Other Utilities

A typewriter-style, bare-bones MathJax previewer that supports a limited number of text formatting options, with very generous output space and large fonts, and few distracting elements. Intended to be used for teaching (either in person for large lecture halls, via projectors; or via Zoom via screen share), or as a quick scratch board for mathematical discussions and brainstorming. Source code available on Gitlab.

Perhaps you would like to subscribe to the Math Department Seminar Announcements on your personal Google Calendar. Unfortunately, each individual seminar has its own iCal feed. And if you are like me, having 9 extra calendar feeds is a bit annoying (for example, if I am travelling and don't want to see the seminars on my calendar, I will have to turn them all off one by one).

Google Calendar unfortunately cannot have one calendar subscribe to multiple iCal feeds... natively. This can be handled through Google Apps Scripts, however, and the GAS-ICS-Sync script by Derek Antrican works pretty well. The link to the left is a slightly modified version of Derek's script, customized to the MSU Math seminar feeds.

To use:

1. Open up the Google Apps Script link, click on the icon with a circled "i" on the top left. Look at the upper right corner, there should be a "Copy" symbol. Click on it to make a copy of the script to your own Google Drive.
2. Edit the settings: there are two lines that you should edit.
   • The list of seminar codes is stored in the array sem_codes. To find the seminar code, go to the seminar announcement page, hover over the seminar you wish to subscribe to. The URL that shows should end in seriesID=XXXX; that number is the seminar code. For example, doing it with the Analysis and PDE seminar you get the code 49.
   • You need to specify which Google Calendar these events will be stored. You should go to Google Calendar and create a new calendar (it is best that you don't pollute your main calendar with all the seminars). And enter on the marked line (see the comments in the Apps Script) the name of your new calendar in quotes. Mine is called "MTH Seminars".
3. In the top middle of the editor pane, there should be a button labelled "Run", next to a "Debug" button, and next to a dropdown list of functions.
   • Make sure that the drop down list is set to "install"
   • Click "Run".

Dictionary file for Gboard (the default Android virtual keyboard by Google) to help input mathematical symbols. To use:

1. Download the zip file; do not decompress.
2. Upload zip file to your Google Drive.
3. On your Android device, open up the settings for Gboard, go to "Dictionary", select "Personal Dictionary", select a language, click on the vertical 3 dots symbol, and select "import".
4. Navigate to the zip file and select.

Notes: Most symbols use their standard LaTeX names, except the slash \ is replaced by qq, to save time from navigating to the symbols menu. So the code for the symbol ð is qqeth (normally it would be \eth). The exception are the Greek letters; they are stored as alpha, beta, vartheta and so on, without the qq- prefix. I didn't have time to type in all LaTeX symbols; just the one I find useful myself. Hence several of the symbols use my personal macro names, instead of standard names (e.g. qqReal, qqComplex, qqSphere etc.). To save time paired delimiters are also defined (qqnorm, qqbraket, etc.). Once the file is loaded please browse through it to edit as you please.