Thursday, 4 April 2019

Mathpix is pretty neat

Here's a neat piece of software I spotted via a re–tweet from @eddedmondson on Twitter:
It's called Mathpix and it lets you take screen captures of equations which it then turns into LaTeX code.  I thought I'd try it out with something quite stretching in the form of a slightly poorly scanned pdf of Max Planck's paper from 1900 Ueber das Gesetz der Energieverteilung im Normalspectrum.  Here is a screencap of the original equation:



As you can see, it's not perfectly scanned in, especially in the horizontal lines of the fractions.  Mathpix, though, did a fine job.  It said "We had trouble reading that.  Try zooming in for a better result." but the result was exactly right.  Its LaTeX result is

\(E=\frac{8 \pi c h}{\lambda^{5}} \cdot \frac{1}{e^{\frac{c h}{k \lambda \vartheta}}-1}\)

and its own graphical rendering comes out as



So pretty good really.
 


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