It took me a long time to know this. Yes, I can use $\LaTeX$ on wordpress. So I can now rant and blither using my favourite language!

I often fuss about how little was done about reading MATH on the internet. But a lot of energy was spent on various browsers to facilitate people watching videos, seeing images, reading documents, hearing sound files in different formats.

For example, the earliest browsers only read gif and tiff and maybe jpeg formats for pictures, now they accepted a lot more. Videos took a while to be incorporated. Gone are those days where one has to download the movie videos (which usually took 20 or more hours), verify that the download has no errors then find an appropriate program to watch the movie. Now browsers generally broadcast (or stream) videos from YouTube, Tudou, Metacafe, in real-time.

But Math took a long time to be readable. MathML, I think, was available as early as XML was available, but no browser wants to read MathML by default. Then professors suggest we all typeset with $\LaTeX$ and convert to PDF files or one of the acceptable graphic formats. But as you can see, that was a lot of pain for a typical mathematician or a math teacher. Or we can try the Special Symbols provided by W2C (or is it w3C now), like ½ (&frac12; ) or  ∫ (&int;) , but good luck in finding your symbol on that list!

Latex did provide mathematics to be communicated via email and on some forums (Physics forum for instance), they allow users to type in their $\LaTeX$ code and it gets processed so that reader can read your math directly.

But now, I can “talk in Math” almost directly.   And I wanna say:

$\nabla F (x_0, y_0, z_0)$ is normal to the tangent plane to the surface S given by $F(x,y,z)=0$ at the point $P(x_0, y_0, z_0)$.  And don’t talk to me about $\int_C (1+z)\, ds$ as the only line integrals I am interested in are those due to vector fields like $\int_C \bf{F}\cdot d\bf{r}$.

Phew!  I feel so much better now.