OK, at the risk of causing anyone following me to unsubscribe immediately... My thing for today was finding a way to produce mathematical equations in a document. I actually started last night but it has taken some time to find the tools, get them installed, and learn how to create some very crude examples.

I've been attending a scientific programming study group on Wednesday nights. The discussion tonight centered around several calculus topics. When I took calculus years ago all my notes were scribbled on pieces of paper and most are long gone now. Today I'm accustomed to writing directly into documents on the computer. The language of mathematics is not represented well when using a standard text editor or word processing program.

Equations and mathematical symbols are assembled using a typesetting method, most often the LaTeX formatting method is used. I installed two programs in my OpenOffice word processing program, OOoLatex and CompPad. The image is some scribbling I did trying to see if they work.