I did a Google+ Hangout on Air Q&A session with MathJax’s Peter Krautzberger and cnx.org’s Phil Schatz last Friday. We spent about an hour and a half answering questions and talking about the way we use MathJax.

It was a bit awkward, since I couldn’t see who was watching, and it wasn’t very clear how to interact with the audience apart from them submitting questions, but some people seem to have found it worthwhile.

For your entertainment, here’s the recording:

Peter wants to run more of these Q&As in the future. I’ll make sure to attend!

I finally got fed up enough with WordPress.com’s blurry image-based maths rendering to write a bookmarklet which goes through the page replacing them with the equivalent MathJax code. I’ve added it to my MathJax bookmarklet installation page. Drag the “image replacement bookmarklet” to your bookmarks bar, go to a WordPress.com blog (I recommend Gowers’s Weblog), then click the “Replace image maths with MathJax” bookmarklet.

Update 19/09/2013: Following a suggestion by Peter Krautzberger, I’ve updated the bookmarklet to do the image replacement differently, so the images don’t disappear while MathJax is working. I’ve also made it work on Wikipedia.

I’ve just given a talk at Newcastle’s maths & stats Postgraduate Forum about zero-knowledge protocols. I don’t know very much about them but it’s an interesting topic and something fairly accessible to an audience of non-pure mathematicians.

Click here to see the slides.

I used deck.js, along with the Computer Modern web fonts and MathJax, to make the slides. I think it looks pretty nice! I’ve also uploaded my template deck, in case you want to build on it for your own presentations. It’s a bit big because it contains all the files needed to display the Computer Modern fonts on any browser.

Computer Modern is the family of typefaces developed by Donald Knuth for TeX. It’s so good-looking that some scientists do research just so they can write it up in Computer Modern.

The cm-unicode project compiles versions of the Computer Modern fonts in a few formats, including TTF. I’ve run them through codeandmore’s @font-face kit generator to get all the weird formats that the various browsers insist on.

I’ve put up a page containing examples of each face in use and links to packages containing everything you need to use them.

I’ve completely rewritten my write maths, see maths library to be a little jQuery plugin that attaches itself to editable areas on pages, like contenteditable elements, textareas, and input boxes. When your cursor is inside some LaTeX, a little preview box appears just above it with the LaTeX rendered through MathJax. I’ve made a demo page on GitHub, and the code itself is available there too. It also works in TinyMCE, if you’re into that sort of thing.

The first I thing I did with it was to write a WordPress plugin which applies the plugin to the comment boxes underneath posts (source code). I’ve installed it on this site and The Aperiodical, so you can use LaTeX with confidence, knowing that it’ll appear how you want on the page. Please try it in the comments box below!

On Monday I gave a talk at Birmingham at a workshop titled, Using social media to engage students in mathematical sciences. I have no experience of doing that, but I was invited to talk a bit about putting maths notation online. It’s basically just a collection of links to the posts I’ve written on the subject previously, but maybe big text in small slides will be more accessible.

Paul Taylor wanted an easy way to write some maths he could take a screengrab of, for use as an icon. Before I intervened he was doing something unnatural with wikipedia, so I wrote a little applet using MathJax: “make big maths“.

Quite a few tools like this exist, using mimetex or some other CGI tool to run LaTeX on a server and produce an image file. That’s far too slow and rubbish-looking for my liking, so I made my own with MathJax.

I’ve started a new tumblog as a collection of maths-art intersections I find on the web. It’s at artymaths.tumblr.com.