Trying to get LaTeX work with Anki
http://ankisrs.net/docs/manual.html#installing-and-assumed-knowledge


  Anki’s LaTeX support is not turn-key: it is assumed that you know how to use LaTeX already, and that you have it installed. If you have
  no experience with LaTeX, please consult one of the many guides
  available on the internet. If you are having trouble with markup,
  please ask on a LaTeX forum.
  
  To install LaTeX, on Windows use MiKTeX; on OSX use MacTex, and on
  Linux use your distro’s package manager. Dvipng must also be
  installed.
  
  Note On Windows, go to Settings in MikTek’s maintenance window, and
  make sure "Install missing packages on the fly" is set to "No", not to
  "Ask me first". If you continue to have difficulties, one user
  reported that running Anki as an administrator until all the packages
  were fetched helped. 
  
  
    Note On OSX, LaTeX has only been tested with MacTex and BasicTex. If
    you use BasicTex, you need to install dvipng separately, with the
    following command: 
    
    
      sudo tlmgr update --self; sudo tlmgr install dvipng
    
    
    The command may not be on the path, so you may need to provide the
    full path, eg /usr/local/texlive/2014basic/bin/x86_64-darwin/tlmgr.
  
  
  Note If you are not using the above LaTeX packages, you will need to
  use the "edit LaTeX" add-on to specify the full path to latex and
  dvipng.


Superuser access needed, not just admin.  

P.S. It would be great if someone with sufficient rep link this answer to the Apple Stack Exchange question!  Even though we would be quite a few years late to answering user21373 's query :P