When I write, I use mathematical notation all the time. This need has
been a source of continual frustration my entire life. In the 1980's,
I chose Macintoshes whilst all about me were choosing PCs, because
with Macs I could print math. But that choice isolated me,
computer-wise, from my colleagues. In recent years, I've written some
papers using Mathematica (http://www.wolfram.com) and MathType
(http://www.mathtype.com). These tools permit me to write magnificent
paper documents, but sharing the documents electronically has been all
but impossible. The mathematical fonts tend to be copyrighted, so
software will not copy them. Asking my readers to find, buy, and
install copyrighted fonts manually is just too much. While some people
smarter than I, like Peter Ogden, have managed to convert and post
some of my papers (http://phors.locost7.info), I've spent more time
fiddlie-futzing with fonts and markup than I have spent actually
writing those papers, only to meet with failure and frustration. The
best I could do, in the end, was scan the printed form into
bitmaps. Maybe someday I'll post them in that form.
The state of mathematical presentation today is so poor that it kept
me away from blogging these last five months. It's frustrating,
tiring, distracting, and terribly annoying.
I'm not the only one, by the way. One of the finest minds of our time,
no less than Donald E. Knuth, spent about 10 of his prime research
years working on nothing BUT mathematical typesetting. His frustration
with mathematical presentation while creating the Art of Computer
Programming books was so profound that he decided to apply that
selfsame art to slay the dragon forevermore. The result was TeX
(http://www.tug.org) and history.
But, today, I'm going to give it another go. I installed the free
MathPlayer download (http://www.mathtype.com/en/products/mathplayer/)
into my browser, Internet Explorer 6. This lets me look at Web pages
created with various tools supporting the MathML standard. This is a
step forward. It's not integrated with ASP .NET blogging, yet, so I
don't think I can use it to put math in my blog, yet. The reason is
that I can't access the HTML header of the blog to insert the MathML
namespace reference (FRUSTRATION)!
But I'll be working on getting math in here. There has to be a way.
Maybe I have enough energy for just one more push on this problem.
I'd really just rather work on the math, but what's the point if I
can't share it?
If you've got MathPlayer installed, you MIGHT be able to see the
following rendered: