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.

[ApproachingLinux]

and this reference in Oct 99

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>