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Using MathJax in Tumblr

Did you know you can use MathJax to typeset math in Tumblr? Here is an example: 

$$\cos x = \sum_{n = 0}^\infty \frac{(-1)^n}{(2n+1)!} x^{2n+1}$$

Inline formlas too, such as \(f: GL(2, \mathbb{R}) \rightarrow \mathbb{C}^*\). 

This is apparently not without bugs. For example, matrices don’t seem to render properly on Tumblr because when you use the double-backslash symbol used in \(\LaTeX\) to signal the end of a row, one of those backslashes gets interpreted as a line break. For example, the \(4 \times 4\) matrix at this post (on a non-Tumblr blog) ends up looking like this: 

$$\left( \begin{array}{cccc} 2&3&4&5 \ 0&-1&2&1 \ 0&0&2&4 \ 0&3&-6&0 \end{array} \right) $$

If you right click and view the source, you can see the double-backslashes have been redacted to single backslashes. Maybe I’m not doing it right, but I’ll look into it. 

Still, this is pretty cool, and you can learn how to do this yourself at this three-minute video

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If you start a lesson off by telling the students “This is going to be easy”, you are simultaneously telling them “We had to make this easy because we don’t think you’re capable of doing anything hard”. And when the lesson is over, the only sense of accomplishment they can feel is that they did something easy. So what?

Learning is hard work. If you are not working hard, you are not learning. Period. Kids love hard work, as long as they see where it’s going and why. Instead of killing that energy by giving them something easy, we should foster it by giving them something really hard. We should tell them it’s hard. We should give them the chance to do something meaningful.

- Theodore Gray, from The Beginner’s Guide to Mathematica, v. 4

Calculus is the mathematical study of change. Its essence is best captured by its original name, “fluxions,” coined by its inventor, Isaac Newton. The name calls to mind systems that are ever in motion, always unfolding.

Calculus thrives on continuity. At its core is the assumption that things change smoothly, that everything is only infinitesimally different from what it was a moment before. Like a movie, calculus reimagines reality as a series of snapshots, and then recombines them, instant by instant, frame by frame, the succession of imperceptible changes creating an illusion of seamless flow.

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Steven Strogatz, The Calculus of Friendship-p. xii, 1

Found at http://matlabician.wordpress.com/quotations/