Math mode

I had an e-mail recently pointing out that I don’t say much about TeX’s math mode in my blog. I guess that this is mainly because as a chemist I don’t do anything particularly advanced. So things like

\begin{document}
\usepackage{fixltx2e} % \( and \) are not robust otherwise
\begin{document}
\( y = mx + c \)
\end{document}

are really as complex as I ever need to go!

Of course, occasionally I need to look something more complex up. I think like most people I tend to reach for the excellent Math Mode by Herbert Voß. The basic advice I tend to remember is to load the amsmath package, as it does ‘lots of clever stuff’!