There is something delightful about LaTeX. However, the last time I bothered with it was in college, since I don’t have much call for PDFs in day-to-day life. I recently came across Overleaf, which is an online LaTeX editor. The nice part is that it live-renders your work and you can right-click->Save as an PNG. Thus, you can suddenly embed gorgeously formatted math anywhere. For example, here’s one of my favorite proofs, that the square root of two is not a rational number:
Source code:
\documentclass[varwidth=true, border=10pt]{standalone}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage{amsmath}
\begin{document}
Suppose $\sqrt{2}$ was rational. Then we could write:
\[ \sqrt{2} = \frac{a}{b} \]
...where $a/b$ is in lowest terms. Squaring both sides yields:
\[ 2 = \frac{a^{2}}{b^{2}} \]
Now multiply both sides by $b^{2}$:
\[ 2b^{2} = a^{2} \]
$a^{2}$ must be even, since $b^{2}$ is multiplied by 2. For $a^{2}$ to be even, $a$ must be even, so we can say that $a = 2c$ for some $c$.
Thus, we can write this equation as:
\[ 2b^{2} = (2c)^{2} \]
or:
\[ 2b^{2} = 4c^{2} \]
Now we can divide both sides by 2... but we end up with $b^{2} = 2c^{2}$, which is shaped the same as $2b^{2} = a^{2}$ above!
We can continue expanding this equation out forever, so there are no whole numbers that $a$ and $b$ can resolve to.
Thus, $\sqrt{2}$ is irrational.
\end{document}
Gorgeous.
Kristina Chodorow's Blog 