NIST Publishes Preview of Math Reference

An anonymous reader writes "Abramowitz & Stegun has been one of the most authoritative references for special functions and engineering mathematics since the 1960s, when it was published by the US Bureau of Standards (now NIST). NIST has been working on an freely-available online updated version to this legendary reference for years. A preview of the digital library of mathematical functions (which uses MathML and requires some of its fonts) is now available from NIST's website."

Comments

Yeesh.

[gardyloo]

Yes, the summary is correct: the preview is available now. However, it's been available for at least a year and a half, and perhaps much longer than that. I can't remember exactly when it was put up; I visited it almost immediately after it appeared, but was quickly disenchanted with the supplied content and ended up using the original A&S for my grad school work.

Re:Yeesh.

[gardyloo]

Huh. At least 2001: http://cio.nist.gov/esd/emaildir/lists/opsftalk/msg00011.html

Re:Yeesh.

[CaseCrash]

And they only seem to have 5 of the 38 sections up still :P

Re:Yeesh.

[richg74]

Yes, it's been up for a while. I know this kind of project always takes a while, but I do hope they can get it / keep it moving. I got my first copy of the original Handbook of Mathematical Functions, often referred to as "the AMS-55" for its catalog number, at the end of 1970, just after its 9th printing. (I was an undergrad at the time.) It's one of a handful of books that's always been handy on my office bookshelf, along with Don Knuth's Art of Computer Programming and a few others.

Random aside from the You-Know-You're-Getting-Old department: After a recent office move, I was sorting through some boxes of old stuff, and found my K&E slide rule. One of our young guys was really fascinated; he said he had never seen one. He was even more amazed that I knew how to use it. ;-)

Re:Yeesh.

[ApproachingLinux]

and this reference in Oct 99

Re:Yeesh.

[gr3kgr33n]

Its taking so long because the purist mathematicians can't see that their services are needed by those other professions

Re:Yeesh.

[scruffie]

Until recently, it was only the Airy function section that was up.

Re:Yeesh.

[Panaflex]

Was it an iSlide?

Sorry... couldn't resist!!

Re:Yeesh.

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Hmm, I would expect a category theorist to peek at the mathematician from the very right border of the picture...

Re:Yeesh.

[Dice]

Yes, this is woefully incomplete. No Bessel, Legendre, hypergeometric, or pretty much anything else that's actually useful. I must have spent about half of my senior year in the library with a copy of A&S flipping through recurrence relations and trying to get terms to cancel or go to zero ;)

About time!

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the most exciting news I've read all day!

MathML

[bcrowell]

It's really a shame that mathml is so poorly supported in browsers. There's basically no practical, reasonable way to do write a single xhtml page that will do something reasonable in most browsers and display inline mathml. Firefox requires the file to have extension .xhtml, and standards say to serve it as application/xhtml+xml; but if you do this, a default install of IE will display a file download dialog, with a warning that "some files can harm your computer." IE wants it served as text/html, and will only display the mathml if the user has installed the MathPlayer plugin. The MathPlayer plugin also implements mathml in way that isn't standards-compliant. The bare minimum you really need is:

• The majority of users, who have IE with no plugin, should see some kind of graceful degradation.
• Firefox users should see the math displayed correctly.
• The tiny minority of users who have MathPlayer+IE should see the math displayed correctly.

Unfortunately, you just can't accomplish this by any reasonable technique. The technique I've ended up using for the web browser version of my own physics textbooks is to use mod_rewrite to serve mathml to Firefox 3+ users, and serve a version with bitmapped renderings of the equations to everyone else. This also seems to be what DLMF has done. What a disaster.

Re:MathML

[Martin Blank]

Has this support level changed in the IE8 beta?

Re:MathML

[Thyrsus]

In case anyone else is trying to see these in Firefox on Fedora 8, the instructions at the Mozilla site were incomplete and took me down several blind alleys. What worked for me:

* Download these specific Mathematica fonts:
http://support.wolfram.com/mathematica/systems/windows/general/files/MathFonts_TrueType_41.exe

Don't worry about the self extraction. Create a directory (I named mine "mathematica"); cd there and run "unzip /path/to/MathFonts_TrueType_41.exe" (give the full path name). In that directory, first run "mkfontscale", then "mkfontdir".

At this point, I chose to make the fonts available by default for anyone on the system, so I copied the directory: "cd ..; sudo cp -r mathematica /usr/share/fonts/mathematica" and "sudo ln -s /usr/share/fonts/mathematica /etc/X11/fontpath.d"
followed by "xset fp rehash".

I'm not convinced it was necessary, but I also added this line to my $HOME/.mozilla/????????.default/prefs.js file:

user_pref("font.mathfont-family", "Math1, Math2, Math4, Symbol");

Re:MathML

[bcrowell]

As far as I can tell, MS has no intention ever to support xhtml, which means it can never properly support inline mathml. Essentially a lot of people are treating xhtml as a failure, and focusing on html 5 instead. The problem with that is that it makes it impossible to support inline mathml or svg.

Re:MathML

[Excors]

HTML 5 recently added inline MathML support, and temporarily defined inline SVG too (but then removed that since the SVG Working Group didn't like it). So you can write an HTML document like

<!DOCTYPE html>
<title>MathML test</title>
<p>Here's an equation: <math><msup><mi>e</mi><mrow><mi>i</mi><mi>&pi;</mi></mrow></msup><mo>+</mo><mn>1</mn><mo>=</mo><mn>0</mn></math>

and send it as normal text/html, and (if this was implemented anywhere yet, which it isn't) it would work properly. HTML 5 doesn't allow arbitrary extension languages, but MathML and SVG were considered part of the 'web platform' and it was worth extending the HTML parser specifically to handle them.

Re:MathML

[PaulTopping]

I agree that MathML support in browsers is not what it could be. However, I feel the need to argue the case for our MathPlayer plugin. It works just fine and is as standards compliant as IE lets it be. There are guidelines for serving up MathML in a way that is compatible with both IE and FF on our website: www.dessci.com/mathplayer. While making IE properly display math takes downloading and installing a small plugin, makeing Firefox properly display math takes downloading and installing fonts. Do you think the poor student who can't see the math on pages cares which of these things they have to do? Finally, based on comments here, installing the fonts is the harder task of the two. Paul Topping, Design Science, Inc.

Re:MathML

[bcrowell]

It works just fine and is as standards compliant as IE lets it be.

I realize that MS's poor support for the standard isn't your fault, but basically IE doesn't support xhtml in any standard way, and doesn't make it possible for mathml to be supported in a standard way by third-party developers like you.

There are guidelines for serving up MathML in a way that is compatible with both IE and FF on our website: www.dessci.com/mathplayer.

Yes, but IIRC it's a technique that violates standards, and it doesn't pass the test I described above of behaving well (possibly with degradation) in the three most important cases: a default install of IE, FF with mathml support, and IE with mathplayer. If you have a single html or xhtml file that passes that three-part test, when served with a single filename, I'd honestly be very, very happy to see it, because it would solve a lot of problems for me. (I believe there is a technique that the w3c suggests that does this, but it uses CSS tricks in an incredibly obscure, complex, and ugly way, and I think it's different from what your site suggests.)

While making IE properly display math takes downloading and installing a small plugin, makeing Firefox properly display math takes downloading and installing fonts.

I think you're right that at the present time it's slightly easier to get MathML working in IE with your plugin than it is to get it working in FF with open-source software. The difference is that MathML support will probably be built in to Firefox by default very soon, since the STIX fonts are due to have a final production version released in August.

Re:MathML

[bcrowell]

Cool! Thanks for the reply. I was really starting to think that mathml and svg were going to end up never being supported in any standard, cross-browser way, and it would just be a total defeat for standards. This is good news.

MathML...

[Anonymous Coward]

The quadratic formula in LaTeX markup:

x = \frac{-b \pm \sqrt{b^2 - 4ac}}{2a}

The same in MathML:

<math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML">
  <mi>x</mi>
  <mo>=</mo>
  <mfrac>
  <mrow>
  <mrow>
    <mo>-</mo>
    <mi>b</mi>
  </mrow>
  <mo>&PlusMinus;</mo>
  <msqrt>
    <msup>
    <mi>b</mi>
    <mn>2</mn>
    </msup>
    <mo>-</mo>
    <mrow>
    <mn>4</mn>
    <mo>&InvisibleTimes;</mo>
    <mi>a</mi>
    <mo>&InvisibleTimes;</mo>
    <mi>c</mi>
    </mrow>
  </msqrt>
  </mrow>
  <mrow>
  <mn>2</mn>
  <mo>&InvisibleTimes;</mo>
  <mi>a</mi>
  </mrow>
  </mfrac>
</math>

Re:MathML...

[frank_adrian314159]

'Nuf said (but having said that, I will say more). The notion that all things are made better with XML seems to be a particular class of programmer's corollary to the priest's notion that all things are made better with God. The true believers in each are just as insufferable.

Re:MathML...

[K. S. Kyosuke]

I think that MathML is still quite fine as an exchange format, even in spite of this unwieldiness - as long as you do not have to write it by hand, that is. At least no one will feel jealous that the competitor's format (Troff eqn, TeX markup, OpenOffice.org textual format, OOXML markup, whatever...) is going to be used as a standard. I would even go as far as to say that the exact format, in fact, does not matter at all, as Internet Explorer is never going to support it anyway.

Re:MathML...

[mxs]

If and when you get LaTeX rendering implemented in Firefox and Opera, you can start complaining about XML.

Re:MathML...

[skeeto]

Don't you know? It is said that, "XML is like violence: if it doesn't solve your problem, you aren't using enough of it."

OMG I had no idea!

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

According to that site, the 3j symbol can be written as a terminating generalized hypergeometric series 2F3 of unit argument. Amazing! I had no clue! I can see that this publication is going to be a great boon for people everywhere.

(Especially for people who like looking at the angular momentum of colliding subatomic particles in their spare time.)

Re: OMG I had no idea!

[Anonymous Coward]

http://functions.wolfram.com/HypergeometricFunctions/ThreeJSymbol/26/01/02/

Anonymous Coward

[Anonymous Coward]

It's been available in digital form forever on various websites:

http://www.math.sfu.ca/~cbm/aands/
http://www.iopb.res.in/~somen/abramowitz_and_stegun/
http://www.convertit.com/Go/Convertit/Reference/AMS55.ASP

In PDF here:
http://web.mit.edu/birge/Public/books/