Suppose I write a post that contains equations that I like to refer back to later, like this:
$$3^2 + 4^2 = 5^2 \qquad (*)$$ $$3^3 + 4^3 + 5^3 = 6^3 \qquad (**)$$ $$3^4 + 4^4 + 5^4 + 6^4 = 7^4 \qquad (***)$$
In spite of the well known truth of ( * ) and the lesser known but equally valid truth of ( ** ) we have that equation ( *** ) is patently false.
You may note that I put some extra spaces between the stars and the brackets, because otherwise the sentence becomes garbled by Markup:
In spite of the well known truth of () and the lesser known but equally valid truth of () we have that equation () is patently false.
(If you click the edit button you will see that the above weird looking sentence is typed just as you would naively do on a type writer)
My question is twofold:
- How can I get ( * ) without the extra spaces?
- In real life I found that sometimes everything works out just fine without me doing anything special, see e.g. my latest post here. (Update: and the bracket-star-bracket just two lines down in this very question(?!?)) But then at some other places in the same post I had the same problem as above and needed the extra spaces. So my second question is: how is this possible? What is going on here? What determines if I can type (*) or not? It seems arbitrary but it can't be, right?
${*}{*}{*}$
renders as ${*}{*}{*}$ (as compared to$***$
which gives $***$).${\ast}{\ast}{\ast}$
(${\ast}{\ast}{\ast}$) might be a better alternative. $\endgroup$(1)
but rather$(1)$
. $\endgroup$