Equations in LaTeX
Arbitrarily complicated equations can be inserted into both posts and comments here at Cosmic Variance, by using the LaTeX typesetting system. (Our original introduction of LaTeX was announced here, but some details have changed.)
LaTeX is a system for interpreting certain control commands as symbols that would appear in mathematical expressions; \alpha stands for the Greek letter α, and so forth. To get the blog to interpret your commands as LaTeX, just begin with “$latex” and end with a single “$“.
For example,
$latex \int d^4x \sqrt{-g} R $
becomes
(Interestingly, due to a quirk of the blog theme it doesn’t seem possible to get in-line equations in the body of a post, but in comments there is no problem.)
There are a million online tutorials; try this list of commands to get you started. Use comments to this post to try it out. (Sadly, no preview, so be careful, and that post will remain open for playing around.)
