Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by jampekka 544 days ago
> Yet one thing that these minimalistic text-based interfaces are terrible for is rendering mathematical notation.

You can notate mathematics using text. In fact the mathematic notation rendered to vector graphics/bitmaps is typically rendered from such text-based notation.

Mathematics is increasingly done using text-based notation (e.g. Lean, Mathematica, SymPy), which I actually prefer because it's typically unambiguous unlike the traditional notation with wildly varying conventions and a lot left implicit or even ill-defined.

3 comments

Oh, SymPy looks great!
It is, at least for basic stuff. The biggest problem is that one forgets to solve stuff by hand after getting used to SymPy doing it automatically.

Sometimes SymPy fails at problems that Mathematica can solve though. And Mathematica is expensive pain.

I mean as a mathematical notation, not as a solver.
> mathematic notation rendered to vector graphics/bitmaps are typically rendered from such text-based notation

What everyone was impatiently waiting for: LaTeX microblogging !

But seriously, a specialized Bluesky client could easily do that for scientific communities - no need to reinvent the whole stack.

One complaint is LaTeX isn't semantic, but visual markup.
Of course. But good luck trying to render LaTeX in a text terminal.