There are three environments that put LaTeX in math mode:
math
|
For Formulae that appear right in the text. |
displaymath
|
For Formulae that appear on their own line. |
equation
|
The same as the displaymath environment except that it adds an equation number in the right margin. |
The math environment can be used in both paragraph and LR mode,
but the displaymath and equation environments can be used
only in paragraph mode. The math and displaymath
environments are used so often that they have the following short forms:
\(...\) instead of \begin{math}...\end{math}
\[...\] instead of \begin{displaymath}...\end{displaymath}
In fact, the math environment is so common that it has an even
shorter form:
$ ... $ instead of \(...\)