Quite some time ago, I was made aware of a useful feature featured in Google's charts API. The document service provided by Google provides an equation editor which is actually a friendly way to interface with TeX/LaTeX. It's possible to generate your own equations this way and share them using standard LaTeX syntax for math equations. For example, the definition of a derivative of a function at point a:
Or perhaps the definition of the mathematical constant e:
For many involved in authoring papers in scientific fields or in mathematics, LaTeX often becomes the typesetting method of choice. Even in the face of growing competition provided by equation editors in Microsoft Word and OpenOffice.org Writer, well-typeset documents produced by LaTeX still thrive. Having a simple way to generate LaTeX and share it could be useful for discussions by email where sharing some cryptic looking syntax such as:
\lim_{x\to\infty}\left(1+\frac{1}{n}\right)^n
Could be cumbersome. It's also a heck of a lot faster than generating your own images and uploading them (though if you must do this, you might want to try Ekee. A word of warning: the string that you send the charts API to generate an image cannot be larger than 200 characters. It's suited for generating single equations, but not for creating a series of them.