Ask HN: What tool for live, collaborative, symbolic math?

  • Perhaps try purchasing a digitizer tablet with a stylus (e.g. Wacom's Intuos series) which will allow you to write your equations as you would with an ordinary writing instrument?

  • lyx [1] is great for live editing of latex . Set the instant preview Tools>Preferences>Display>Instant Preview if you want automatic latex rendering, although the editor rendering is nice as it is.

    For something that is more of a calculator, SymPy [2] with sympy.init_printing() would be rendering latex automatically in any Jupyter notebook.

    Specific tools I created for my own use for leveraging the above is pypad [3] together with calcpy [4] (%load_ext calcpy)

    [1] LyX https://www.lyx.org

    [2] SymPy https://www.sympy.org

    [3] pypad https://github.com/idanpa/pypad

    [4] calcpy https://github.com/idanpa/calcpy