mscharrer

Wolfram works with the full mathematical expression tree. It works very well in practice but the equality test is undecidable in general.

I ran into this issue once while trying to render the Mandelbrot set while learning Haskell. It defaulted to a rational type based on two bignum integers with unlimited precision.

With every Mandelbrot iteration* the integers doubled in size, producing exponential complexity. With 100 iterations this essentially means that the program never completes and even runs out of memory at some point.

The newbie-friendly feature turned out to be not so friendly.

* complex z_{n+1} = z_n^2 + c

> Nothing is mining the web for maths, and semantic markup for maths buys you nothing.

I find that rather unfortunate. A math search engine that find sites with equivalent formulae (or segments) would be quite useful to me.

Of course, that can probably made to work with image alt tags containing latex code.