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by Darkstryder 2157 days ago
Steal this idea: a Shazam of mathematical notation. In an app you would draw (or take a picture) of a mathematical symbol you don’t recognize and get a link to the appropriate Wikipedia page.

My biggest pet peeve with mathematical symbols is the difficulty of looking them up when you don’t know them already. If I’m reading a text on a topic I'm unfamiliar with, I can at least google the keywords I don't know. This is difficult with symbols.

3 comments

Great idea. I'm a fan of this app/site for finding the Latex command for a particular symbol:

https://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html.

Then just need to look up the Latex on Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mathematical_symbols

you could try something like https://mathpix.com/ and then look up what the LaTeX symbol is.
Shapecatcher is a free webapp that allows you to draw any Unicode symbol:

https://shapecatcher.com/