The American Institute of Physics is an organization of 10 physical science societies, representing more than 135,000 scientists, engineers, and educators and is one of the world’s largest publishers of scientific information in physics. AIP pursues innovation in electronic publishing of scholarly journals and offers full-solution publishing services for its Member Societies. AIP publishes 13 journals; two magazines, including its flagship publication Physics Today; and the AIP Conference Proceedings series.

“Both our reader and author communities will benefit greatly from AIP’s use and support of MathJax,” said AIP Director of Business Development Terry Hulbert. “The MathJax project is an important step forward, not only in the clarity with which it displays math, but in the usability and accessibility of math and online learning. AIP is proud to support the MathJax project.”

“AIP’s use and financial support of MathJax is a huge boost to the project,” said Robert Miner, MathJax Project Director. “This will significantly increase awareness and hopefully attract more support for MathJax.”

MathJax lets users copy equations from AIP’s online journal articles and paste them directly into Word and LaTeX documents, science blogs, MathType, and research wikis. Equations can also be copied and pasted into calculation software like Maple, Mathematica, and others. MathJax supports the use of STIX fonts (stixfonts.org), which will improve MathJax’s speed when rendering mathematics.

AIP is seeking feedback from the scientific community on the utility of MathJax as it continues to develop the service. To see MathJax in action, visit the 50th Anniversary issue of the Journal of Mathematical Physics (jmp.aip.org/resource/1/jmapaq/v51/i1). Every article in the issue is freely available. Select read online for any article, and once in the HTML view, go to the navigation bar and turn on MathJax.

Our first Business Development Manager, Hylke Koers, moved to a full-time position with Elsevier at the end of the summer. He began shortly after MathJax 1.0 was released, and helped the project broaden its base of sponsors, establish the CDN, foster integration with leading web platforms, and build adoption to the point where more than half a million pages access the CDN a week today.

The next MathJax Business Development manager will begin with an established, well-regarded project. We look forward to seeing what the next stage of MathJax’s evolution will look like under the guidance of another talented and ambitious person, eager to make a difference in the sphere of math and science communication.

The IEEE Xplore Digital Library provides access to over three million documents including research articles, standards, transactions and conference publications. MathJax has already greatly benefited from suggestions and bug reports from IEEE technical staff investigating the performance of MathJax with that trove of real-world technical content, and we look forward to further collaboration.

For over a century, IEEE has been dedicated to advancing technological innovation and excellence for the benefit of humanity. IEEE and its members inspire a global community through IEEE’s highly cited publications, conferences, technology standards, and professional and educational activities.

Change
Requests to the MathJax CDN that don’t contain an “Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate” HTTP header will in future be served with uncompressed content.

Rationale
Up to now the MathJax CDN has delivered gzip compressed content for all non-image requests, even when the “Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate” header was absent. This meant that browsers could still receive faster gzip’d responses even if an intermediate proxy (for instance) had stripped the header.

Unfortunately, all versions of Internet Explorer disable gzip handling completely when HTTP 1.1 is disabled. This can occur in several ways, including

1. when a user does not have administrator privileges, regardless of the
   advanced configuration option “Use HTTP 1.1″ setting, or
2. when the advanced configuration option “Use HTTP 1.1″ is disabled, or
3. when the advanced configuration option “Use HTTP 1.1 through proxy
   connections” is disabled and a HTTP request is made through a proxy.

The upcoming change will maximize the number of users who are able to
receive content from the MathJax CDN.

Implications

1. There is no need to change the way you use the MathJax CDN with your
   pages.
2. There may be a few users of Internet Explorer who previously could
   not view math in your pages, but now are able to.
3. There may be a few users who have a slightly slower experience due to
   not receiving gzip’d content from the MathJax CDN.

Motivated by this rapid uptake, we have looked deeper into how MathJax is being used by the e-learning community and released an article that describes this on mathjax.org. Please read “Mathematics E-learning Community Benefits from MathJax” to learn more about the landscape of mathematical e-learning websites, and to understand how MathJax is helping online educators to teach mathematics on the web.

The Institute of Physics is a leading scientific society promoting physics and bringing physicists together for the benefit of all. IOP Publishing is central to the Institute of Physics, providing publications through which leading-edge scientific research is distributed worldwide. Beyond a traditional journals program, IOP Publishing makes high-value scientific information easily accessible through an ever-evolving portfolio of community websites, magazines, conference proceedings and a multitude of electronic services.

IOP Publishing seeks to make the most of new technologies and continually make it easier for researchers to find what they need, when they need it, in the format that suits them best. Through its generous support of MathJax project, IOP Publishing demonstrates it commitment to being a partner to the science community.

For more information, visit the IOP Publishing site.

Project Euclid, jointly managed by Cornell and the Duke University Press, addresses the unique needs of low-cost independent and society journals. Through a collaborative partnership arrangement, these publishers join forces and participate in an online presence with advanced functionality, without sacrificing their intellectual or economic independence or commitment to low subscription prices. Mathematics display in titles and abstracts via MathJax, full-text searching, reference linking, making collection metadata available through the Open Archives Initiative, and long-term retention of data are all important components of the project.

As the video tutorial shows, it is easy to use MathJax with Blackboard. By using the HTML source editor, you can link to the public MathJax CDN by including a simple code snippet. Once that code snippet is in place, you can use LaTeX to include mathematical expression in your course material. MathJax will render these expressions as typeset mathematics, which you and your students can view and reuse. Further instructions, together with the tutorial video, are available on the “Use in Web Platforms” page at mathjax.org.

The Blackboard tutorial follows the “How to use MathJax in Tumblr” video tutorial in our Use in Web Platforms series. Thanks are due to Ian’s Blackboard blog and other members of the Blackboard user community who emailed and tweeted with us, and drew our attention to the topic. If you have a suggestion for a tutorial video you would like to see, please let us know!