Mathbin, a pastebin that renders mathematics using LaTeX

If you use IRC to collaborate on a software project, chances are you’ve come across pastebin.com, a site where you can post snippets of code, program output, patches, and the like, and then give out the URL of the snippet to other people in the channel you’re working in. A similar site is paste.lisp.org, which controls a network of bots that sit in IRC channels and announce newly pasted URLs for you. These seemingly trivial services make it vastly easier to do collaborative development and debugging. I just ran across a mathbin.net, a site that takes one step closer to nerd heaven, by allowing you to write mathematical equations using LaTeX’s notation; it then renders the mathematics as inline images, using LaTeX’s renderer. The results are beautiful; here’s an example of the Airy function defined over real values.

Of course, you need to speak some LaTeX to be able to generate such beautiful images:

\mathrm{Ai}(x) = \frac{1}{\pi} \int_0^\infty \cos\left(\frac{t^3}{3} + xt\right) , dt.

So mathbin is wonderful, but it’s not for everyone 🙂