How do you format equations in MLA?

Question

I'm currently writing an acedemic paper on the topic of computation time. I have to include several equations similar to the following:

O(N²)

I am wondering if there is any special formatting or citing I would have to do for the above equation if I am writing this paper in MLA style.

Answer 1

There are a set of rules to go by when writing equations into an academic paper. Depending on the kind of equation, it'll be one of three types:

• In-line equations
• Displayed, but unnumbered, equations
• Displayed and numbered equations

In this case, O(N²) is an In-line equation. Given that, the only changes to be done would be to italicize the characters 'O' and 'N'. Rather than writing out O(N²), you should instead use O(N²).

For further reading on this topic, a useful PDF can be found here.