When adding articles, comments, etc. to the site, your text input will be processed by an extended version of markdown to produce pleasing visual output that includes links, basic formatting, and images. Markdown is designed to be very easy to read in plain-text and it's syntax is very well documented on the web. If you don't have much experience writing in Markdown, this site allows you to play around. Further information about Markdown syntax can be found here. We've also extended Markdown in two ways that are specific to this site. Please see below for details.

Inline math

We've extended markdown with MathJax to allow support for inline math. As things can get complicated when you mix the two, we recommend the following when you need to write math:

To have inline tex, do:

$ \sum_{n=1}^\infty {1\over n^2} = {\pi^2\over 6} $

which will display like: ∑n=1∞1n2=π26\sum_{n=1}^\infty {1\over n^2} = {\pi^2\over 6}

. For paragraph math, do:

$$
	\sum_{n=1}^\infty {1\over n^2} = {\pi^2\over 6}
$$

Which will look like:

∑n=1∞1n2=π26 \sum_{n=1}^\infty {1\over n^2} = {\pi^2\over 6}

To do a literal $, do \$

Internal site links

Rather than use full web urls for content on the CS184 web site, we offer convenient shortcuts to help you refer to pages on the CS184 site. (It's very much like the special syntax for internal links on a wiki.) We highly encourage you to use this short format when linking to content on the site, because if the site's URLs ever change (and they almost certainly will) your links will remain valid. Here are some examples of using the CS184-specific short syntax in the url part of regular Markdown links. (The url part of a Markdown link definition is the part inside the parenthesis. The text inside the brackets is just how the link will be displayed during HTML rendering. For more on Markdown links, visit the references given at the top of this page.)

To generate a link to lecture 1, use:

[lecture 1](classlecture:intro)

If you want to know the short name of a lecture (e.g., intro above), just go visit the lecture on the site. You'll be able to read the short name of a lecture right out of it's url. For example, lecture 1's url is lecture/intro.

To generate a link to lecture 1, slide 1, use:

[lecture 1, slide 1](classlecture:intro[slide_001])

As with links to lectures, if you want to know the name of a slide, just take a look at the slide's url. All lecture slide urls on the site are of the form lecture/lecturename/slidename.

Currently, articles don't have short names, only numerical ids. To generate a link to article 1, use:

[article 1](classarticle:1)

Latex Math

If you have not used Latex for math before, here's a brief tutorial containing the most commonly used math expressions in Latex.

If the expression you are looking for is not found in the page above, here's a more comprehensive reference.

Alternatively, Googling latex <description of math symbol> is usually helpful as well.