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I asked Stephen Wolfram about this and he explained that it was because sometimes the answers contain complex mathematical formulae that are difficult to render

by aaronsw 17y ago

I asked Stephen Wolfram about this and he explained that it was because sometimes the answers contain complex mathematical formulae that are difficult to render in HTML and that since he wanted a consistent display, his preferred solution was to just use images all the time.

vamsee 17y ago
Any idea if they use TeX or MathML for this?
- tlrobinson 17y ago
  Wolfram|Alpha is written in Mathematica (several million lines of it!), so I presume they're just using Mathematica to render everything. You can actually download a Mathematica worksheet for any query response and open it up in Mathematica. Pretty neat.
Herring 17y ago
Wikipedia occasionally has complex mathematical formulae & it seems to be working fine. This isn't a hard problem.
- andylei 17y ago
  those formulae are rendered as images
  - behe 17y ago
    There's an option to render it all in MathML if you're logged in.
  - wlievens 17y ago
    ... whereas text is rendered as text, is his point. But I understand the original explanation. It's all Mathematica, so it makes sense to let Mathematica format it and then spit it out as images.