name a few contenders for ‘most influential mathematical blogs’: What’s new with Terence Tao, the most active single user blog I know, Timothy Gowers’s Weblog and Gil Kallai’s Combinatorics and more.

Of course, they are the ones that got me started with reading math blogs, but it’s the small blogs that got me hooked. The diversity is a challenge (I don’t understand half of what I read) but blogs form the best mathematics newspaper out there.

Polymath

At the moment the most hardcore project when it comes to online collaboration is clearly Polymath. With one paper on the arxiv, two projects finished and three projects going it is the perfect show case. Driven by the “big three” — Tao, Gowers, Kallai — one may argue that their power makes sure that it works (and is protected from theft). Polymath is an exemplary web project. It follows Jeff Jarvis’s rule and shows the synergetic behaviour of web projects — using multiple technologies at once: there’s the blog for the main discussion, but also the authors individual blogs used partly to organize. Finally there’s the wiki for fixing proper definitions and notational issues and finally they frequenly use mathoverflow to recruit new people by e.g. singling out distinct partial or dervitative questions.

But I believe it shows a glimpse of the future of mathematics. On the one hand, many problems have become too complex to be tackled by a single person or research group. On the other hand, although the techology might change considerably in the future, the idea of having researchers on all levels collaborate — with every contribution being valued — could be a prototype that values many soft skills, be it good writing, accessible presentation, social skills for bringing conversations to converge productively, taking a bird’s view of the process to assist or acquiring empirical experimentation and implementation. It is also a very flexible approach where people can help as much or as little as they find the time for while (with proper support like Gower’s current EDP posts) still being able to follow the flow and ideally being able to change their level of involvement as they please.\

That’s all for now. Let me know what I forgot.

Addenda

2010-02-15

Unicode characters

There was also a question regarding unicode characters and the like (instead of mathml). I just found this chart via mathoverflow — maybe it helps.

2010-02-17

Feeds and feed readers

Feeds in either Real simple syndication (RSS) or Atom from are worth mentioning on its own. As a tool for 1-to-infinity communication it’s an important technology for collaboration. You’ll find feeds for all kinds of newssites and blogs, but also for each section of the arxiv. To read feeds you can use lots of different programs and web based services.

Video sites

Videos of research level mathematics are pretty rare. There is the archive of the MSRI and singular popular mathematics gems like Gowers’s talk on multiplication. Also, you should check out MIT’s impressive youtube channel.

To put up a video you don’t need much these days, so it’s strange that there’s not more around — especially since (pure) mathematics seems easier to share than, say, complicated science experiments. There are too many free video sites out there. Next to the already mentioned youtube I would point out the science video site SciVee (with its strong, yet somewhat expensive premium service) and Vimeo with its focus on original content.

Reference management

Thanks to David for reminding me that I forgot one aspect of pdf management — reference management (see the list on wikipedia). Now there are many programs out there to get your citations, i.e., your BibTeX files organized. But there are also programs that connect the citations with the pdf, offer online database searches, tags, pdf annotation and social networking ideas.

A big list can (once again) be found on wikipedia. To present a few. I personally use referencer but David also mentioned Mendeley in his comment which has an impressive list of features including online access and social network aspects and I’ll probably try it out. To give credit where it is due a few of these programs name Papers as inspiration which unfortunately is Mac only. With a different flavour there are the web-only Zotero, a powerful Firefox addon, and I, Librarian, a groupware tool.