Apr 20, 2011  A way to create equations and use them in Pages on a Mac.

If you dont have AppleWorks, then Grapher in the Utilities folder might be useful.
Create the equation in Grapher, copy and paste into Pages.

Or if you know LaTeX you could use something like Equation Service (I think there are other similar programs) which gives you a very pretty pdf that you can scale any way you want in your document.

LaTeXiT embeds the original LaTeX source code line in the PDF. So, even if the equation is no longer in it's history window you can use copy/paste or drag & drop to re-edit a PDF equation in LaTeXiT's window. The right-click feature is probably Outliner's option to edit the graphic in the program that created it.

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I highly recommend LaTeXiT as well, mostly because of one essential feature that no other equation-creators seem to have: it generates equations at any user-specified font size.
If you plan to create many equations and are placing them inline into a Pages document or stacking them in a Keynote document, resizing each with a mouse is painful and you'll never seem to get things to look professional. Setting the size at the source solves this problem.
Oh yeah, and LaTeXiT's history feature is excellent, too.

You can also use grapher, a wonderful application part of macosx since the begining of it and buried in Application/Utility.
From it you can copy and paste in PDFD, TIFF and even in LaTeX and nice graphics of your favorite equations.

I'll add my 2c for grapher, which produces scaleable images, has great built-ins that you can copy (parametric curves, bessel functions, fourier transforms etc are located under examples) and does not require the use of LaTex, which seems an extraordinarily un-MAC approach to computing. In fact, we are using it to produce a book chapter, and using Grapher equations is easier than using the build-in equation editor in Word. Let alone for use inside Pages. Just ctrl-click in the equation bar and export in lots of useful formats....

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Pages is essentially worthless for any work requiring more than a handful of equations and thus requiring automatic numbering and renumbering. Ditto for tables, figures, etc. It is simply an inappropriate tool for such uses.
It befuddles me over and over when word processors omit such a basic and easily-implemented (and easily-used) capability.
Maybe someone can tell me a workaround—I'd be glad to hear it.
On another note, MathMagic is currently the best GUI-based equation setter available for the Macintosh. Equation Editor and MathType have sucked for a long time in not giving high quality results; I haven't used them for a long time so tell me I'm wrong. Last I checked, Equation Editor crashed a lot.
And don't forget the venerable MathEQ (né Expressionist), a very early entry from the late 1980's which is still available and still puts out extremely high quality stuff. While you're on their web site, be sure to pick up the cream of the computer mathematics programs, Live Math (né Theorist).
TeX and LaTeX are of course the epitome in terms of typesetting quality (thanks, Prof. Knuth) but the mark-up language must be mastered first. As others have mentioned, some of the alternatives (including MathMagic) export LaTeX code, if you don't mind the extra steps.

AppleWorks is still kicking !!

Doing a Get Info on AppleWork's Equation Editor, it shows up as a Classic application. Those Intel Macs will have a tough time with this ...

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There are two Equation Editors. The one that is in the Carbon folder is Mac OS X version that should work on Intel Macs although I cannot test this.

And so it is. I thank you for pointing that out. Never dawned on me to look any further ...

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To those who worry about the Intel Macs being unable to run the equation editor, I must point out that there is a carbon version of that editor, which also came with Appleworks. That works fine, and since it is not really a CPU intensive application, the performance reduction is not noticeable. Thank God for Rosetta!
The Equation editor also allows the user to specify the actual font sizes for all functions (EquationEditorMenu>Size>Define), so they do not have to be resized, it is just nice that they can be.
And I agree that word processors should handle (and number) equations in some user friendly way, but I am not holding my breath, and since I am getting on a bit, I'd rather do that by hand than learn to use some new powerful tool. You heard about old dogs and new tricks ;-!
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Georges