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.

[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

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

[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");

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.