How to Write Math Equations on Reddit Without Losing Your Mind

If you’ve ever tried posting a math question—or worse, answering one—on Reddit, you’ve probably had this moment: you type out a clean LaTeX expression like E = mc^{2} hit “post,” and Reddit responds with something that looks like your cat walked across the keyboard. Reddit is fantastic for deep discussions, but it has zero native support for LaTeX. Not in comments, not in posts, not even in the “fancy” editor on new Reddit. If you’ve ever browsed r/math, r/askphysics, r/learnmath, or even r/chemhelp, you’ll notice people rely on a strange mix of Unicode symbols, code blocks, and plain text hacks to express pretty basic math.

Over the years, after writing way too many equations on Reddit myself, I’ve learned what actually works—and what blows up on mobile or gets destroyed by Reddit’s Markdown parser. This post is basically a summary of that hard-earned experience.

Reddit’s formatting engine is built around Markdown, not MathJax. Adding LaTeX support would slow down rendering, complicate moderation, and break half the third-party apps. So the platform just... never added it.

That’s why Reddit math posts feel like working with old-school ASCII: users invent their own conventions, copy weird Unicode characters, and occasionally upload screenshots of equations because text formatting simply can’t capture what they want.

It’s messy, but it’s survivable once you know the tricks.

For simple formulas, Unicode is hands-down the easiest and most readable approach.

• When you write: x² + y³ = z⁴
• H₂O
• θ = 2πr

...it just works. No rendering issues. No funky spacing. No special editor.

The problem is that almost nobody knows how to type superscripts or subscripts quickly. Most people Google “superscript 2,” copy it from Wikipedia, and paste it in. Then they do that again for every exponent, every index, every Greek letter. After the third or fourth equation, you start questioning your life choices.

At some point I got tired of hunting down characters manually and switched to a little helper tool—Superscript Generator—which converts normal characters into Unicode superscript/subscript versions. It sounds trivial, but when you’re writing a whole derivation in a Reddit comment, this tool saves a ridiculous amount of time. It also keeps formatting consistent so your post doesn’t look like a ransom note made of mismatched Unicode.

Once you try to write something like

• an integral
• a summation
• a limit
• or God forbid, a matrix

Unicode becomes basically useless.

Reddit will not render: \int_{0}^{\infty} e^{-x^2} dx

It just stays as text. No pretty typesettings. No vertical fractions. No spacing.

When your equation grows past one line, you have only two realistic options.

This is what most long-time math posters end up doing. You write your LaTeX somewhere else—Overleaf, Mathcha, whatever—export a PNG, then upload it.

It’s not elegant, but it works. And it’s the only way to show full LaTeX on Reddit.

Pros:

• looks perfect everywhere
• supports every symbol imaginable
• no formatting surprises

Cons:

• not searchable
• not accessible to screen readers
• sometimes gets compressed by Reddit

If you go this route, export images at 2× resolution so text doesn’t turn blurry on mobile.

Reddit code blocks preserve spacing, which is weirdly useful for math structure. You can align terms, create fake matrices, or show steps in a derivation without everything collapsing.

Example:

d/dx (x^2 + 3x + 1) = 2x + 3

Or:

[ 1    2 ] [ 3    4 ]

It’s not real math rendering, but it’s surprisingly readable. And unlike images, it looks fine in both dark and light mode.

After years of posting math on Reddit and seeing what newcomers struggle with, here’s the workflow that causes the fewest headaches:

And if you’re doing a lot of single-line expressions, the Unicode approach gets dramatically easier if you use a converter rather than manually hunting for characters. That’s where tools like Superscript Generator genuinely help—not as some SEO gimmick but because Reddit’s interface gives you no easy way to type ₙ, ³, ₀, or even a clean θ.

Reddit isn’t built for math, but math communities have been hacking around the limitations for more than a decade, and the “unofficial standards” are surprisingly reliable once you get used to them.

Use Unicode for quick, inline math.

Use code blocks for structure. Use images when you need full LaTeX power.

And if you’re writing a lot of equations, don’t torture yourself with manual superscript/subscript copying—just automate it.That’s the sane, real-world way to write math on Reddit without fighting the platform every step of the way.