Instead of orbiting Earth, the James Webb Space Telescope will orbit the Sun in a special spot beyond the Earth that is a sort of gravitational island. The location is called “L2” (Lagrange Point 2). In this post, I will describe what L2 is, then show how to compute where it is relative to Earth. It’s a terrific example of the power of basic algebra.

This post is about creating, displaying, and publishing documents that have mathematical content. This is a troublesome thing for mathematics and science workers, because most word processing systems treat math as an add-on or an afterthought, if they have any provision for it at all. Even when mathematics is supported, it may be difficult or impossible to do much more than print the document on paper.