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The Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences has a lot of technical math writing that uses nothing but ascii. The fact that they have not adopted mathjax is sor

The Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences has a lot of technical math writing that uses nothing but ascii. The fact that they have not adopted mathjax is sort of the mathematics equivalent of refusing to use JQuery or insisting on writing your own game engine. But I guess that is just not the culture.

yesenadam 6y ago
It is unfortunate, makes it hard to read.[0] Although there's something to be said for a format like that shuts no-one out. Also, the OEIS has been around in different forms since the 1960s - "The database was at first stored on punched cards" – and it would be a huge effort to convert to LaTeX. "As of November 2020, it contains 338,526 sequences." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On-Line_Encyclopedia_of_Integer_Sequences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On-Line_Encyclopedia_of_Intege... [0] Say what you will about LaTeX, it's amazing when you come across a mathematics paper from the pre-LaTeX era presenting complicated mathematical typsetting done...with a typewriter! - it's so very hard to understand and so unpleasant to read in comparison, that usually I don't bother. TeX + LaTeX was such a huge teknulogical advance.
abhinav22 6y ago
I find mathematical content to behind the curve when it comes to digitization. The issue I guess is that math is much more expressive than text, and everybody has a different style. There is no consensus offline on how to write math (for example I would recommend all variables in proofs to be English letters and not Greek letters - why add additional complexity in terms of digital input by using Greek letters, unless for specific needs, like the constant pi or capital Sigma). Smaller examples would be somebody may write a + b = 3 while somebody else will write x + y = 3 (should there be consistency? I personally don’t think so, but just flagging out that this is a variation too).
- Koshkin 6y ago
  > English letters Did you mean to say German letters?
- the_svd_doctor 6y ago
  Well the problem is that it’s easy to run out of letters with only the latin alphabet. Also some fields do have conventions. For instance in numerical linear algebra, many papers us the rules of (1) matrix in roman capital letters (2) vectors in roman normal-size letters (3) scalars in greek normal-size letters.
  - abhinav22 6y ago
    Agree 100% It’s not an easy problem to solve, otherwise it would be done already

yesenadam 6y ago

It is unfortunate, makes it hard to read.[0] Although there's something to be said for a format like that shuts no-one out. Also, the OEIS has been around in different forms since the 1960s - "The database was at first stored on punched cards" – and it would be a huge effort to convert to LaTeX. "As of November 2020, it contains 338,526 sequences." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On-Line_Encyclopedia_of_Integer_Sequences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On-Line_Encyclopedia_of_Intege... [0] Say what you will about LaTeX, it's amazing when you come across a mathematics paper from the pre-LaTeX era presenting complicated mathematical typsetting done...with a typewriter! - it's so very hard to understand and so unpleasant to read in comparison, that usually I don't bother. TeX + LaTeX was such a huge teknulogical advance.

abhinav22 6y ago

I find mathematical content to behind the curve when it comes to digitization. The issue I guess is that math is much more expressive than text, and everybody has a different style. There is no consensus offline on how to write math (for example I would recommend all variables in proofs to be English letters and not Greek letters - why add additional complexity in terms of digital input by using Greek letters, unless for specific needs, like the constant pi or capital Sigma). Smaller examples would be somebody may write a + b = 3 while somebody else will write x + y = 3 (should there be consistency? I personally don’t think so, but just flagging out that this is a variation too).

Koshkin 6y ago
> English letters Did you mean to say German letters?
the_svd_doctor 6y ago
Well the problem is that it’s easy to run out of letters with only the latin alphabet. Also some fields do have conventions. For instance in numerical linear algebra, many papers us the rules of (1) matrix in roman capital letters (2) vectors in roman normal-size letters (3) scalars in greek normal-size letters.
- abhinav22 6y ago
  Agree 100% It’s not an easy problem to solve, otherwise it would be done already