| In recent years, with the vigorous development of the Internet technology and computer, notebook computer, the popularity of tablet computers, mobile phones and other intelligent electronic equipment, various types of online education software is becoming more and more popular.The current mathematics footprint has been throughout all areas of human knowledge system, computer has become the one of the important ways to study mathematics information. Currently the development of mathematics education based on computer software is also more and more widely, but on the web page of applied mathematics formula is quite difficult, mainly due to the two dimensional mathematical formula with complex structure, and its description and layout are very complicated. Mathematical formula is a complex structure composed of mathematical symbols, in traditional paper writing, each mathematical formula is a two-dimensional structure which composed of multiple mathematical symbols. We can freely control the size and location of each symbol in paper writing, however, in the computer, we can only use existing character on the keyboard to input one-dimensional string representation of a mathematical formula, and we cant control two-dimensional structure of mathematical formula.Therefore how to input a mathematical formula and how to display or storage or transfer mathematical formula on computer is a very important studies, we need a syntax format to input and show mathematical formulas.In all methods of mathematical expressions input on computer, linear input methods have more users for its high input efficient. The 6 existed linear input methods for mathematical formula, including ASCIIMathML, LaTeX, UnicodeMath, Mathematic, Maple, and Maxima are analyzed on digitals, Greek alphabets, operators, functions in the paper. A new linear input method, Mathematical Extended Infix Language (MEIL), is designed for users especially for students and teachers who are learning and teaching elementary mathematics. The paper also introduces an experiment for comparing 6 existed linear input methods and MEIL. In seven methods, MEIL requires the least number of characters for inputting 20 same mathematical formula. Furthermore the error rates of Maxima and MEIL are lower than other 5 methods in the experiment. As shown in the experiment results, MEIL is an efficient, convenient and flexible linear input method for expressions of elementary mathematics. |
