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\equiv \newline
\pi r^2
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One of the things I don’t like about blogging is how long it can take to put together a blog post, even after it has been written, edited and polished. Aside from all the formatting required to make an entry look the way I want (see above), the other big time-suck has been adding mathematical statements (equations, formulas, expressions, etc.) to my blog. While I love MathType for its ease-of-use, using it has meant I’ve had to suffer through 1) writing math statements in the MathType Editor, 2) inserting them into a Pages document, 3) copying the said insertion into Preview, 4) exporting the Preview file as a PNG, 5) uploading the PNG to WordPress, and, finally, 6) inserting the PNG into the appropriate blog post. This is a lot of steps for something as short as, say, the area of circle (again, see above).
As such, I was happy when, several weeks ago, I stumbled onto MathJax, a Javascript engine which renders LaTeX “code” into professional-looking math statements. I had, for a long time, known about TeX and LaTeX as way to create math documents, but had always been satisfied with MathType to get done what I needed done. After doing a bit more investigation and discovering that WordPress already supported LaTeX, I decided to give it a shot by using a LaTeX snippet I found here and expanding it into an entry on the sum and product of quadratic roots below.
***
Given a quadratic equation in general form 
or
Let
Thus, the product of roots
equals
And the sum of roots
equals
For example,
So,
Given
Product of roots
Sum of roots
***
Given LaTeX has a bit of a learning curve, I probably didn’t finish this entry any faster with it than if I had used MathType. And I ran into some kinks (e.g. why do some numbers/variables look smaller than others despite having set everything to the same size?). Nonetheless, LaTeX was fun to learn and I hope to get better at it with practice. Another arrow in the quiver, so to speak.
