# Testing New MathJax Plugin

Testing the math delimiters: $$\int_{-\infty}^{\infty}e^{-x^2} \, dx= \sqrt{\pi}.$$ Success! We appear to have MathJax on the blog now. This will obviously greatly facilitate the posting of tutorials, or any discussion at all concerning math, as $\LaTeX$ is (mostly) available.

Testing: $A \; \x{implies} \; B$. This means that my new command of \x{} is equivalent to \text{}, and works just fine.

# Launch Post

Welcome to Math Help Blogs! As you can see in the subtitle, this blog is a companion to the Math Help Boards, an up-and-coming free math help website with the following unique characteristics:

1. Warm and welcoming atmosphere.

2. Distributed authority, with delegation. We have four different staff ranks, with great fluidity between ranks. We’ve had one user climb up all the way up from regular user to system administrator!

3. Completely spam-free, due to #2 above, as well as well-chosen anti-spam software such as Spam-O-Matic

4. Good teaching philosophy: we do not simply hand out the answers. We ask users to put forth effort and show us their work so far. Then we get them unstuck. This maximizes the teaching moment, and helps the student do the heavy lifting.

5. Highly active administration. There are four regular administrators, all of them active helping to improve the site. We are two years old, and with this level of sysadmin, you can bet we’ll be around for a long time!

With these factors in place, we have experienced steady growth from the get-go. We now have over 1600 users, almost 200 of which are active (have logged in in the past month), almost 10k threads, with over 44k posts. While these statistics may seem small compared with sites like the excellent Physics Forums, we are only two years old.

So much for Math Help Boards. What about Math Help Blogs? This blog exists to highlight events at Math Help Boards, as well as talk about mathematics and mathematics education in general, and possibly other topics as well. We’ll define ourselves as we go.

In the meantime, welcome to Math Help Blogs, and don’t neglect to check out Math Help Boards!