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

5 pointsBrannonKing1y ago2 comments

I'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're visualizing and editing equations live.

Hand-drawing the equations, like you would do on Zoom's whiteboard, is not great. We all have mouse & 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't fit enough on screen.

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

ThrowawayR21y ago

Perhaps try purchasing a digitizer tablet with a stylus (e.g. Wacom's Intuos series) which will allow you to write your equations as you would with an ordinary writing instrument?

idanp1y ago

lyx [1] is great for live editing of latex . Set the instant preview Tools>Preferences>Display>Instant Preview if you want automatic latex rendering, although the editor rendering is nice as it is.

For something that is more of a calculator, SymPy [2] with sympy.init_printing() would be rendering latex automatically in any Jupyter notebook.

Specific tools I created for my own use for leveraging the above is pypad [3] together with calcpy [4] (%load_ext calcpy)

[1] LyX https://www.lyx.org

[2] SymPy https://www.sympy.org

[3] pypad https://github.com/idanpa/pypad

[4] calcpy https://github.com/idanpa/calcpy

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse