Practice Kanji Writing on Mac's Trackpad

Interesting enough, you can use the trackpad on a mac to practice writing Chinese or simplified Chinese characters. (support.apple.com/kb/HT4288) This can also be used to practice writing Japanese kanji. It is worth noting that it can not be used to write all Japanese characters because some kanji have been changed from their Chinese or simplified counter parts. I do not know enough to give any specific examples, but it is well documented in my learning Japanese books to know that this is the case.

If you want to give it a try, use the Apple support page to read how to enable the feature.

Latex Under and over braces example

I found this example for over and under brakets useful and thought I should keep it just in case I wanted to use it later.
\[
\overbrace{\rho \Big(
\underbrace{\frac{\partial \mathbf{v}}{\partial t}}_{
\begin{smallmatrix}
\text{Unsteady}\\
\text{acceleration}
\end{smallmatrix}} +
\underbrace{\mathbf{v} \cdot \nabla \mathbf{v}}_{
\begin{smallmatrix}
\text{Convective} \\
\text{acceleration}
\end{smallmatrix}}\Big)}^{\text{Inertia}} =
\underbrace{-\nabla p}_{
\begin{smallmatrix}
\text{Pressure} \\
\text{gradient}
\end{smallmatrix}} +
\underbrace{\mu \nabla^2 \mathbf{v}}_{\text{Viscosity}} +
\underbrace{\mathbf{f}}_{
\begin{smallmatrix}
\text{Other} \\
\text{forces}
\end{smallmatrix}}
\]

The example is from: http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=264861

More information about how to do this type of writing is at:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Advanced_Mathematics

Note:
underbrace and overbrace can also be underbracket and overbracket. See that wiki page above if you want more information of how this works.

Free Math Texts

While viewing a number of blogs over the past week, I came across one in particular I thought was interesting: mathandmultimedia.com/ . It is related to mathematics and multimedia. I found the mathematics resources to be particularly interesting is the free resources page:
mathandmultimedia.com/all-for-free/
This page has textbooks and competition questions from a variety of sources. If you have any desire to learn more math (which I think everyone should) you should check out the site.

I feel that some of the explanations on the site are a bit too simplistic and miss points that should not be skipped. But, as long as people are learning, I don't think it is that big of a deal.


Update: I have have been thinking about my previous comment and it seems I was misguided. The content of the site matches what the goal of the site is. It would not make sense to make the explanations more complicated than they need to be for no reason.

LaTex with Gmail?

I was wondering for while, what if I could send latex to other in Gmail and have it be readable?

Other than the fact that I am a scientist and would actually think about doing it, it has a host of problems such as having everyone having it installed to make it look right to everyone. But, one could always use it themselves to make sure the code they are sending and receiving is what they think it is. That is always an issue since LaTex  can sometimes get confusing when writing equations.

The link to check out: (it is called GmailTex)

http://alexeev.org/gmailtex.html

Using MathJax with blogger

I work with Latex a lot with my job and I have not written anything about it here on my blog since it was difficult to get equations written. Recently though, I found MathJax on the web. But, they do not have any instructions for blogger that I could find.

The first website I could find that had some sort of instructions was:
http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/13865/how-to-use-latex-on-blogspot

This is not optimal since it says to put the code in by editing the template, and that means you would need to keep modifying the template every time you wanted to change the look of the blog. Instead I added the scrip as a gadget on the side of the page with the title MathJax. It does not display anything; it just loads the script to display equations.

I then added a custom scrip to not use $ or $$ as delimiters and to only use \(  \) and \[  \]

If you have java script enabled these equations should show up as math

Inline:

\( x < x^2 \) if \(x>1\)

Centered:
\[ f(x) \]

You can make this work by adding the following text as a gadget as well:

<script src="http://cdn.mathjax.org/mathjax/latest/MathJax.js" type="text/javascript">
MathJax.Hub.Config({
 extensions: ["tex2jax.js","TeX/AMSmath.js","TeX/AMSsymbols.js"],
 jax: ["input/TeX", "output/HTML-CSS"],
 tex2jax: {
     inlineMath: [ ['\\(','\\)'] ],
     displayMath: [ ["\\[","\\]"] ],
     processEscapes: true
 },
 "HTML-CSS": { availableFonts: ["TeX"] }
});
</script>

You can then turn it off by adding the tags: (how I wrote the code above)

<div class="tex2jax_ignore">
</div>