wikipendium / wikipendium.no

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Enhancement: Theorems, definitions, and numbered equations. #432

Open tOgg1 opened 8 years ago

tOgg1 commented 8 years ago

For some (many) of the mathematics compendiums, having some more clear markup for theorems, definitions etc. would be great. There are a bunch of ways these could be styled, which definitely justifies a discussion.

Also, having these (along with equations) numbered, and being able to refer to them, is also ideal for a lot of the same class of compendiums.

stianjensen commented 8 years ago

The latex library we use, mathjax, supports automatic equation numbering: http://mathjax.readthedocs.org/en/latest/tex.html#automatic-equation-numbering

Enabling this would mean all equations on a page would get a number assigned, and I believe it should be possible to refer to them from the text.

stianjensen commented 8 years ago

As for theorems and definitions, the closest thing we have today are blockquotes. Could they be sufficient for this use case, or are some other special features needed?

For reference, blockquotes are created with the following syntax:

> This is a blockquote

and rendered as

screenshot 2015-12-10 15 43 01
tOgg1 commented 8 years ago

Yes I am aware of the blockquote feature. They are okey as is, but lack:

  1. (Very subjective) Proper formatting, I much prefer Math SE's blockquotes. See for instance this link.
  2. A distinguishing factor for theorems, conjectures, lemmas, corollaries etc. This can be introduced by the user by explicit numbering/naming though.
  3. Numbering. For short articles or answers (as on Math SE) this is rarely necessary. However for larger compendiums, such as this, or this, being able to number and refer back to a given theorem is very handy. This is particularly relevant for courses which are very sequential in nature, in the sense that definitions and theorems from one chapter is relied upon and used a lot later.