# LaTeX or MathML on the web via MathJax

I recently discovered GmailTeX, a plugin (implemented via javascript) that displays LaTeX markup in my emails viewed through my web-based gmail account. SIDE NOTE: I implement it conkeror by creating a webjump for the bookmarklet code.

GmailTeX renders the LaTeX markup via MathJax, “an open source JavaScript display engine for mathematics that works in all moder browsers.” What I like about MathJax is that it displays the math symbols as actual characters as opposed to generating an image with all the math symbols (as implemented in, e.g, wp-latex). The display is really nice. What I REALLY like about it is that you can right-click on the math and export the raw code in LaTeX or MathML; the right-click even works in conkeror. That way, the reader can easily adapt your code without having to re-write them should it become necessary.

For WordPress, the mathjax-latex implements it finely; the syntax is also described here. To illustrate its power, let me state one version of the most important theorem in all of statistics, the Central Limit Theorem:

Suppose $$X_1, \ldots, X_n$$ is a sequence of independent and identically random variables with $$E(X_i) = \mu$$ and $$\text{var}(X_i) = \sigma\^2$$. Then

$$\sqrt{n} \left( \frac{1}{n} \sum_{i=1}\^{n} X_i – \mu \right) \stackrel{\scriptscriptstyle d}{\longrightarrow} \mathcal{N}(0, \sigma\^2).$$