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Comment by Jun8 | Hacker News Reader

This question and answers are gold! The answer with LaTex (http://mathoverflow.net/a/213268/42557) and the diametrically opposed comments to it illustrate problems with Tex.

One thing I didn't see mentioned is better collaborative tools (true for any research but doubly true here due to difficulties with notation, etc.). Note the quick progression of results triggered by Tao's polymath blog (http://polymathprojects.org/) but I find the current Wordpress format not very suitable for search and browsing.

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(I'm the founder of SageMath.) SageMathCloud (https://cloud.sagemath.com) is a highly collaborative online web application for working with Sage, R, Python, IPython, LaTeX, etc that I've been working extremely hard on this for almost 3 years. We'll have a major new release this week with much new polish and functionality (the testing server is at https://web0.sagemath.com). Everything is 100% open source. https://github.com/sagemathinc/smc

My Mathematical Modeling teacher is having us use SageMathCloud! It's a great tool. I didn't know it could be so easy to do things I thought I needed something akin to Mathematica for. Thanks for your effort!

Jim Simons, after retiring from Renaissance Technologies with a cool 15 billion, has spent the last 10 years giving grants to people in the pure sciences. He's a true academic at heart -- a BS from MIT in Math, PhD from Berkeley which yielded a whole new field (heh) of something to do with Riemannian manifolds that's way beyond my ability to grok but apparently it's on par with "oh yeah I invented abstract algebra (a la Emmy Noether)", worked at Princeton for the NSA cracking Cold War codes during Vietnam but got fired because he wanted to do his own recreational mathematics instead. Anyways, he's very fond of academics and gives MacArthur-esque grants, especially to people who want to change the way mathematics is taught. Approach his fund. I'm 100% sure he'll give you a grant on the spot.

You might like to check out https://www.overleaf.com as a collaborative LaTeX editor, and we now have an integration with services such as Plot.ly[1] and Mendeley[2] to make it easy to pull in figures and references.

Feedback very welcome -- I'm one of the co-founders and we're continually developing the platform to better serve researchers and student authors.

[1] https://www.overleaf.com/blog/201-reproducible-and-collabora...

[2] https://www.overleaf.com/blog/184-mendeley-integration-is-he...

I want to say, as William Stein and John Hammersley have said in other replies, that there are people working on making things better. If you are reading this thinking that these things are big jobs and there is nothing you can do, think some more. Find something you are interested in, and pitch in. Sage, for example, is a great project that I'm sure any reader of this site could contribute to in some way.

For another example, I'm VP of the TeX Users Group http://www.tug.org. If you are looking for a project to work on, or just thinking to support the work of others on LuaTeX, or XeTeX, or LaTeX 3, or ConTeXt, etc. then come join us.

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