At a 24-hour Hackathon in early 2014, I worked with Stephen Just and Jacob Ortt to re-create the elementary school fun of Mad Minutes. The idea was that you are presented with quickly solveable Calculus problems, and for every problem solved, you get an “award” in the form of an XKCD-style comic.

Our web-app was centered around SymPy for the symbolic math checking. The idea was to use MathDox for WYSIWYG input, SymPy for checking, and output using a LaTeX to HTML engine.

We ran into a problem when none of the WYSIWYG math input methods produced anything that SymPy could use, since SymPy takes in valid Python expressions. Our library of choice output only MathML. Thankfully, we found an XLST transform that could make MathML into LaTeX. With some work, Stephen was able to make it produce valid expressions for the limited subset of the math we needed to parse

This project can be seen on GitHub.

Try out FastMath here.