In my view, any document with a substantial amount of mathematics should load the packages from AMS-TeX. Hence, most of my document's preambles contain
\usepackage{amsmath, amsthm, amssymb, amsfonts}
(I could add to that the non-AMS mathtools
, etc.). What do each of those packages do? Do I really need to list all of them, or do some of them load others? In particular, does any package load all of them, so that I can simply type
\usepackage{ams-everything}
shorter than the current list?
Best Answer
Most of the answer was extracted from the Introduction sections of the documentation of
amsmath
andamsthm
:amsmath
provides miscellaneous enhancements for improving the information structure and printed output of documents containing mathematical formulas. Some of the features provided by this package are:\DeclareMathOperator
command (through the auxiliary packageamsopn
) to define new "operator name" commands analogous to\sin
and\lim
, including proper side spacing and automatic selection of the correct font style and size (even when used in sub- or superscripts).eqnarray
environment to make various kinds of equation arrangements easier to write.eqnarray
).equation
environment (unlikeeqnarray
).tag
command, an easy way to substitute a variant equation number for a given equation instead of the automatically supplied number.\text
command (through the auxiliary packageamstext
) for typesetting a fragment of text inside a display.eqref
command, which provides formatting for equation referencesamsthm
helps to define theorem-like structures; the introduction to the documentation gives a nice concise description of the package:amssymb
provides an extended symbol collection. For example, after loadingamssymb
you have the following additional binary relation symbols:\barwedge
,\boxdot
,\boxminus
,\boxplus
,\boxtimes
,\Cap
,\Cup
(and many more), the arrow\leadsto
, and some other symbols such as\Box
and\Diamond
. Another useful feature is the\mathbb
command to produce blackboard bold charactersSince
amssymb
internally loadsamsfonts
, it's enough to load the former.As far as I know, there's not a single package loading
amsmath
,amsthm
, andamssymb
so all three of them will have to be loaded when using the standard classes (book
,report
,article
).If one of the document classes of the AMS-collection (
amsbook
,amsart
) is being used, there's no need to loadamsmath
, oramsthm
;amssymb
will have to be explicitly loaded.