# How can I place a displaymath environment and an align* environment side by side?

I have a displaymath environment and an align* environment I would like to display next to each other. My idea was to wrap them in a tabular environment:

\begin{tabular}{c c}
$%math stuff here$
&
\begin{align*}
%laign stuff here
\end{align*}
\end{tabular}


Both environments work fine on their own, but as soon as I add in tabular, the following error starts coming up (repeatedly):

Missing \$ inserted.


I've also tried the multicol environment as suggested in How to place a program and a text side by side?, but that just led to an error like the following:

Overfull \vbox blah blah blah


repeat like 20 times.

I am not able to get past this point. How can I get a displaymath environment and an align* environment to be side by side?

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Two possibilities:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{amsmath}
\begin{document}
\noindent\begin{tabular}{p{0.45\textwidth}p{0.45\textwidth}}
$A = B$
&
\begin{aligned} a&= b \\ c&= d \end{aligned}
\end{tabular}

\noindent\begin{minipage}{0.45\textwidth}
$A = B$
\end{minipage}
\begin{minipage}{0.45\textwidth}
\begin{align*}
a&= b \\
c&= d
\end{align*}
\end{minipage}
\end{document}

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Second one worked, thank you very much! The first one was complaining about me using \0.3em] at the end of rows in align*. – KPthunder Dec 4 '11 at 9:27 @KPthunder You'll notice that I didn't use align* in the first one, but aligned within displaymath. Using \\[0.3em] works fine here. – Torbjørn T. Dec 4 '11 at 9:30 @TorbjørnT. Very good! I added an answer with an align* version, to show the OP that it could be used too, if the & for align is hidden from tabular. – Stefan Kottwitz Dec 4 '11 at 9:38 Also align* works in a p cell in a tabular environment. A trick to make it work, is grouping the align* environment by curly braces, so the & within align does not act like an & for tabular. Even \\[length] works. A modification of Torbjørn's table in this way: \noindent\begin{tabular}{p{0.45\textwidth}p{0.45\textwidth}} \[ A = B
&
{
\begin{align*}
a &= b \\[0.5ex]
c &= d
\end{align*}
}
\end{tabular}

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It is quite possible you need only:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{amsmath}

\begin{document}
\begin{align*}
\begin{aligned}
a &= 1 \\
b &= 1+2 \\
c &= 1+2+3
\end{aligned}
&&
A = B
\end{align*}
\end{document}


Forget complex tabulars and boxes.

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