Some Very Useful Tools

Thought I’d do a post with links to some tools I use, mostly with the ease and panache of the above orangutan.

Some of this is specific to blogging using Squarespace, and this is mostly so that I have the links as I’ll probably forget where some of this stuff is at some point. But some of it could be more generally useful!

Latex to Image

This is terrific for creating mathematical expressions in places that don’t natively support them (cough Squarespace cough). Instead, you type your latex expression here and it generates an image you can import. It’s simple but I use this all the time!

Cutting and Pasting Unicode Characters

If your text editor (again, Squarespace) doesn’t have native support for things like superscripts, subscripts, Greek letters, etc., have no fear — you can cut and paste all these goodies.

Creating Cool Images From Text

There are a lot of these available, but the ones I tend to use most are the Microsoft one, and the deepai.org one.

A List of Cool Graphs

Here is a list of cool graphs that you can stare at! Hours of horrid fun. One cool thing is it lists if the graph is non-planar — this is important for Tangled — in order to have hard instances we need non-planar graphs. Actually, I’m not 100% sure about this — there are polynomial time solvers for ground states in this case, but as Tangled is a sampling over distributions problem this might not help? Anyway, it’s probably true that non-planar graphs generate harder problems.

Removing Backgrounds From Images

This is super useful and this website does this very well.