Writing mathematics in this blog

What I say in this post is no longer correct, as I am now using Mathjax.

LaTeX is the language in which my lecture notes (and almost all modern mathematical papers) are written. In this blog I will use a pseudo-LaTeX notation for mathematics. So

• x_i is "x sub i",
• alpha is the Greek character α, 

and so forth. (I say pseudo-LaTeX, because in actual-LaTeX one has to put \$ signs around things, e.g. \$x_i\$, and put a \ in front of a Greek character name, e.g. \alpha).

When I want to write in this blog some algebra or work with mathematical objects I sometimes use Mathematica's notation. So DiagonalMatrix[{1,1−alpha−beta}] is the 2x2 diagonal matrix which has 1 and 1−alpha−beta on the diagonal. Also, {{1,alpha},{1,−beta}} is the 2x2 matrix whose rows are {1,alpha} and {1,−beta}.