Via Dave Bacon’s blog, I came across Detexify, a cool tool that enables you to find the LaTeX command for a symbol by drawing the symbol. LaTeX is the standard typesetting system for researchers in the mathematical sciences. One indication of its popularity is that Scott Aaronson lists “The authors don’t use TeX” as the first of his “Ten Signs a Claimed Mathematical Breakthrough is Wrong.” Unfair I know, but so it is.
People outside of the mathematical sciences often wonder why so many of us continue to use LaTeX directly, which requires typing in commands to specify formulas, rather than a graphical interface. The problem with graphical interfaces is that, even if you know where all the symbols in a formula are located in the GUI, it is time consuming to click on them all, and the problem only gets worse if you need to specify the relative positions of symbols. In contrast, once you know the LaTeX commands, it is fast.
In either case, learning where the symbols are located in a GUI, or learning the appropriate LaTeX command, can be painful. For many years, I’ve believed that only when we have programs that can interpret handwritten mathematical formulas will we shift away from typing LaTeX commands. Detexify is a step along the way. In the meantime it provides an easy way to find the LaTeX command for the basic symbols. I’ve been using LaTeX long enough, and am fluent enough, that I expect to use Detexify only on rare occasions, but I sure would have appreciated it in earlier years.