Convert background document to Markdown

[garrison]

GitHub now supports equations in Markdown. There are still a few issues in the preview, but it's already looking pretty good.

In any case, here's the quick script that I used to convert from the Jupyter notebook:

import json

with open("quantum_relaxations.ipynb") as f:
    d = json.loads(f.read())

cells = d["cells"]

assert set(c["cell_type"] for c in cells) == set(["markdown"])

md = "\n\n".join("".join(c["source"]) for c in cells)

print(md)

Summary

Details and comments

[garrison]

The main thing I've noticed that is odd about the preview (and inconsistent with how equations work in LaTeX and in Jupyter) is that $\{0,1\}$ renders as ${0,1}$. If we want the braces to appear, we have to double escape with two backslashes: $\\{0,1\\}$ renders as $\{0,1\}$.

This is easy enough to change, but I have to wonder if GitHub will notice and "fix" this in the near future.

EDIT: further discussion here