A new release of Discourse Math

[sam (Sam Saffron)]

I am very happy to announce a major upgrade to our Discourse Math plugin!

Special thanks goes to @mcmcclur who helped test and build much of the new and upgraded discourse-math.

This is a very significant change – we upgraded all the way from version 2.x up to version 4.1 of MathJax, catching up with years of features and advances.

Additionally, we amended our design to make it significantly easier to upgrade the plugin in the future.

Our new iteration is much friendlier to LLM outputs, which prefer using LaTeX-style math inlines such as e=mc^2.

The plugin remains very configurable – you can use MathJax or KaTeX for math rendering and even disable the handling of \( if you wish.

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Some Fun Examples to Show Off MathJax 4.1

The Quadratic Formula:

x = \frac{-b \pm \sqrt{b^2 - 4ac}}{2a}

Euler’s Identity:

e^{i\pi} + 1 = 0

Maxwell’s Equations:

\nabla \times \mathbf{E} = -\frac{\partial \mathbf{B}}{\partial t}

A Colorful Integral:

\int_{-\infty}^{\infty} {\color{red}e}^{{\color{blue}-x}^{\color{green}2}} \, {\color{orange}dx} = {\color{purple}\sqrt{\pi}}

An Infinite Series:

\sum_{n=1}^{\infty} \frac{1}{n^2} = \frac{\pi^2}{6}

New in MathJax 4 – The \U{} Macro:

You can now insert Unicode characters directly into TeX input! For example:

A \U{229E} B = C

$$A \U{229E} B = C$$

This produces U+229E (⊞, a squared plus).