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MAA Becomes a MathJax Supporter

 

This article is published in the October/November issue of MAA FOCUS.

The MAA is giving the MathJax project a boost by joining its sponsorship program as a MathJax Supporter. MathJax is open-source software for displaying mathematical notation within web pages in a reliable, flexible way.

The MAA has been an early adopter of technology for communicating mathematics online, with online resources such as MathDL and Loci and with electronic editions of its books and journals. Its open-source homework system WeBWorK is used at more than 450 institutions worldwide.

“MathJax is rapidly becoming an essential resource for communicating mathematics on the web,” says MAA Director of Publications Ivars Peterson. “We are very pleased to support the development of MathJax and intend to incorporate it even more fully in our many electronic offerings.”

In the past, images were the only reliable way to present mathematics within web pages. The Mathematical Markup Language (MathML) was developed as an alternative method to build mathematics into web pages, but most major browsers don’t yet support it. MathJax fills the gap, building on techniques developed by Davide Cervone as part of his earlier jsMath package for displaying mathematics. MathJax is a joint ongoing project of the American Mathematical Society, Design Science, Inc., and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.