5

I would like to have a left brace around equations in the align environment. How can I do this?

(I would like to use this environment because I would like to number each individual equation to be able to refer to it.)

So my code looks like this, and I want to have a curly brace on the left around the the 3 equations. How can I do this?

\begin{align}
& F= ma \\
& v= at \\
& W= F s
\end{align}

EDIT: I didn't want to use the empheq package, because I get the error ''empheq.sty'' not found.

student441
  • 443

1 Answers1

8

I wouldn't use an align environment for this job. Instead, I suggest you use the empheq package and its eponymous environment.

enter image description here

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{empheq}
\begin{document}
\begin{empheq}[left = \empheqlbrace]{align}
               F &= ma\\
               v &= at\\
               W &= Fs
\end{empheq}
\end{document}
Mico
  • 506,678
  • Thank you. But I get the error ''empheq.sty not found'' if I try to compile your code. How can I fix this? – student441 May 30 '15 at 12:32
  • I already tried to put the file empheq.sty in the folder I compile into. But this didn't work unfortunately... – student441 May 30 '15 at 12:35
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    Which distribution do you use? – Bernard May 30 '15 at 12:43
  • @Bernard I compile with Texmaker. (Does this answer your question? I don't know exactly what you mean with distribution..) – student441 May 30 '15 at 12:50
  • @student441 - TeXmaker is the front end, not the TeX program itself. A TeX distribution would be something like TeXLive or MikTeX. – Mico May 30 '15 at 13:11
  • @student441 See http://www.seanallred.com/tex/2015/05/25/tex-terminology.html – Sean Allred May 30 '15 at 13:47
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    @student441 Package empheq is part of mathtools, which is available both in TeX Live and MiKTeX. – Heiko Oberdiek May 30 '15 at 13:50
  • @Mico one question: if I want to not have the equation tags (i.e. '(1)', '(2)', '(3)' in this case), what should I do? – JpW Aug 24 '20 at 10:27
  • Ah problem solved @Mico , turns out I just need to write align* ! – JpW Aug 24 '20 at 10:36
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    @JpW - Using an empheq environment if the equations needn't be numbered individually is probably overkill. Try something like \documentclass{article} \usepackage{amsmath} \begin{document} \[ \left\{ \begin{aligned} F &= ma\\ v &= at\\ W &= Fs \end{aligned} \right. \] \end{document}. – Mico Aug 24 '20 at 11:38