I am writing this blog using Jekyll. The Jekyll documentation notes that there is a way to make your blog render mathematics notation. In following posts, I will find this very useful, so today, I shall implement MathJax. Perhaps, in the future, I can find a way to render music nicely too?

I have decided to follow along with Gaston Sanchez’s blog post on using MathJax with Jekyll.

I did not follow all of his steps. His first step is to change the _config.yml to use markdown: redcarpet, but, he wrote this post in 2014. As of 2016, Github pages no longer supports the Ruby library redcarpet, so I left kramdown as the library for markdown.

Next, I needed to create a default post layout, so I added this to _config.yml. Then, I created a _layouts directory, and included all of the basic minima *.html files.

Next, I combined advice from the MathJax site, Gaston Sanchez’s blog post, and mmistake’s advice, and added the following into post.html, above </article>.

{% if page.mathjax  %}
<script type="text/javascript" async src='https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/mathjax/2.7.2/MathJax.js?config=TeX-MML-AM_CHTML'></script>
{% endif %}

(If you want to learn how I highlighted the liquid templating language above, see this post or the markdown file for this page. Lots of brackets and strangely placed quotation marks come into play.)

Lastly, I added mathjax: true to the YAML of this post’s markdown file, so that I can render mathematics for this article.

After doing this, I can include mathematics and formulas, similarly to in tech! For instance, check this out. \\( 2 + 4 \\) yield an inline \( 2 + 4 \) and $$ 2 + x^2 = 11 $$ yields

\[2 + x^2 = 11.\]

I know, I know, that itself is not groundbreaking, but for future math related shenaningans, this is invaluable.

Look out, Immersive Music Hackathon! I come prepared with math, music, and new blogging skills. Let’s see if I can bring these together to make an immersive audio experience.