LaTeX

Unfortunately, Blogger does not directly support LaTeX, which is kinda crucial for a math blog. I thought about moving to Wordpress which says they support it, but when I tried it out, I found their "support" wasn't any better than using an external tool, which is what I'm trying out now. Here's one of my favorite equations:



That was sort of a pain, since I had to switch to HTML mode to paste in the link to codecogs, but not bad. I think with some practice I can get pretty fast at it. The editor at codecogs is pretty bare bones, but it works fine and I like that the resulting link has a hover tag giving the raw LaTex (put your mouse over the equation and you can see the code I used to generate it).

By the way, the reason I like that equation so much isn't any particular fondness for the normal distribution. I just really like the derivation. You can find it in just about any Calculus text. The switch to polar coordinates is one of those little brilliancies that makes your heart flutter (assuming you're into math; otherwise it just makes your eyes glaze over).