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Ask HN: What tool for live, collaborative, symbolic math?

5 pointsby BrannonKing5 months ago
I&#x27;ve been doing Zoom meetings where we use live Overleaf to talk through math equations. This is cumbersome at best. I need a tool that I can use to talk with one or two remote mathematicians while we&#x27;re visualizing and editing equations live.<p>Hand-drawing the equations, like you would do on Zoom&#x27;s whiteboard, is not great. We all have mouse &amp; keyboard interfaces, and mouse-drawn square-root symbols and subscripts leave a lot to be desired. Also, we copy and paste equations and modify them. The whiteboard interface has a struggle with this as well. The mouse-drawn stuff tends to be too large; we can&#x27;t fit enough on screen.<p>What tool would you recommend for this scenario? A bonus would be to have something like a mini Desmos calculator on the side, where I can drop (in)equations and get them rendered.

2 comments

ThrowawayR25 months ago
Perhaps try purchasing a digitizer tablet with a stylus (e.g. Wacom&#x27;s Intuos series) which will allow you to write your equations as you would with an ordinary writing instrument?
idanp5 months ago
lyx [1] is great for live editing of latex . Set the instant preview Tools&gt;Preferences&gt;Display&gt;Instant Preview if you want automatic latex rendering, although the editor rendering is nice as it is.<p>For something that is more of a calculator, SymPy [2] with sympy.init_printing() would be rendering latex automatically in any Jupyter notebook.<p>Specific tools I created for my own use for leveraging the above is pypad [3] together with calcpy [4] (%load_ext calcpy)<p>[1] LyX <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lyx.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lyx.org</a><p>[2] SymPy <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sympy.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sympy.org</a><p>[3] pypad <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;idanpa&#x2F;pypad">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;idanpa&#x2F;pypad</a><p>[4] calcpy <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;idanpa&#x2F;calcpy">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;idanpa&#x2F;calcpy</a>