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Basic LaTEX offers excellent mathematical typesetting capabilities for straightforward documents. However, when complex displayed equations or more advanced mathematical constructs are heavily used, something more is needed. Although it is possible to define new commands or environments to ease the burden of typing in formulas, this is not the best solution. In the early nineties the American Mathematical Society (AMS) provided a major package, amsmath, which made the preparation of mathematical documents much less time-consuming and more consistent.1 It forms the core of a collection of packages known as AMS-LaTEX [5] and is the major subject of this chapter. A useful book by George Grätzer [59] also covers these packages in detail.

This chapter describes briefly, and provides examples of, a substantial number of the many features of these packages as well as a few closely related packages; it also gives a few pointers to other relevant packages. In addition, it provides some essential background on mathematical typesetting with TEX. Thus, it covers some of standard LaTEX’s features for mathematical typesetting and layout and contains some general hints on how to typeset mathematical formulas, though these are not the main aims of this chapter. It is also definitely not a comprehensive manual of good practice for typesetting mathematics with LaTEX. Indeed, many of the examples are offered purely for illustration purposes and, therefore, present neither good design nor good mathematics nor necessarily good LaTEX coding.

Advice on how to typeset mathematics according to late 20th century U.S. practice can be found in Ellen Swanson’s Math into Type [187]. Many details concerning how to implement this advice using TEX or, equally, standard LaTEX appear in Chapters 16–18 of Donald Knuth’s The TEXbook [84].

To use the majority of the material described in this chapter, you need to load at least the amsmath or mathtools package in the preamble of your document. If other packages are needed, they are clearly marked in the examples. Detailed installation and usage documentation is included with the individual packages.