Edited by Richard Walker, Saturday 31 January 2026 at 23:33
... are getting on well, I really like being able to use professional quality mathematical notation. So far I've only mastered simple algebra and not attempted anything fancy. Here are some examples.
The cube root did throw a bit of a curveball. To get a cube root (or fourth root etc.) you have to use a square root and say it is a a 'cube square' root, like this
Notice I had to use an image because in this editor as soon as you save any LaTeX code gets rendered as mathematical notation and I want to show what the code itself looks like.
The logic is quite straightforward once you get the hang of it. A backslash is like a kind of escape character that takes us into the LaTeX editor and the open bracket ( says we want inline mode.
Then we have another backslash, which signals a command will follow, and the command in this case is sqrt.
Next there is a modifier (if that's what it's called) in square brackets [3], so now we've said its to be a cube root, and then an argument {2} in curly braces, saying what to want it to be the cube root of.
Finally we have to jump back into the normal editor, and we do that with a last backslash and a closing round bracket.
When you enter all this it looks like the image displayed earlier but then when you click the 'Save changes' button and what you have written is posted it comes out like this.
All this is not too hard with a little practice and there are plenty of places you can look up the commands you want. The main difficulty I've found is that with so many brackets it's easy to miss one. Then when you save the changes you get a reasonably helpful error message but then you have to go back and edit the post.
LaTeX and I ...
... are getting on well, I really like being able to use professional quality mathematical notation. So far I've only mastered simple algebra and not attempted anything fancy. Here are some examples.
The cube root did throw a bit of a curveball. To get a cube root (or fourth root etc.) you have to use a square root and say it is a a 'cube square' root, like this
Notice I had to use an image because in this editor as soon as you save any LaTeX code gets rendered as mathematical notation and I want to show what the code itself looks like.
The logic is quite straightforward once you get the hang of it. A backslash is like a kind of escape character that takes us into the LaTeX editor and the open bracket ( says we want inline mode.
Then we have another backslash, which signals a command will follow, and the command in this case is sqrt.
Next there is a modifier (if that's what it's called) in square brackets [3], so now we've said its to be a cube root, and then an argument {2} in curly braces, saying what to want it to be the cube root of.
Finally we have to jump back into the normal editor, and we do that with a last backslash and a closing round bracket.
When you enter all this it looks like the image displayed earlier but then when you click the 'Save changes' button and what you have written is posted it comes out like this.
All this is not too hard with a little practice and there are plenty of places you can look up the commands you want. The main difficulty I've found is that with so many brackets it's easy to miss one. Then when you save the changes you get a reasonably helpful error message but then you have to go back and edit the post.