Show HN: MathLingua – A Structured Language of Mathematics • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: MathLingua – A Structured Language of Mathematics

#21

Post by triclops200 » Fri, Dec 03, 2021, 2:36 PM UTC

CatsAreCool wrote: post #5

triclops200 wrote: post #3

Awesome 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, MathLi…

Awesome! Sounds like a great system

Re: Show HN: MathLingua – A Structured Language of Mathematics

#22

Post by CatsAreCool » Fri, Dec 03, 2021, 6:51 PM UTC

silasdb wrote: post #19

Great project. BTW, I'm more and more interested in how to produce math for blind people. Although there is some recommendation about writring math in MathML, few (none?) screenreaders actually support it. Could this project help or could you tell me other resources about it? Thanks.

Great feedback. This is one of the areas that I designed MathLingua to help with.

Every definition has a ‘written:’ section describing how to express the math idea on paper and a ‘called:’ section describing how it is described when speaking.

Right now the ‘written:’ is used to render how a result looks, and in a similar way the ‘called:’ section can be used to convert a result into a transcript that a screen reader would read.

I haven’t yet been able to implement this feature though, but stay tuned for updates.

Re: Show HN: MathLingua – A Structured Language of Mathematics

#23

Post by CatsAreCool » Fri, Dec 03, 2021, 6:53 PM UTC

cloudhan wrote: post #11

I think you might be interesting in this interactive papar: https://willcrichton.net/nota/

Looks interesting. Thanks for the link.

Re: Show HN: MathLingua – A Structured Language of Mathematics

#24

Post by CatsAreCool » Fri, Dec 03, 2021, 6:54 PM UTC

gnull wrote: post #20

So is it like math written in natural language but more structured and cross-referenced?

That is correct, and the structure allows for computers to better understand the meaning of the math concepts being described, which opens the door to different analyses that can be done.

Re: Show HN: MathLingua – A Structured Language of Mathematics

#25

Post by CatsAreCool » Fri, Dec 03, 2021, 6:59 PM UTC

chriswarbo wrote: post #17

Seems similar to http://openmath.org e.g. https://www.omdoc.org/about/ https://kwarc.info/systems/sTeX

It is similar. However, where omdoc seems to focus on storing math concepts in a precise way, it’s focus doesn’t appear to be on easily hand writing concepts in that format.

MathLingua, on the other hand, focuses on being precise and easy to read and write in its raw form.