Show HN: MathLingua – A Structured Language of Mathematics
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Re: Show HN: MathLingua – A Structured Language of Mathematics
#2This is the creator of MathLingua, a unique language for easily describing mathematical definitions, theorems, axioms, and conjectures.
It is unique from LaTeX and theorem proving languages and has a different goal. See the documentation at www.mathlingua.org for more information.
This post is a follow-up to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23960662 and many changes have been made to MathLingua since that time based on the feedback from that post.
In particular, since that time, I have added numerous improvements to the language to improve its usability, have drilled down on a particular use-case that I have documented more clearly, and have created a `mlg` command line tool to interact with the MathLingua language.
In particular, using `mlg check` one can check their MathLingua documents for errors, with `mlg document` one can create a dynamic static site of their documents suitable to be shared on GitHub pages, and with `mlg edit`, an in-browser IDE is available to edit your MathLingua documents with live previews, auto-complete, etc.
I really appreciate all of the feedback I received previously, and any and all feedback now is greatly appreciated.
Re: Show HN: MathLingua – A Structured Language of Mathematics
#3Awesome project: I love the fact that you can click grab definitions, would make learning new symbols in a field a breeze.
Question, though: is there a way to add custom definitions to symbols when you work in a field that uses symbols differently than the standard usage or symbols that have no standard usage (such as \bigoplus in latex)?
Re: Show HN: MathLingua – A Structured Language of Mathematics
#4This is great. You can easily look up a definition within a definition. No more context switching when trying to find Theorem 17.23, and then Definition 2.7.
Re: Show HN: MathLingua – A Structured Language of Mathematics
#5Awesome project: I love the fact that you can click grab definitions, would make learning new symbols in a field a breeze. Question, though: is there a way to add custom definitions to symbols when you work in a field that uses symbols differently than the standard usage or symbols that have no standard usage (such as \bigoplus in latex)?
Yes, you can. MathLingua makes no assumptions about what symbols are used to represent different math operations (other than KaTeX is used to render expressions and so you need to symbols KaTeX recognizes).
As such you can use whatever visual representation you want for operations and definitions.
For a particular math definition, you can also specify multiple different notations for the concept (in this case, MathLingua uses the first one when rendering results).
An example of this is the derivative of a function in the “A Detailed Example” section of the docs.
Re: Show HN: MathLingua – A Structured Language of Mathematics
#6Awesome project: I love the fact that you can click grab definitions, would make learning new symbols in a field a breeze. Question, though: is there a way to add custom definitions to symbols when you work in a field that uses symbols differently than the standard usage or symbols that have no standard usage (such as \bigoplus in latex)?
I haven’t added a reverse lookup yet where you provide a symbol and can find all things that the symbol can represent, but it is on the roadmap.
Re: Show HN: MathLingua – A Structured Language of Mathematics
#7This is great. You can easily look up a definition within a definition. No more context switching when trying to find Theorem 17.23, and then Definition 2.7.
I’m glad you like it. One of the goals is to make discovering math easy and fun, in particular exploring theorems and definitions.
Re: Show HN: MathLingua – A Structured Language of Mathematics
#8I come from a very practical engineering math background.
I am really excited about this project because it makes it very clear how everything hangs together in a way that I haven't experienced before. The visual structure of a single definition/theorem/states is very helpful. Also, knowing how many 'levels' from the original concept I'm currently exploring while unpacking and re-packing just helps everything click into place.
Very, very cool.
Re: Show HN: MathLingua – A Structured Language of Mathematics
#9Oh my goodness, this is awesome. It's like the tactics language of Coq, but less irritating and pretty formatting. I will be recommending this to everyone!
Re: Show HN: MathLingua – A Structured Language of Mathematics
#10The next natural step would be write down all theorems from kindergarten to undergrad and make them reproduciable with http://leanprover.github.io/