his site is here to facilitate mathematical and computational discussion. As such, it is often nice to format your questions and responses as nicely as possible - including typeset mathematics, images, and code as appropriate.
Markdown
Textual entry into discourse is based on Markdown - a lightweight markup language that makes formatting relatively easy. I should mention that Markdown is also used in the Jupyter notebook. To start this particular section, for example, I simply entered:
## Markdown
Code
Sometimes, we’d like to enter computer code - like I just did above to indicate how to start a section. To do so, just indent your line four spaces.
There many other things you can do with Markdown. If you’re interested in more, you can check out [this MarkDown Cheasheet.
Typeset math
The forum uses a Javascript library called MathJax to render snippets of LaTeX markup as mathematical formulae. For example, to type the following:
If f(x) = e^{-x^2}, then
\int_{-\infty}^{\infty} f(x) \, dx = \sqrt{\pi}.
I would type in:
If $f(x) = e^{-x^2}$, then
$$
\int_{-\infty}^{\infty} f(x) \, dx = \sqrt{\pi}.
$$
Note that the inline mathematics is enclosed in single dollar sings $like this$ while larger display style math is enclosed in double dollar signs with line breaks
$$
like this
$$
While it seems a bit strange, it’s not so hard after a little practice.
Images
When you’re editing a post, you’ll notice a toolbar with an image uploader, as I’ve circled here:
Of course, I used exactly that to upload that very image!
Desmos
The “share” button on Desmos includes an “embed” button that generates a funny bit of HTML called an iframe. You can plug that right into the forum to get something like so: