It's more free maths!

August 2, 2008 1:00 AM

Online Encyclopedia of MathematicsEdited by Michiel Hazewinkel (CWI, Amsterdam), and originaly published in dead tree form in 2002, now free to browse and poke into.

Seems to have been made available online by Springer-Verlag for 2 years or so, and somehow I missed it all this time until I stumbled on it during a somewhat obscure googling for a calculus question over AskMe. It seems to lack a search functionality, which is a pity.

"The Online Encyclopaedia of Mathematics is the most up-to-date and comprehensive English-language graduate-level reference work in the field of mathematics today. This online edition comprises more than 8,000 entries and illuminates nearly 50,000 notions in mathematics. The Encyclopaedia of Mathematics is updated on a regular basis to remain a quick, precise source of reference to mathematical definitions, concepts, explanations, surveys, examples, terminology and methods, which will prove useful for all mathematicians and other scientists who encounter mathematics in their work. "

posted by Iosephus (7 comments total)

Well, planetmath has somewhat nicer graphics, and mathworld is better organized (categories and hierarchies) as opposed to alphabetic lists of entries.
posted by oonh at 1:55 AM on August 2, 2008

Don't dismiss this so quickly!

Does mathworld have an article on Nikolsky spaces? On Satake compactification?

Nicer graphics and searchability is something you can hire an intern to do.
posted by vacapinta at 2:15 AM on August 2, 2008

Let's enumerate the failure:

• No search?
• ALPHABETICAL BROWSING?
• Minimal interlinking?
• No links to references?
• No outbound links?
• Broken internal hyperlinks highlighted yellow with void javascript in the href?
• Non-meaningful-urls?
• All pages are titled "Springer Online Reference Works"?
• Shitty inline aliased pngs, with no meaningful URLs, markup, or even alt text for ALL math — instead of even simple Unicode (not even entities!) much less MathML or TeX?

SPRINGER "EVIL" VERLAG?

Yes, at least it doesn't have a "The Peano axioms in popular culture" subheading, I'll give it that. But I'll never find it in a search, so that doesn't matter.
posted by blasdelf at 3:48 AM on August 2, 2008 [2 favorites]

All or none of the above, possibly, maybe, (it's beyond my ken). I just wanted to say, Hi! Iosephus
posted by tellurian at 7:07 AM on August 2, 2008

You forgot: no final keyword index! If you're going to be picky, -be- picky. (I kiiiid, I kiiid, I'm also dissapointed at the lack of proper webification, it's a very basic ebook structure, yes. I think the content makes up for it, though. Or almost. I think I just found that some of the funny javascript only works on IE. Sigh.)

(And hi! back there...)
posted by Iosephus at 8:28 AM on August 2, 2008

This fails as an encyclopedia. In that I have some math education and have a tough time reading this. This is clearly a technical reference if you haven't taken Set Theory or Abstract Algebra or Real Analysis this reference is simply less useful than Wikipedia or mathworld. Its an encyclopedia folks your supposed to be able to read it and gain complete knowledge, I have to be able to read it.
posted by Rubbstone at 9:34 AM on August 2, 2008

For a preview of NIST's newest contribution check out the Digital Library of Mathematical Functions. Lots of links, well referenced, MathML, Tex, & PNG equation rendering and other goodness.
posted by khedron at 7:26 PM on August 2, 2008