Due Sunday, September 6, 11:59pm
What is $\LaTeX$?
Throughout the semester, you’ll be asked to submit complete written solutions in your own posts on the OpenLab. One way to do this is to upload a photo of work you wrote on paper and upload it as a picture to include in your post. You could also just type the work directly into your post. The regular keyboard can do a lot, but it won’t look that great and you’ll be missing useful math characters like $\int$ and $\frac{d}{dx}$.
Instead, you can use the most commonly used math typesetting language, called $\LaTeX$ (pronounced LAY-teck) right in your OpenLab posts. $\LaTeX$ is a software system/markup language for typesetting math. It’s used widely to prepare research papers, technical reports, and other documents requiring mathematical symbols. A lot of you are planning on going into technical fields, and might find getting to know how to typeset math in $\LaTeX$ to be useful. It takes a while to learn, but it’s waaaaaay better than Microsoft Word’s equation editor!
Our OpenLab page has a $\latex$ plugin installed, so that’s why I can type beautiful things that look like this:
\begin{align}
u=& \int \frac{3-6t}{e^{-t}}dt \\
=& \int \left(3e^t – 6te^t\right) dt \\
=& 3e^t – 6(te^t-e^t)+C\\
=&9e^t -6te^t+C.
\end{align}
Instructions
For this assignment all you’re going to do is practice typing some $\LaTeX$ code in the comments on this post. What you type doesn’t have to make any mathematical sense, just try to get it to compile some math symbols. Go ahead and play around and make a giant mess in these comments. If something doesn’t work at first, don’t worry just try again.Â
Instructions for typing in $\LaTeX$ on the OpenLab can be found here.
Two things to remember:
- Type ! at the top of your post/comment.
- Enclose your mathematical expression in dollar signs. (The instructions linked above use !\begin{math} and \end{math} instead of dollar signs, but you can use either to enclose your expression.)
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