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Comment by Sharlin | Hacker News Reader

In hard sciences LaTeX is pretty much the de facto standard. So much that most people in those fields automatically assume papers that don't have the LaTeX look to be subpar science. Of course, one of the reasons for its prevalence is the math support that's lightyears beyond anything Word can offer.

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Did you have a look at word's math support in recent years?

I find using the equation editor in Word to be physically debilitating. Pretty much any software involving tiny graphics and fine mouse work triggers severe eyestrain headaches and neck fatigue.

There's a document here, describing keyboard entry:

http://www.chem.mtu.edu/~tbco/cm416/EquationEditor_main.pdf

It's basically a markup language of sorts, and I'd use it if I were presently writing a lot of text with equations.

For better or worse, working in industry, my reports are free of equations! I've formed the hypothesis, that when managers and non-technical people see an equation, they assume the report is "incomplete," i.e., the equation needs to be turned into an actual result.

I've been to academic talks where, instead of typeset equations, the author just copies the source code from their MatLab file to a PowerPoint slide.

In university I used Word 2007 to type math lectures in real-time. I never had to resort to the mouse at all for equations. You seem to be thinking of the stripped-down MathType equation editor that was bundled with Office for a while (before it had native math support). The PDF you linked is for Office 2007 onwards and shows that the markup language you mention is mostly like TeX with a few simplifications, e.g. smart handling of things like x^12 which is then actually x¹² instead of x¹2. Basically it uses parentheses where TeX uses braces and needs a lot fewer of them because of more natural tokenizing.

I think you're right. I plan on trying it, next time I need to enter equations into Word. For me, the key to ergonomic use of the computer is being able to look away from the screen. For instance, I can type text forever without constant focused eye contact with the screen, which greatly reduces the eyestrain issue.

And I suppose a useful thing is that if you do misspell one of the keywords, it just sits there until you correct it, as a reminder of what you were trying to write.

The last time I did it couldn't even typeset a root. (The line on top and the thing at the front weren't connected)

And in Powerpoint the formulas have constantly different sizes and are distorted. I don't like beamer (a latex package), but it the only viable slide show software for me.

That must have been a while ago – nowadays it’s just beautiful real-time latex-style math with just a few improvements where the latex syntax kinda fails (“3/4” instead of “\frac{3}{4}”, “"plain"” instead of “\text{plain}”).

I don't think so. Of the hard sciences, the only one I know where TeX is common is physics. It is also common in math and CS but those are not sciences.

I can buy not calling mathematics a science (although I don't agree), but surely it's torturing language too much (in one direction or the other) to say that computer science is not a science?

If Mathematics is not a science, then the only one definition of it I know is that Mathematics is a language. Now is that not too much torture to the language by itself? That borders to a borderless recursion, which is supposed to be a part of Mathematics.

Can you see what I did there?

there's a humorous point: all "xxxxxx sciences" are /not/ sciences. compare political science, social science, computer science, earth science, with chemistry, physics, mathematics, biology. the real sciences don't need what ends up being a self-negating qualifier.

computer science isn't a science because it's a hodgepodge of algorithms and miscellanea, and very little theory-building.

> there's a humorous point: all "xxxxxx sciences" are /not/ sciences. compare political science, social science, computer science, earth science, with chemistry, physics, mathematics, biology. the real sciences don't need what ends up being a self-negating qualifier.

Certainly I see the humour in this humorous point, and in my most chauvinist moments as scientist (well, mathematician) might mutter it to myself, but I cannot agree with it as fact.

> computer science isn't a science because it's a hodgepodge of algorithms and miscellanea, and very little theory-building.

It sounds like you're discussing programming (which I think of as not yet a science—but I am no programmer), rather than computer science. There is certainly a rich theory behind computer science—indeed, there is a vein of computer science that is essentially just lightly 'applied' mathematics. Just see a random sampling of questions at http://cstheory.stackexchange.com if you don't believe it!

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