Math Authoring Gap and MathUI

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

In a previous post Greg Wilson wrote about the writing gap

between people who value the "I can see what I'm doing" of Microsoft Word and those who care more about the "I can tell what I did" of version control.

For STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) folks there is also the gap related to math expressions (you can use LaTeX to deal with math expressions but for beginners who spent around 20 years using Microsoft Word moving to LaTeX can be challenging).

Do you know that some people are working to solve the gap with math expressions?

Some of this people will be at an international workshop about mathematical user interfaces (submission to works are still open) in July to discuss how users interact with mathematics represented on a computer and related topics.

Folks from Mozilla MathML Project have also worked to solve this gap (like enabling real time preview of LaTeX equations in web browsers) and invite you to take a look at the work they will submit soon which covers nice examples of the new web technologies that can be used to share knowledge.