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How To Use LaTeX In Jupyter Notebook

Learn how to use LaTeX in Jupyter Notebook for creating professional-looking scientific reports and papers with mathematical equations and symbols.
By Saturn Cloud | | Miscellaneous | Updated:

As a data scientist, you may find yourself needing to write technical reports or papers that require mathematical equations and symbols. LaTeX is a typesetting language commonly used in academia to write scientific papers, reports, and books. It is known for its ability to handle complex mathematical equations and symbols. In this blog post, we will explore how to use LaTeX in Jupyter Notebook.

Struggling to use LaTeX in Jupyter Notebook? Get Jupyter notebooks online for free at Saturn Cloud.

What is a Jupyter Notebook?

Jupyter Notebook is an open-source web application that allows you to create and share documents that contain live code, equations, visualizations, and narrative text. It supports over 40 programming languages, including Python, R, and Julia. Jupyter Notebook is a popular tool among data scientists for data analysis, visualization, and machine learning.

How to Install LaTeX in a Jupyter Notebook?

Before we dive into how to use LaTeX in Jupyter Notebook, we need to make sure that LaTeX is installed on our system. LaTeX is not included in the standard installation of Jupyter Notebook. Therefore, we need to install it separately.

There are several ways to install LaTeX on your system, depending on your operating system. For Windows users, you can download and install MiKTeX, a free distribution of LaTeX for Windows. For macOS users, you can install MacTeX, a free distribution of LaTeX for macOS. For Linux users, you can install TeX Live, a comprehensive distribution of LaTeX for Linux.

Once you have installed LaTeX on your system, you need to install the nbconvert package, which is a Jupyter Notebook package that allows you to convert your notebook to various formats, including PDF. You can install the nbconvert package using pip, a package manager for Python. Open your terminal or command prompt and type the following command:

pip install nbconvert

How to Use LaTeX in Jupyter Notebook?

Now that we have installed LaTeX and the nbconvert package, we can start using LaTeX in Jupyter Notebook. Jupyter Notebook supports LaTeX syntax for mathematical equations and symbols.

To use LaTeX in Jupyter Notebook, you need to create a new Markdown cell by clicking on the + button in the toolbar, it will create a Code cell as default.

Alt text

You can change the cell to a Markdown cell by clicking Cell, Cell Type and choosing Markdown from the dropdown menu (You can also simply press M to change the current cell to a Markdown Cell). In the Markdown cell, you can type your text and LaTeX syntax for mathematical equations and symbols.

Alt text

For example, you can write the following LaTeX syntax to create a mathematical equation:

$$
f(x) = \int_{-\infty}^{\infty} e^{-x^2} dx
$$

This will create the following mathematical equation:

Alt text

You can find a comprehensive list of LaTeX symbols and syntax in the LaTeX Wikibook.

How to Convert a Jupyter Notebook to PDF with LaTeX?

Now that we have written our report or paper in Jupyter Notebook using LaTeX syntax, we can convert it to PDF using the nbconvert package. The nbconvert package allows you to convert your notebook to various formats, including PDF, HTML, and LaTeX.

To convert your Jupyter Notebook to PDF, you need to open your terminal or command prompt and navigate to the directory where your notebook is located. Then, type the following command:

jupyter nbconvert --to pdf notebook.ipynb

Replace notebook.ipynb with the name of your notebook file. This will convert your notebook to PDF and save it in the same directory as your notebook file.

Struggling to use LaTeX in Jupyter Notebook? Get Jupyter notebooks online for free at Saturn Cloud.

Conclusion

In this blog post, we have explored how to use LaTeX in Jupyter Notebook. We have learned how to install LaTeX on our system, how to use LaTeX syntax for mathematical equations and symbols in Jupyter Notebook, and how to convert our notebook to PDF using the nbconvert package.

LaTeX is a powerful tool for writing technical reports and papers that require mathematical equations and symbols. Jupyter Notebook is a popular tool among data scientists for data analysis, visualization, and machine learning. By combining LaTeX and Jupyter Notebook, we can create professional-looking reports and papers that are easy to share and reproduce.

References

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