Pandoc includes math support out of the box. R Markdown is actually built on top of Pandoc. I know many academics that write their papers in (Pandoc) markdown a

Pandoc includes math support out of the box. R Markdown is actually built on top of Pandoc. I know many academics that write their papers in (Pandoc) markdown and then convert to PDF. It creates an intermediate .tex file that is then converted to PDF.