Equations not rendering in JupyterLab 3 "MathJax is not defined"

Jupyter Lab won’t render my math equations in Latex syntax when writing them in markdown with the {equation} format.

I’m running JupyterLab from an Ubuntu remote machine and using it in a windows machine with Google Chrome.

When I check my browser console I get the ReferenceError “MathJax is not defined” as shown below. I have no idea why this is happening.

How did you install JupyterLab? And could you provide a small example? Do you encounter the same problems when you use mybinder.org?

Hey, I installed it normally with conda install -c conda forge as instructed in the documentation. When I write something like $1+2^2=5$ in a markdown cell I expect the cell to render the latex equation (1 + 2² = 5) but it shows up in plain text instead. I’m not familiar with binder but I believe my problem is likely specific to my machine or jupyter installation as I’m able to render equations when using jupyter lab from other machines just fine.

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Thank you for your help.

That simple example you provided should word, you are totally right. I have little idea what could have gone wrong here, but here are some working hypotheses:

Working hypothesis 1: For whatever reason, the installation on the remote machine is broken. I have no idea what are the things that could break but here you need to go back to the “IT defaults”:

  • Have you tried to turn it off and on again?
  • Have you tried to deinstall it cleanly (making sure to delete all the files) and then re-install it?

Because of the SyntaxError, I favor this approach.

Working hypothesis 2: The damage happens somewhere on the network route. Maybe a reverse proxy (using regex?) is going wild and accidentially inserts strings into a file where they don’t belong? Here, you might need to dig deep, i.e. check firewalls, proxies etc. how they affect your traffic. A quick check might be maybe to create an SSH tunnel to circumvent those.

I hope while traveling down one of these paths, you will find some helpful information!

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