Terence Tao's Software Listings

Having just now stumbled upon Terence Tao's WordPress blog, aptly named https://terrytao.wordpress.com/, I noticed that he has a panel titled software in which he lists the following:

• Detexify
• GmailTeX
• Inverse Symbolic Calculator
• jfig
• LaTeX to Wordpress
• Online LaTeX Equation Editor
• Sage: Open Source Mathematical Software
• Subverting the system

I thought it might be a good idea to check out some of these links. I'm already familiar with the Online LaTeX Equation Editor and Sage but the latter links to William Stein's Blogger blog site. Stein is the guy who started Sage in the first place. He only made one entry in 2019, on May 1st. It's a rather long post so I'll just quote the first and last paragraphs. 

Nearly 3 years ago, I gave a talk at a Harvard mathematics conference announcing that “I am leaving academia to build a company”. What I really did is go on unpaid leave for three years from my tenured Full Professor position. No further extensions of that leave is possible, so I finally have to decide whether or not to go back to academia or resign ...

I have decided to resign. I’m worried about issues of intellectual property; it would be extremely unfair to my employees, investors and customers if I took a 50% UW position, and then later got sued by UW as a result. Having a 50% paid appointment at UW subjects one to a lot of legal jeopardy, which is precisely why I have been on 100% unpaid leave for the last three years. But more importantly, I feel very good about continuing to focus 100% on the development of CoCalc, which is going to have an incredible year going forward. I genuinely love building this (non-VC funded) company, and feel very good about it.

I'd actually read this earlier in the year and I was saddened once again to read of his struggles. Why can't philanthropists give a million dollars to a guy like this rather than to useless NGOs as they are wont to do?

I've used the Online LaTeX Equation Editor before and it does a good job for one line expressions. Figure 1 shows a screenshot. The site also generates the HTML code that can then be inserted into a web page.

Figure 1

I used Detexify the day before I wrote this after following a link I saw somewhere. It's better suited to devices that support touch input or, better still, a digital pen. It will show you the command (let's say for the integral symbol) and what package to download. An example is shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2

The LaTeX to Wordpress link leads to a blog post with a link to another post that contains a link for downloading this free software. As the author writes:

LaTeX2WP is written in Python, so you’ll need a Python interpreter. 

If you are using Linux/Unix or OS X, then you already have it. If you are running Windows, go here and get the Windows installer for 2.6.1.

Uncompress the files of the LaTeX2WP distribution in the directory in which you are going to write your posts in LaTeX. 

On OS X, double click on the file latex2wp.0.6.2.zip after saving it; on Linux unzip latex2wp.0.6.2.zip. If your Windows machine says it doesn’t know what to do with a .zip file, get 7zip. 

Write your LaTeX post, say you call it spam.tex. When you are done writing your post, type from the command line: python latex2wp.py spam.tex 

This will produce a file spam.html. Open it with a text editor, copy and paste it into the WordPress editor, and here is your post. 

This is simple enough and something that I might test out in the future. I've gotten used to using Blogger for my mathematical posts but I much prefer the look and feel of WordPress as opposed to Blogger, so I may be tempted.

GmailTeX is a Chrome Extension that enables the creation and sending of emails containing mathematical notation created using LaTeX. The creator says that "the other person does not have to have TeX for Gmail installed or to use Gmail. Math is viewable in most mail readers and browsers, including mobile ones." Figure 3 shows the result when I tried it.

Figure 3

This could be quite useful, so I'm happy to have discovered it.

The Inverse Symbolic Calculator link doesn't appear to working or is loading very slowly. It's purpose is to change a floating point decimal into a symbolic expression. The jfig link is also a dead-end. It is a java applet designed to draw xfig-like figures. The site can be found but the latest Java versions seem to present problems with its implementation. The link Subverting the system describes a collaborative software for mathematicians so it's not applicable for me in my current situation.

Overall, the GMailTex chrome extension was the main takeaway from all of this. Of course, there's lots of other interesting stuff on Terence Tao's site. For example, he writes in a post on September 4th 2019:

In the fall quarter (starting Sep 27) I will be teaching a graduate course on analytic prime number theory.  This will be similar to a graduate course I taught in 2015, and in particular will reuse several of the lecture notes from that course, though it will also incorporate some new material (and omit some material covered in the previous course, to compensate).  I anticipate covering the following topics:

• Elementary multiplicative number theory

• Complex-analytic multiplicative number theory

• The entropy decrement argument

• Bounds for exponential sums

• Zero density theorems

• Halasz’s theorem and the Matomaki-Radziwill theorem

• The circle method

• (If time permits) Chowla’s conjecture and the Erdos discrepancy problem

• Lecture notes for topics 3, 6, and 8 will be forthcoming.

The notes he has provided so far for the course are quite comprehensive. He has links to lots of other interesting stuff so it's a good site to just poke in and see what you find.