Today, GitHub announced that mathematical expressions can now be rendered in Markdown on GitHub, using “$$” as a delimiter for blocks of code with mathematical content or a “$” delimiter for embedded mathematical expressions.
According to GitHub, mathematical expressions have become necessary for the exchange of information between engineers, scientists, data scientists and mathematicians.
The community was in dire need of support for the display of mathematical expressions more than eight years. Now users can use The “$” and “$$” delimiters are built into Markdown on GitHub to insert mathematical expressions into the syntax of TeX and LaTeX styles. The content is then displayed using a file MathJax library.
MathJax is an open source JavaScript-based display engine that supports a wide range of LaTex macros, as well as several accessibility enhancements. To learn more about MathJax, see documentation and MathJax Enhancement Documentation.
There are several different ways that users can include mathematical expressions, such as embedded in text, by dividing an expression by a dollar symbol or as a block, starting with a new line and delimiting the expression by two dollar symbols.
In addition, to display dollar signs as a symbol in the same string as a mathematical expression, the user must avoid a non-delimited dollar sign so that the string is displayed correctly.
In mathematical expression, this can be done by adding the “” symbol in front of the dollar sign and outside the expression by adding span tags around the explicit dollar sign.
To learn more, see here.
