Math Magic

MathLex lets you easily transform handwritten math formulas to digital format and use them on the web.

- Marco Fioretti

Math helps us to make sense of the world and make it a better place. The language of math (formulas and equations) is universal, but it is also universally difficult to render handwritten formulas into digital form for the computer.

Thirty years ago, math graduate students would pay programmers to render their beautifully drawn mathematical formulas for the computer because the process took twice as long as the original drawing, regardless of the available software. Even today, entering a complex mathematical formula can be much slower than writing the same formula by hand. MathLex [1], a little-known JavaScript utility, helps solve this problem. It parses math input notation into a syntax tree and then renders the notation as several target outputs, which you can then use on your web pages (Figure 1).

MathLex was developed by Matthew J. Barry along with Philip B. Yasskin and others as part of Barry's undergraduate thesis about 10 years ago. While the project basically stalled after initial development, you can still find it (along with a demo) on GitHub [1] (Figure 2).

Barry developed MathLex because he found math entry systems like MathML and even LaTeX too slow to use, too complex, and sometimes not very good at preserving semantics (the actual meaning of each element of a formula). He designed MathLex to let users enter complex formulas using a syntax as close as possible to handwritten math, but unambiguous in its mathematical meaning, without giving up compatibility with popular standards like MathML or MathJax (Figure 3). In addition, Barry made MathLex compatible with any browser or operating system, without the portability issues of technologies like Flash.

In this article, I will show you how to install MathLex on Linux, how to use it to write formulas, and also how to embed it into any web page.

Installing MathLex