About us

MathJax is a fiscally sponsored project under the auspices of the NumFOCUS Foundation, which serves as the legal and fiscal umbrella for the MathJax project and several dozen other open-source, scientifically oriented software products.

Originally, MathJax was supported by The MathJax Consortium, a joint venture of the American Mathematical Society (AMS) and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) to advance mathematical and scientific content on the web. We are grateful for the commitment offered by the Consortium for over 10 years, without which MathJax would not exist today.

Core Goals

The core of the MathJax project is the development of its state-of-the-art, open source, JavaScript platform for display of mathematics. Our key design goals are:

High-quality display of mathematics notation in all browsers.

No special browser setup required.

Support for LaTeX, MathML, and other equation markup directly in the HTML source.

An extensible, modular design with a rich API for easy integration into web applications.

Support for accessibility, copy and paste, and other rich functionality.

Interoperability with other applications and math-aware search.

Support for equation conversion outside a browser (e.g., preprocessing on a server).

Advisory Committees

The MathJax Steering Committee meets regularly to advise the MathJax team on its development goals and priorities. We’re grateful for the support of our committee members!

MathJax Steering Committee

Catherine Roberts, AMS

Robert Harington, AMS

Tom Blythe, AMS

Astrid van Hoeydonck, Elsevier

Ken Rawson, IEEE

Ted Kull, SIAM

Jim Crowley, SIAM

Davide Cervone, MathJax

Volker Sorge, MathJax

History

MathJax grew out of the popular jsMath project, an earlier Ajax-based math rendering system developed by Davide Cervone in 2004. In the following years, there were many significant developments relevant for web publication of mathematics: consolidation of browser support for CSS 2.1, Web Font technology, adoption of math accessibility standards, and increasing usage of XML workflows for scientific publication.

In 2009, the AMS, Design Science, and SIAM formed the MathJax Consortium to enable Cervone and others to design MathJax from the ground up as a next-generation platform, while still benefiting from the extensive real-world experience gained from jsMath. Since its initial release in 2010, MathJax has become the gold standard for mathematics on the web.

In 2019, MathJax joined the NumFOCUS family of open-source software products as a fiscally sponsored project. MathJax continues to be supported by the founding sponsors and other partners, as it joins this dynamic community.

Over the years since MathJax was first developed, new web technologies and paradigms emerged, and MathJax was not always easy to incoporate into these new approaches. In 2017, after nearly a decade of use, work on MathJax version 3 was begun, a complete rewrite of MathJax from the ground up using modern techniques. This new version integrates with current toolchains and frameworks, and can run equally well in a browser on a server, or in a stand-alone application. It should form a solid foundation for another decade of MathJax use, and its use of the Typescript language should make contributions from our user community easier to produce and incorporate into MathJax.

The MathJax Team

The MathJax team consists of Davide Cervone and Volker Sorge. Contributors include Christian Lawson-Perfect, Omar Al-Ithawi, and Peter Krautzberger.