How many of you have ever looked at a Math test and wondered, “how did they type this up with all of the funky symbols and stuff. This must have taken hours to make!” Well, maybe only I do. But, I found out how they do do those Math tests, and it’s called TeX.
TeX is a basically a simple little markup-type language that allows you to do really powerful typesetting easily. It involves typing in some code, then using a utility to turn that code into a PDF, DVI, or PostScript file. The TeX code, also known as LaTeX code, is actually quite simple. Let’s take a look at an some examples.
To create a really simple article that has a title, an author, and a date, here is all the code that is necessary:
\documentclass[11pt]{article}
\begin{document}
\title{My Article}
\author{Kevin Cathey}
\date{Today}
\maketitle
\end{document}
However, we may want to have more control on our document, like adding margins, so we need to tell TeX that we want more control. We do this by bringing in more commands into the language that TeX has. These extensions are called packages. Anyone can write a package, and TeX has quite a rich environment of them. So to do page margins or other geometric functions, we are going to bring in the package called geometry:
\usepackage[left=0.75in,top=0.75in,right=0.75in,nohead,nofoot]{geometry}
But let’s get to the good stuff. You can do quite a variety of cool mathematical and scientific things in TeX with only one command.
Symbols:
Inserting those crazy symbols is easy with TeX, just write out the name of the symbol and put a “\” before it. The following code will print out quite a different taste of symbols:
We can do all kinds of symbols, like: $\delta, \varepsilon, \Sigma, \gamma, \Gamma, \rho_0, \mu^x$.
With this code, you should notice a few things. First of all, symbols appear between two “$”. This is TeX’s way of saying, “this is an equation”, and then it formats it with the italics and everything, for free! Also, notice that uppercase symbols start with an uppercase letter for the name, and lowercase symbols have lowercase first letters. And finally, if you put an underscore “_” after a symbol, it makes the next character subscript, and if you use a carrot “^”, it makes it superscript. It’s that easy.
Mathematical expressions:
You can also do all kinds of really nifty mathematic expressions like fractions, integrals, etc. For example, let’s say I want to take the integral of some fraction with powers and subscripts and greek letters. I would never be able to do that easily in a word processor, but TeX makes it easy:
$\displaystyle\frac{1}{4\pi}\oint_\Sigma\frac{1}{r}\frac{\partial U}{\partial n} (\frac{\delta_{\kappa^i}}{\varepsilon}) ds$
How about trying to do Schrodinger’s equation in a word processor? Forget it! It TeX, no problem:
- \frac{{\hbar ^2 }}{{2m}}\frac{{\partial ^2 \psi (x,t)}}{{\partial x^2 }} + U(x)\psi (x,t) = i\hbar \frac{{\partial \psi (x,t)}}{{\partial t}}
Conclusion:
I’m just touching the tip of the iceberg here. Basically, TeX acts as a great tool for generating any documents that are going to need advanced typesetting for mathematics or science. If you are a student typing up their homework, or a teacher generating a math test, this technology is a great option. TeX has a great community that has put out modules to do almost anything. To make things easy for me when I write TeX, I use a program on the Mac called TeXShop. I recommend downloading it and at least playing with it. I think you will find it quite fun to play with. For someone who doesn’t like math, it makes it just slightly more enjoyable.
Additional resources:
Mathematical typesetting in TeX.
EquationSheet: pretty much any equation you can think of in TeX code.
Mathematical symbol reference.
