Handcalcs: Automatically render Latex equations from Python math code

https://github.com/connorferster/handcalcs

by amrrs • 6 years ago

277 51 6 years ago

abnry• 6 years ago

This is fantastic! The best use case I can think of is to verify your python formulas are correct. It is much easier to read math notation than code.

enriquto4• 6 years ago

It is much easier to read math notation than code.

I agree.

And for writing, the difference is even bigger than for reading. Thus, what we need is the reverse tool, that translates our beautiful formulas into the damned code!

ajuc5• 6 years ago

The problem isn't translation, it's input. Keyboard is designed for serial 1-dimensional input, formulas are nested trees. The approaches I've seen are:

- OCR a handwritten formula (unreliable but the most convenient)

- make the user write serialized code and show it as formula (basically this submission, but also latex etc. - misses the point)

- force the user to design the formula tree with some graphical editor and fill it with values and identifiers later (office suites do this and it's such a pain to constantly switch between keyboard and mouse)

abalaji• 6 years ago

This is really neat. I'm sure high school teachers with a little programming experience might enjoy setting this up with Google colab in Algebra and Calculus classes.

hatmatrix• 6 years ago

All the more reason to move to a declarative style of programming.

jlukecarlson• 6 years ago

This seems like a pretty helpful educational tool — you could sprinkle it in a project's documentation to help clarify the exact formulas being used.

I could also imagine people using this if they aren't that comfortable with LaTeX and want an easier way to write it. They could just write out their formulas with Python, call @handcalc() to get the string output, then post it in their tex documents.

mhh__• 6 years ago

Maybe, but if you can do Python I cannot imagine you not being able to do LaTeX. The equations are the easy part.

macintux• 6 years ago

It’s still one more thing to learn. There are lots of things I could do that aren’t on my priority list.

mcqueenjordan• 6 years ago

This is very useful. My use case is that I often write python simulations of designs and/or as cost analysis simulations, but I also often want to put these conclusions into white papers. This is an excellent way to de-duplicate the work of getting the python simulation code and the latex code both correct, and as a bonus, they can share a single place to change.

I'd love to be able to inline this code into my org documents, and have it display the latex output, but that might be asking for too much magic. (As in, not sure if the magic is worth the incantation.)

Terr_• 6 years ago

share a single place

I particularly like the idea of feeling reassured that whatever I publish for humans also passed a test-suite.

narwally• 6 years ago

There's already an emacs-jupyter package that provides an emacs api for interacting with the jupyter kernel through either a repl or org-mode source blocks. It provides output from the jupyter kernel in latex, svg, and png among others. What your asking probably wouldn't be to difficult and will probably find its way into one of the ipython notebook specific packages if it isn't already in one of them already.

tikej• 6 years ago

Pretty cool but I think SymPy is more practical w.r.t. to formula transformations and rendering is as good in Jupyter notebooks. If it only had as good pattern matching and substitution rules as Mathematica...

cmferster5• 6 years ago

Sympy is for solving an original solution. handcalcs is for plugging numbers into formulas. Next major milestone is integrating sympy with handcalcs so it is easy to transition from the sympy steps to the calculation steps.

montalbano• 6 years ago

In case people would like similar functionality in the Julia programming language, there is also a package for that:

https://github.com/korsbo/Latexify.jl

leephillips• 6 years ago

This and handcalcs are impressive. Maxima, the symbolic math program, also does TeX output.

mlochbaum• 6 years ago

And on the off chance you want to use the array language J instead, I wrote and used JtoLaTeX (https://github.com/mlochbaum/JtoLaTeX) throughout college for physics and math papers and even a master's thesis. It can display or calculate formulas, and embed plots.

andrewnc• 6 years ago

This is lovely

etaioinshrdlu• 6 years ago

Is this a kind of open source version of Mathematica's traditional form? https://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/TraditionalForm.h...

lifeisstillgood• 6 years ago

almost related but is there a project allowing editing of a .rst doc to be real time transformed into Html / latex via sphinx - I guess it's not too hard but the faffing about with servers seems like it would be nice if someone had already solved it

ggcdn• 6 years ago

weird, I was looking for this exact concept (except for Javascript code) literally right before checking whats new on HN.

This looks great. Its super useful for when you need to perform calculations and also keep a saved record of it (like structural engineering calcs)

technicalbard• 6 years ago

That it can do units too makes this a possible replacement for MathCAD!

cmferster5• 6 years ago

That is my hope! At least for more typical arithmetic.

smabie• 6 years ago

Will it render my matrices/vectors? I suppose since Python doesn't have static typing that is unlikely.

I've been using sage math a lot and the latex generation is really solid. It only renders greek letters correctly if you type them out though, it won't transform unicode greek letters to the correct latex equivalent. Though maybe XeTeX would solve this problem? I'm not sure.

fiddlerwoaroof• 6 years ago

If it puts the Unicode character into the Tex source, verbatim, XeTeX is the way to go (or Luatex or Context, I believe): at this point I almost never use vanilla LaTeX

modmans2nd• 6 years ago

I feel like a latex language editor is easier.

cmferster5• 6 years ago

But it doesn't do the calculation for you. handcalcs is about performing calculations and having it automatically show your work.

kareninoverseas• 6 years ago

This is what I needed when I was writing my undergrad thesis. Would have saved me hours of time. Alas.

maksimsum• 6 years ago

If only you had created this sooner, I could have saved so much time writing up lab reports for my physics courses. I attempted something similar with Excel sheets and some bash scripts, but the effort involved took more time than just writing the lab report by hand.

jakeogh• 6 years ago

going the other way LaTeX -> code: https://github.com/sympy/sympy/issues/5418

TallGuyShort• 6 years ago

I was hoping to see it detect loops that sum something and translate it into sigma notation but that's ambitious... Very cool, regardless - I'll be using this a lot!

klysm• 6 years ago

I could see that working with a direct `sum` invocation.

cmferster5• 6 years ago

That's the current plan.

jimbob45• 6 years ago

I know it’s off topic but there is no bigger cheat code in high school than knowing Latex. In no other way can you get an additional free 5% on every paper with virtually no additional time input past the initial investment.

xrisk• 6 years ago

An easier way to achieve the same thing is to use Pandoc :)

CGamesPlay• 6 years ago

This seems super-useful! Really interesting library that I earmarked for use next time I'm doing something math-heavy.

Quick note about the site: the animated GIFs are not helpful. A static screenshot would let me see the result and give me time to understand what's going on. As it is, they jump back to an unrendered Jupiter cell almost immediately, and the animation is just typing; not really showing anything useful.

justmyname• 6 years ago

As I see on the demo, it evaluates the expression itself. There is a ton of possibilities to misinterpret the domain of operations involved. Moreover, how should we control the details to which it should unwind the undergoing calculations?

That way of work seems a bit too optimistic to me.

aargh_aargh• 6 years ago

Fair point. It also provides the %%tex magic that gets you the source LaTeX snippet. May save you 80% of the effort, the rest you can tweak manually.

cmferster5• 6 years ago

Jupyter, and ultimately Python, evaluates the expressions. handcalcs just displays the resulting information with variable values from the Python locals dict.

caterama• 6 years ago

There's also https://github.com/google/latexify_py out there. Handcalcs seems to have a more extensive readme at least. Does anyone have a comparison?

bronzeage• 6 years ago

Sagemath with %display latex does practically the same thing, and it's much more powerful symbolic execution engine. Works with matrices too.

RossBencina• 6 years ago

The %%tex directive to convert Python to LaTex looks useful. Does anyone know whether there is a similar way to output the Python code in C++ syntax?

crashocaster• 6 years ago

This can be done by 'unparsing' the python AST. We do this in the DaCe project: https://github.com/spcl/dace/blob/900cac070c4b083653c672e225...

Handcalcs: Automatically render Latex equations from Python math code

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