NIST Releases Updated Handbook of Math Functions

An anonymous reader writes "NIST announced the publishing of the NIST Handbook of Mathematical Functions reference text (967 pp), also available in digital form at the Digital Library of Mathematical Functions. Access it with a MathML-enabled browser (Firefox or IE+plugin) to view equations as scalable text rather than bitmaps; the 3-D graphs can also be viewed with a VRML plugin for local rotating / zooming." The original Handbook of Mathematical Functions was published 46 years ago; the revision has been in the works for a decade.

Comments

Ob

[Hognoxious]

Let the number of the post be defined by a monotonically increasing function f, such that the initial value of f is zero.

Re:Ob

[cosm]

Let the number of the post be defined by a monotonically increasing function f, such that the initial value of f is zero.

Corollary 1.1:

Let the rate of posting trolls be defined by the the exponentially decaying 4th degree wave function of T(t), with a maximum frequency of /b/tards approximated inside t[10,60] seconds, with T(t) approaching 0 as t approaches infinity.

Re:Ob

[maxwell demon]

Corrolary 1.2:

The score function is not strictly positive on the set of posts.

Re:Ob

[SoVeryTired]

f(x) = x satisfies that condition.

Perhaps you meant monotonically decreasing nonnegative function on the nonnegative reals with f(0) = 0, or something to that effect...

As I'm sure you can tell, I'm a big hit at parties.

Re:Ob

[blair1q]

That renders as "0th post" in my browser.

How do I submit a bug report?

Or shall I just flame-shame you into fixing it?

Re:Ob

[rcamans]

Let the number of the interesting post be defined by the zero function...

Re:Ob

[jd]

It can't be real, unless you assume that there can be fractions of a post. Actually, no, you'd still be able to use the set of all quotients for that. Since it's starting at 0, you would presumably define it over the set of cardinal numbers. If you'd started at 1, you would use the N+ natural numbers. However, on the basis of this post alone, I would actually advocate defining posts over the set of complex numbers, so as to deal with imaginary components.

Re:Ob

[jd]

Actually, you want something like:

Let interesting posts be defined on the set of cardinal numbers such that the number of interesting posts is less than or equal to the total number of posts not allocated to the set of posts defined by trolls, funnies and miscellaneous posts, and where a post is moderated as interesting by that set of users who don't do this to give funny posts karma and who also have an excellent karma and who also have an above-average achievements score and who know something about the subject at have, and where such moderations exceed the total number of any other kind of moderation.

Re:Ob

[poopdeville]

No, you're clearly talking about ordinals. It's the FIRST post, not "1 post"

Re:Ob

[jd]

If Slashdot supported the Z font, I'd post the complete schema. Besides, there is only ever one informative post on a Slashdot article and it's never the first one.

Re:Ob

[Hognoxious]

That renders as "0th post" in my browser.
How do I submit a bug report?

I'm a C programmer, you insensitive clo01@m.

One day I'll fix that bloody pointer error.

Re:Ob

[rcamans]

Actually, what I am trying to say is usually there are ZERO informative, useful, or interesting posts.
Including the first post, the article.
(Not including the posts attacking commander taco, which are all interesting) heh heh

42

[Yvan256]

That's all you need to know about maths.

Re:42

[Anonymous Coward]

You must be from the US.

Re:42

[Anonymous Coward]

You must be from the US.

Douglas Adams was English

Re:42

[Bugamn]

You must be new here.

Re:42

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually I prefer the number 23.

Re:42

[Frequency Domain]

That's all you need to know about maths.

You must be from the US.

USians wouldn't say "maths". Our knowledge of math is singular.

Re:42

[Anonymous Coward]

One country doesn't get to claim the whole hemisphere, even if they would like to.

Re:42

[Anonymous Coward]

Who are these USians you speak of? Since people from the United States of America are called americans.

As are people from Canada, Mexico, Belize, Brazil, and any other American country.

Re:42

[insertwackynamehere]

Slashdot: Where pedantic contrarions get modded insightful.

Re:42

[Crayon Kid]

As are people from Canada, Mexico, Belize, Brazil, and any other American country.

Umm no. If you mean a continental context you would say "North American" or "South American".

If you mean citizen of a country you use the appropriate Demonym: Canadian, Mexican, Belizean, Brazilian etc.

US citizens are the only ones called Americans. Citizens of other countries are not.

Re:42

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually I prefer the number 23.

Multiply that by three and then you've got something!

Re:42

[dziban303]

I've never heard a Canadian, Mexican, Beliz..ian, or Brazilian call themselves an American. In fact, I'm pretty sure they avoid doing so.

Re:42

[Anonymous Coward]

But America isn't a country, so Americans means people living in America, which can be Canada, Mexico, USA, Brazil, etc.

When you say European you're talking about a continent. When you say Asians you're talking about continents and parts of continents.

You guys choose to make your country name an acronym, so get used to the terms USAsians or United States of Americans.

Re:42

[Anonymous Coward]

What hemisphere is named "America"?

Re:42

[CraftyJack]

Does that mean we get to call our neighbors to the north "Americans"? They usually don't like that, you know.

Re:42

[ooshna]

USians are all the really smart asians we have here and claim as our own to help negate the fact that our school system is in the shitter. "Ok we need to take a "random" sample of our standardized tests. Wong ok, Chan good, Jackson we better put that at the bottom of the pile".

Re:42

[Anonymous Coward]

Easy grandpa... easy... let me turn up the O2.

Re:42

[Anonymous Coward]

An erection and a headache?

Re:42

[CecilPL]

Do you also refer to people from West Virginia as "Virginians" and people from New Mexico and "Mexicans"?

Re:42

[daem0n1x]

That's not what the people from the other countries in America call them.

Re:42

[Draek]

We do, but only when reffering to people of the whole continent (for instance, "we Americans should follow Europe's example and make an American Union"), which doesn't occur often in day-to-day usage.

Re:42

[yotto]

It is very common to shorten the name of a country that is hideously long. For example, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was commonly called the Soviet Union. People from the Soviet Union were called the Soviets. That all ended a couple decades ago but the point still stands.

So, how better to abbreviate "The United States of America"?

"The"? No. Not very good.
"Of"? Just as bad. Maybe worse.
"United"? Other than the fact that a couple countries have "United" in their name, there's also an airline with the same name.
"America"? Wow. There's a good one. It's in the names of 2 continents but no other country has it in the name. I say we go with that one.

Re:42

[icensnow]

Sigh. The full, legal, proper name of my country is "United States of America," it is the only country with "America" in its name, and we refer to its people as "Americans" by the same construction that we (in English) refer to people from the Federal Republic of Germany as Germans or the Peoples Republic of China as Chinese. This might be one of the oldest stupid arguments on the internet -- it certainly was common on Usenet > 20 years ago.

Re:42

[Registered Coward v2]

Do you also refer to people from West Virginia as "Virginians" ...

No, they are West By God Virginians.

... and people from New Mexico and "Mexicans"?

No, they generally get asked about visas and passports, especially now in Arizona.

Re:42

[VisceralLogic]

But America isn't a country, so Americans means people living in America, which can be Canada, Mexico, USA, Brazil, etc.

When you say European you're talking about a continent. When you say Asians you're talking about continents and parts of continents.

You guys choose to make your country name an acronym, so get used to the terms USAsians or United States of Americans.

Can we still call Mexicans Mexican, or do they have to be EUMians/Estados Unidos Mexicanosians?

What about the Spanish? Do we have to call them REians/Reino de Espanans?

And I suppose we should call Germans Bundesrepublik Deutschlandians?

Do you begin to see how silly this is? America is part of the name of our country, so we call ourselves Americans.

Re:42

[Anonymous Coward]

Latin Americans think of themselves as Americanos, in fact, many Mexicans quite proudly call themselves Norteamericanos. Latin Americans call us Estadounidenses (which one might render in english as United Stateser, or maybe USian).

Re:42

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not what the people from the other countries in America call them.

True. Dog-Cow already filled in the blank on that one.

Re:42

[AK Marc]

So you are arguing that the English use is wrong because someone in a different language translates things wrong? They also conjugate their adjectives. I guess if we don't give nouns gender and conjugate adjectives, then English is obviously wrong there as well. Perhaps you could stick to English definitions for discussing English.

Re:42

[AK Marc]

Do you also refer to people from West Virginia as "Virginians" and people from New Mexico and "Mexicans"?

There are two states/commonwealths that end in "Virginia." As such, using just that is ambiguous. In American English, there is no "America" for a country. There is no ambiguity for "American." The only people I've heard claim ambiguity are people who learned another language first in which there was ambiguity. Spanish is one example. Oh, and the pedants on Slashdot that don't care about the truth or the language, but want to argue that they get to define words to mean something other than the dictionary or common use.

Oh, and the continents are "The Americas" for both, or "North America" and "South America" for them individually. And because someone talking about their continental origin wouldn't say "American" because that isn't a continent and they'd distinguish themselves as being from north, south, or central areas.

Back to the Virginia example, The Commonwealth of Virgina goes by "Virginian." They don't have to worry about West Virgina screwing that up, just like The Unites States of America uses American unambiguously and anyone from the continent wanting to express their continent of origin would say "North American" or "South American." Furthermore, I've never heard anyone state their origin by continent. They *always* use their country (either of origin or ethnicity). Only when talking about others is there any reference to continent because they are grouping people together. So never, anywhere, have I heard of anyone say they are "American" and not be from the USA except one person from a Spanish speaking country who deliberately tries to convince people he is a citizen of the USA (and uses the "well, in Spanish we call them something else" excuse). But even he agrees everyone he ever met thinks he means he's a US citizen when he says that, but he likes that. I guess he's ashamed to be Argentinian, not that there's anything wrong with that.

Re:42

[AK Marc]

The other countries in The Americas call them Americans. The only thing is "Americans" in English translates to "estadounidenses" in Spanish while they have an unrelated word "americanos" which looks and sounds the same so that it's confusing to people that don't understand language. In Canada, those who learned English as their only language call people from then US Americans. Find a country in The Americas where English is the official language where they don't call Americans Americans. Using incorrect translations as proof of confusion is a good argument, but only a good argument that they weren't taught English well enough.

Re:42

[AK Marc]

A Canadian traveling abroad will *never* refer to themselves as "an American."

So take this as me officially calling you a liar.

Re:42

[sumdumass]

I'm not aware of any country that claims the entire hemisphere.

Lets see, there are no other countries in the Americas (notice how that is plural, that's because there are two continents) that use America in their name that ends the name of the country in America, IF you are refering to the people of a continent, you would need to use North or South as a prefix to America so no one is claiming even an entire continent. Hmm.. Americas is the hemispher, American(s) is people from the United States of America, they are also North Americans.....

I'm failing to see your point. Could you please explain to me what your school is teaching that is supposedly so much better then the schools in America? I mean where is it that you think America means a whole hemisphere? I know the US schools are lax compared to other countries. Well, so they say, so please tell me how you equate the name of the people from a country to an entire hemisphere without making shit up?

Re:42

[Anonymous Coward]

mostly because no one actually thinks that's a good idea

may be offtopic

[mapkinase]

If you are looking for a good math reference I would recommend Mathematical Handbook for Scientists and Engineers by Korns

Russian translation of it was a must-have for every member of Russian "technicheskaya intelligentsiya".

Re:may be offtopic

[silverglade00]

Mathematical Handbook for Scientists and Engineers by Korns

Math Freak on a Leash?

Re:may be offtopic

[CraftyJack]

Are you ready...for math?

Re:may be offtopic

[Anonymous Coward]

More like trying-to-be-hip calluses on feet.

Re:may be offtopic

[Anonymous Coward]

I actually have this book. It's useful at times, but it is rather dry on explanations. Thus, it tends to speaks less to the mind and more to the sphincter.

Opera MathML support

[molo]

Opera has had MathML support since 9.5, but it looks like this page serves up PNGs for equations to Opera unless the user-agent is changed. When the user-agent is changed, MathML is served up, but the rendering is off, with little blank boxes dotted around (see this page for example: http://dlmf.nist.gov/2.7 ). Anyone else getting similar results?

-molo

Re:Opera MathML support

[hakey]

You don't need to change user-agent. Take a look at the customization page http://dlmf.nist.gov/help/customize. I wish all sites had something like that.

Re:Opera MathML support

[bcrowell]

Opera has had MathML support since 9.5, but it looks like this page serves up PNGs for equations to Opera unless the user-agent is changed. When the user-agent is changed, MathML is served up, but the rendering is off, with little blank boxes dotted around (see this page for example: http://dlmf.nist.gov/2.7 ). Anyone else getting similar results?

This is just one of many examples of the pain and suffering caused by MS's failure to implement the MathML standard in IE. Webmasters shouldn't have to special-case browsers like this, but they're forced to, because they can't just afford to have the page not work for IE users. When you have to special-case different browsers and version numbers of browsers, it's inevitable that you'll get problems like this. Every new browser that is every written will not get served mathml by a site like this, until someone finally gets in touch with the webmaster of the site and gets him to add a special case for that browser. The only solution I can think of is to make it a federal crime to use IE.

Re:Opera MathML support

[bcrowell]

You don't need to change user-agent. Take a look at the customization page http://dlmf.nist.gov/help/customize. I wish all sites had something like that.

No, all sites should not have something like this. End users should not have to do something special like this to work around the fact that IE doesn't support MathML properly. (IE requires a plugin, and even with the plugin, it doesn't support standard mathml; web authors have to make special IE-only versions of their pages with nonstandard kludges written in.) The best solution is for IE to die. The second best solution is for Opera users to contact the webmaster at nist.gov and ask them to configure their server so it recognizes recent versions of Opera as having mathml, in the same way it recognizes recent versions of Firefox.

Re:Opera MathML support

[Anonymous Coward]

The only solution I can think of is to make it a federal crime to use IE.

Lets make it a capital crime. Use IE and get the chair. People will wisen up fairly quickly after the first few nationwide televised mass executions.

VRML!

[jambox]

I did comp sci at university and they made me make a model of the campus in VRML. This is the first time I've heard of it since!

Re:VRML!

[LifesABeach]

Would SVG be better?

Re:VRML!

[jambox]

Only if you could do without the extra dimension..?!

Re:VRML!

[mangu]

Lat time I saw a website with VRML was in 2002. It was a great idea that failed, I don't know why.

Re:VRML!

[LifesABeach]

I was thinking that multiple dimensions can be handled by JavaScript. Then projecting the result function to 2D. I'm trying to avoid server side throttling.

Re:VRML!

[marcosdumay]

It was created in a time when bandwidth was too expensive and computers too slow. Today computers aren't still fast enough, but something like it may appear again in the near future, and be adopted this time. (Or, if we are luck, people won't be affected by NIH, and use the already existent VRML. But I wouldn't bet on it.)

Re:VRML!

[burni2]

1.) sluggish plugins
2.) slow rendering / in '97
3.) not widely known

4.) it was a good idea .. do you really expect good ideas to succeed ?

Re:VRML!

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't bet on it either, for the same reason modern games aren't supplied in DOOM WAD files.

Re:VRML!

[blair1q]

When phones are capable of running it, it might start to catch on again.

Actually, my Nexus One does pretty good with 3D graphics, but the apps are pretty simplified. Having them be fully interactive with most of the information transfer occurring over the data link would bog it down to a small fraction of an FPS.

So the 2-D click-and-wait model still makes the most sense for the machinery that's gaining market share the fastest.

967 pages?

[ProdigyPuNk]

That would take forever to actually read through... I guess if you understand most of these functions you don't have to worry about a wife or girlfriend anyway...

Re:967 pages?

[BitZtream]

If you understand the math, it shouldn't take more than 8-12 hours total reading time.

If you don't, sure it'd be considerably longer if you wanted to understand it, but 1k printed pages really isn't a lot of reading if you can actually read.

Re:967 pages?

[pclminion]

You "read through" reference books? You're... weird.

It would be...

[bagsta]

...more than welcome if they could make an off-line digital DLMF in any of pdf, djvu, odt or any other format...

Re:It would be...

[Paul Jakma]

Ah, me too on this. Though, I might go buy the book as a result of this /. post.

Has coding for every equation in TeX, pMML, PNG

[mapkinase]

It also has alternative coding for every equation in TeX, pMML (XML wrapped default coding) and PNG

I've had my copy for 40 years

[richg74]

And I have found it to be invaluable reference. It's not a textbook; it assumes you basically know the math, but just need to check the details. One other feature, quite handy for programmers of quantitative applications: it has approximations for many functions (e.g., the cumulative normal density function), with notes on their accuracy and range of applicability.

Re:I've had my copy for 40 years

[uberdilligaff]

Me too. Discovered it during a grad course in numerical analysis. With the CRC Handbook in one hand and the HBMF in the other, you had a great deal of summarized practical math at your disposal. Throw in Numerical Recipes in FORTRAN (later released in C) -- icing on the cake.

another reason to encourage people to abandon IE

[bcrowell]

MathML has been around since 1998, which is a heck of a long time by web standards, and yet IE still doesn't support it out of the box. That's why IE users can't view this book properly without a plugin to provide mathml support. Yet another reason to encourage everyone you know to drop IE and get a decent browser. Supporting mathml in IE is also a ridiculous pain in the neck for people creating web pages. Even if you are willing to tell your readers that they can't view your site without the plugin, you still can't write standard xhtml with mathml embedded in it; if you want it to work with the MathPlayer plugin for IE, you have to write all kinds of ugly, nonstandard hacks, and serve up a different version of the page to IE users than to everyone else. The end result of all this is that MathML doesn't get used nearly as much as it should.

For instance, Wikipedia renders bitmaps as equations, using software called texvc. A guy named D.M. Harvey at Harvard wrote software called blahtex that can be used as a drop-in replacement for texvc, rendering math as either MathML or bitmaps as required. There was a long discussion of this on WikiProject Mathematics, and there was a clear consensus that texvc was old, lame technology, and needed to be replaced with blahtex. However, the people who run the software setup for WP never implemented it -- never, apparently, even bothered to give an actual response, just blew it off. The attitude would presumably have been different if the situation with IE had been different. Since most people access WP with IE, those people would still have had to be served a version of the pages with bitmaps. That would have been a hassle in terms of software.

I believe that the current plan is for html 5 to include support for embedded mathml and svg tags (even though html 5 isn't xhtml). It will be interesting to see whether MS supports this aspect of html 5, or just does a partial implementation that omits these features.

Statistics

[bzant]

I would love to see the same thing with statistical formulae, does anyone know if such a creature exists?

Re:Statistics

[bzant]

Never mind I answered my own question

http://mathworld.wolfram.com/topics/ProbabilityandStatistics.html

From my experience...

[denzacar]

It's not a textbook; it assumes you basically know the math

That applies to every math book out there.

Re:From my experience...

[Bromskloss]

It's not a textbook; it assumes you basically know the math

That applies to every math book out there.

No, there is at least one mathematics book for which the statement does not hold. I don't have a constructive proof for this my claim, though, so I can't give you an example.

Re:From my experience...

[Anonymous Coward]

Michael Spivak, Calculus, W.A. Benjamin, Inc. New York, Amsterdam 1967 is such a book. The very first sentence from the preface:

Every aspect of this book was influenced by the desire to present calculus not merely as a prelude to but as the first real encounter with mathematics.

Re:From my experience...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not a textbook; it assumes you basically know the math

That applies to every math book out there.

Clearly you've never seen this book.

"What Is Mathematics?" should be the very first math textbook in any library.

Re:From my experience...

[richg74]

It certainly should be one of first. I have had a copy of the first edition about as long as the "Handbook", and it is a really wonderful survey of what math is all about.

Math PNGs not optimal

[lee1]

A great resource, easier to use than a heavy, giant book, and full of beautiful and useful graphs. However: web text with math mixed in as graphics can be done in a way that is pleasant enough to read, but NIST's pictorial mathematics is not optimal: the size of the symbols is not matched very well with the surrounding text and, because of extreme anti-aliasing, the contrast is very low. Since this is this way most users will see this material, it's a shame they didn't do a better job.

Re:Math PNGs not optimal

[bcrowell]

A great resource, easier to use than a heavy, giant book, and full of beautiful and useful graphs. However: web text with math mixed in as graphics can be done in a way that is pleasant enough to read, but NIST's pictorial mathematics is not optimal: the size of the symbols is not matched very well with the surrounding text and, because of extreme anti-aliasing, the contrast is very low. Since this is this way most users will see this material, it's a shame they didn't do a better job.

They did do a better job. You just aren't seeing it because you're using Internet Explorer, which doesn't support MathML. Try viewing the site with a recent version of Firefox, and you'll see all the math rendered correctly.

Re:Math PNGs not optimal

[lee1]

I don't use Internet Explorer. I said "Since this is this way most users will see this material [meaning, obviously, as PNG images, because most people can't see MathML) , it's a shame they didn't do a better job [at creating the PNG equations. Duh.]".

I did browse the site using Firefox, and the MathML rendering, while generally easier to read than the PNG version, has the usual problems, namely, poor typography and the occasional unavailable or incorrect character. The latter occurs frequently enough that I wouldn't bother to try to use the MathML version of the site, but would stick with the PNGs, bad as they are.

Re:Math PNGs not optimal

[krull]

Install the STIX fonts as they suggest. I did and now the equations all render in MathML just fine and look pretty good...

http://www.stixfonts.org/

Re:Math PNGs not optimal

[lee1]

Install the STIX fonts as they suggest.

As they suggest where? I looked around at the stix site, but it seems that I'll have to spend more time there to actually find out how to download the fonts. I saw a sugestion that I need to register as a beta tester to use them. Is this true?

Re:Math PNGs not optimal

[blair1q]

I browsed it using Firefox, and it bitched about having to load certain fonts, and then rendered several glyphs as black rectangles.

Fuzzy PNGs would have been an improvement.

Re:Math PNGs not optimal

[AK Marc]

I used Opera and it just worked, and worked fine, even when i zoomed.

Useless.

[Hurricane78]

If you don’t know what they mean, you could as well be an automaton applying them.
And if you do, you don’t need them anyway, as you grasp the concept behind it, and can build your formulas yourself.

But hey, the automatons that leave school, having been though “math” as something where you are obsessed with “the right way”(TM) to write it, and learnin everything by heart without ever understanding it, is gonna love it...

Re:Useless.

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Yes, you can derive all of mathematics from a fairly small set of axioms every time you want to do something. The point of having a reference handy is that you don't have to. You see, in the modern world we have this thing called a "body of knowledge," the idea being that smart people can do new work which builds on the previous work of other smart people. It's been quite a successful approach so far; perhaps you should give it a try?

Re:Useless.

[Anonymous Coward]

No, you can't. Godel's incompleteness theorem.

Re:Useless.

[khallow]

No, you can't. Godel's incompleteness theorem.

That theorem doesn't say what you're implying. It says merely that in any sufficiently complex axiomatic system, there are unprovable statements. Instead, you'd have an effective argument by showing that there are incompatible axiomatic systems that lead to different interesting mathematics. For example, the axiom of choice can be substituted with alternatives that lead to different results in integration and measure theory.

Question for mathematicians

[NicknamesAreStupid]

Roughly how long would it take to implement the entire NIST library as functions in C++ just using the standard C math library (abs, acos . . .tan, tanh)?

Re:Question for mathematicians

[AlejoHausner]

The NIST code is mostly in fortran, but what's so bad about fortran? It's well suited to numerical computation, pretty easy to learn, and there's always f2c, which will turn fortran into C.

Re:Question for mathematicians

[Anonymous Coward]

A really long time--most of these functions were defined/invented because combining the standard trig/exponential/etc. functions were not sufficient.

Re:Question for mathematicians

[krull]

Keep in mind the reference is not just function definitions. The main content is actually approximations to functions (asymptotic, series, and polynomial) and various formulas involving relationships between functions.

Re:Question for mathematicians

[u38cg]

About two and a half days.

Re:Question for mathematicians

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, that's about how long any new task at work takes me, too.

Re:another reason to encourage people to abandon I

[Anonymous Coward]

However, the people who run the software setup for WP never implemented it -- never, apparently, even bothered to give an actual response, just blew it off. The attitude would presumably have been different if the situation with IE had been different.

Congratulations, you win the competition to find the biggest "presumably" on Slashdot today :)

So, the limit as geekiness approaches infinity...

[mrflash818]

...is procreation probability approaches zero?

Re:another reason to encourage people to abandon I

[gringer]

Wikipedia renders bitmaps as equations

That sounds quite difficult. Are the bitmap-derived equations small enough to fit into the margins of the articles?

Re:another reason to encourage people to abandon I

[BitZtream]

They've already committed themselves to SVG support in IE9, though I don't remember anything about MathML it doesn't interest me directly so I may have just ignored/overlooked that bit.

As far as WP implementing it ... does the current software work and fill the needs that need to be filled? If so perhaps they simply did the intelligent thing and didn't try to fix what was working fine.

You'll find a lot of people don't upgrade software just because someone rewrote it.

Re:another reason to encourage people to abandon I

[bcrowell]

As far as WP implementing it ... does the current software work and fill the needs that need to be filled? If so perhaps they simply did the intelligent thing and didn't try to fix what was working fine.

The current software renders equations as bitmaps. The bitmaps look lousy. They're less legible than mathml. They look awful when you print them. They're the wrong size compared to the text. People who are visually impaired can use the controls in their browser to enlarge the font in the web page, but that won't enlarge the equations. People who are blind can use text-to-speech on the web page, but it won't read the equations out loud.

I hope you're not saying that it's okay for Microsoft to make math on the web inaccessible to blind people. It's totally messed up that Microsoft can hold back progress in putting math on the web for a decade or more, just because they have the most popular browser and don't feel like implementing the standard in a standard way.

Re:another reason to encourage people to abandon I

[blair1q]

Seriously?

What proportion of the web-browsing public do you estimate will ever touch a page with a single div of MathML on it?

When it reaches 1/50, Microsoft will probably consider adding support. Then probably forget about it.

Re:another reason to encourage people to abandon I

[blair1q]

Only small ones, like "a^n + b^n = c^n, n > 2"...

967 pages of mirth

[Anonymous Coward]

I finally got around to reading the NIST Handbook of Mathematical Functions.

Turns out the Zeta function did it.

Copyrighted unlike the original

[Taxman415a]

The submitter could have benefitted everyone and noted that this is the long awaited version of the original that was known as the Abramowitz_and_Stegun because it was so useful in certain areas. Because it was printed as a government publication it was automatically in the public domain. This new version was wholly created and printed through NIST so it is under copyright. That's an unfortunate side stepping of our rights as citizens. It was created with public money, it should be public domain.

Re:Copyrighted unlike the original

[lee1]

That's an unfortunate side stepping of our rights as citizens.

What rights are these, and where do they come from? They are not legal rights, of course, as the assignment of copyright was done according to the law.

It was created with public money, it should be public domain.

Does not follow. Should all the government's classified information be made public domain immediately because it was created with public money? Should members of the public be able to reproduce without attribution my scientific papers because the research was supported by tax dollars? I hope not. (This is what "public domain" means: far more than free access.) The online version of the handbook is free and provided in a convenient form. What would we gain if it were placed in the "public domain"?

Re:Copyrighted unlike the original

[whitis]

Should all the government's classified information be made public domain immediately because it was created with public money?

Protection of classified materials is done through a mechanism separate from copyright, with much higher penalties. Likewise, private information is protected by privacy laws. But what is published by the federal government for the consumption of he general public is supposed to be public domain.

Should members of the public be able to reproduce without attribution my scientific papers because the research was supported by tax dollars? I hope not. (This is what "public domain" means: far more than free access.)

You appear to work for a contractor. Your work was supported by tax dollars but not performed by employees of the federal government. The copyright status depends on the contract terms. There is also a specific exemption for scientific papers written by contractors. But there are some serious erosions of the publics rights with more and more work being contracted out (due among other things to a foolish cap on the number of government employees). In some cases, contractors double dip and charge the government the entire price of producing a work, then turn around and charge the public to use the intellectual property that has already been paid for. For example, maintenance of the DOD public domain MIL-HDBK-5J was turned over to the FAA and multiple agencies pay the cost of maintaining it and was renamed MMPDS-01. The FAA contracted the work out to Batelle, who asserts copyright on it, restricts its use, and charges the public for it. As far as I know, batelle is not even footing a portion of the cost. I have been in the situation of having a government agency trying to hire me through a contractor and the contractor was trying to claim ownership of the work I would be doing entirely funded by the government.

Be aware that frequently authors, illustrators, and photographers do not receive credit, even in the original work, when that is done for an employer. For example, most product manuals.

I tend to look favorably on attribution-only licenses and would not have much trouble with such a license on government works, but even attribution can become a burden when you are compiling from many sources or using the work in an area where there isn't an ability to display the attribution. Where is the attribution, for example, on pieces of code contained in your car's cruise control? You could technically put it in the car's owner's manual, but in practice this is never done. In practice, government agencies in some cases ask, but do not require, that you provide attribution.

The online version of the handbook is free and provided in a convenient form. What would we gain if it were placed in the "public domain"?

Free-for-use-in-its-original-form-only-for-limited-purposes isn't free. It is only free of charge for certain limited uses. In no way is this an acceptable substitute for public domain. You can't, for example, use it in commercial software and you can't use it in permissively licensed or copylefted software because those do allow commercial use.

Re:Copyrighted unlike the original

[lee1]

Protection of classified materials is done through a mechanism separate from copyright

I was supplying a counterexample to the idea that something "publicly funded" implies that it should be in the "public domain". My counterexample stands; I don't see how your comments are relevant to this point.

You appear to work for a contractor. Your work was supported by tax dollars but not performed by employees of the federal government.

No, I am a federal employee. If all the authors on a paper are federal employees and the paper describes federally funded work then there is no U.S. copyright on the paper as it is supplied to the journal, but the journal may add elements that are subject to copyright; in addition, if some of the authors are contractors (quite often the case with my papers) then the copyright question is unclear. In any case, the papers are still not in the "public domain". Note that this is a separate issue from free public access; I send a pdf to anyone who asks.

A+S

[davidknippers]

You 'll have to pry Abramowitz and Stegun out of my cold, dead hands.

Only on Slashdot

[Frequency Domain]

I was trying to make a funny, a play on the mathematical term "singular". Instead, I got modded insightful and started a flamewar. Ain't Slashdot wonderful?

Re:Only on Slashdot

[sumdumass]

IT was probably your usage of the term USians that got you modded. Many ignorant people (Europeans mostly) do not know how the people of a land is names nor do they know the difference between a continent or a country. They seem to think American means North Americans or South Americans. Yet, the United States of America is the only country in the Americas that uses America in it's name so the confusion is all imaginary on their part. But hey, they hold their heads up high and pretend to be smarter then everyone else so I guess we will have to let them have it if it's all they got going.

Epic Fail

[whitis]

I have been waiting for this to come out for a while but I see a number of reasons for disappointment.

First, a big part of the reason for having a library of mathematical functions compiled by a government agency is to have a public domain source that can be reused for any purpose in any field of endeavor. They screwed that up royally: "© 2010 NIST". Commerfcial use is specifically prohibited. Ironic considering that NIST is part of the US Department of Commerce. And since comercial use is prohibited, it can't be used in software distributed under a permissive license which allows commercial use.

Second, they call it a "digital library" but it isn't. It is more or less a book in html by chapters. They used MathML instead of OpenMATH. MathML is too presentational and not sufficiently semantic. You should be able to configure OpenMATH or MathML or PNG produced from the OpenMath and you should be able to download OpenMath content dictionaries.

It is still useful as a free-for-viewing-only ebook, but that is only a tiny fraction of what it should have been. Tax payers got gyped. We paid perhaps 90% of the cost for 20% of the result, and the copyright even interferes with someone else finishing the job.

Re:Epic Fail

[belmolis]

I am wondering what the legal basis for the restriction on commercial use might be. US government publications are in the public domain - there is no crown copyright at the federal level in the US. So the only situation in which they can legitimately impose restrictions is when they are reproducing material whose copyright is owned by others.

Re:Epic Fail

[Anonymous Coward]

You keep using words that I don't think you quite grasp the true meaning of. And special fail for bringing up OpenMATH.

Re:Epic Fail

[BBTaeKwonDo]

http://dlmf.nist.gov/about/notices (the (C) 2010 NIST link at the bottom of the pages) gives the answer:

Pursuant to Title 17 USC 105, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), United States Department of Commerce, is authorized to receive and hold copyrights transferred to it by assignment or otherwise. Authors of the works appearing in the Digital Library of Mathematical Functions (DLMF) have assigned copyright to the works to NIST, United States Department of Commerce, as represented by the Secretary of Commerce.

Re:Epic Fail

[matmota]

The first thing I did when reading these news was to visit their website and look for a license, until I found the copyright notice you mention. Epic fail indeed. I wanted to do some processing of this content. As it is, it's no more useful for me than functions.wolfram.com, which might or might not have less content but is nicer looking anyway.

As I saw OpenMath in your post I got curious about you and clicked on your homepage link, but it says "This Account Has Been Suspended
Please contact the billing/support department as soon as possible.".

Re:Epic Fail

[lee1]

I wanted to do some processing of this content.

How does the copyright prevent you from doing this? After all, the math obviously can't be copyrighted, just the particular form in which it is presented in the handbook, and whatever else is original there. So you can't reproduce a bunch of their graphs in your own book without permission, but certainly, for example, you could graph the functions themselves, or use them any way you wanted to.

Re:Epic Fail

[whitis]

You keep using words that I don't think you quite grasp the true meaning of.

Oh, I understand the contextually appropriate meanings of the words. You failed to identify the words you thought were misused or what your (mis)understanding of their true meaning is.

"Digital Library". Their choice of words, not mine. This could refer to a library of books, movies, sound recordings, documents, etc. stored in a digital format. Not here. Calling a updated version of a single book a library is quite a stretch. And we were not promised a digital library of books or documents about mathematics, we were promised a "Digital Library OF Mathematical Functions". The objects in the library, therefore, are mathematical functions, not documents. Consider libraries of software functions, schematic symbols, printed circuit board symbols, other CAD libraries (such as for mechanical parts), VHDL/verilog libraries, standard cell libraries, spectral libraries, etc. These tend to have sufficient semantic information that you can automatically search, extract the appropriate objects, link the objects together, evaluate, execute, transform, analyze, synthesize, compare, display, validate, etc. A digital library in the technical sense, not the lay usage, is a collection of objects in a form that can be processed using the specialized tools appropriate to the trade, not merely cut and pasted. Sure, you can do a little processing on MathML but as the math and the processing become non-trivial, it is likely to break down due to the lack of high level abstract information.

"semantics"/"presentational": The OpenMath creators, who have significant overlap with the MathML creators (I.E. many worked on both projects), use the same two words to describe the difference:
"MathML deals principally with the presentation of mathematical objects, while OpenMath is solely concerned with their semantic meaning or content. " You can mix MathML and OpenMath.

And special fail for bringing up OpenMATH.

It was relevant. Even many of the folks who worked on MathML also saw the need for OpenMath and worked on that project as well.

Re:Epic Fail

[whitis]

Thanks for pointing that out. Credit card info needed to be updated due to expiration and reissue.

Re:Epic Fail

[whitis]

No, copyright doesn't stop at the particular format in which it is presented in the handbook. Mechanically derived works are not exempt from the original restrictions. Copyright is limited to the expression of an idea rather than the idea itself but there is more to the particular expression than the formatting or even the words. If you translate a book into a foreign language, the original expression of the idea and copyright remains even though you have changed all the words and some of the sentence structure.

Individual formulas might be exempt from copyright, as "facts" or as fair use, not to mention they weren't really created by Abramowitz and Stegun or NIST. But a sequence of formulas in a mathematic proof might not be exempt. theories and hypotheses may be considered "ideas" not "facts". Exemption may not apply for a collection of facts - i.e. which facts are included vs which are not, if the criteria are non-obvious. A list of all listed phone numbers in the state of Virginia, is a collection of facts with an obvious boundary between what is included and what is not, but some subsets may not be exempt.

Suppose you were to create a set of flash cards from DLMF with all the formulas on one side and the names on the other. Suppose you sell them. Is this even covered by the copyright? You still maintain their selection of which facts are included and which are not. You still have their selection of which variable names are used for placeholders, which are not inherent to the facts expressed in the formula. Are you allowed to do so under the Educational/Academic clause of the license or prohibited under the no-comercial use clause? What if your customers are private users vs public schools (which are allowed to use the material under the commercial clause). What if some of the formulas are in error and therefore not facts? I knew a jerk who deliberately included transcription errors (when transcribing a public domain autobiography) in an attempt to assert copyright. Well, it apprears that errors can be used to trace the origins and have lead to lawsuits but errors in fact are no more copyrightable than facts. What if instead of selling them, your intent is to give them away online for anyone to use in any way the please, including printing them and selling them? If it is that confusing in such a deliberately trivial example, what about something more complicated like a symbolic math program or the documentation for said program?

Suppose you were to copy from DLMF into wikipedia on a scale beyond fair use. That uses the nightmarish GNU Free Documentation License, which does not allow you to incorporate the restrictions imposed by the original license. Viral licenses (copyleft) are particularly nasty as they dictate the terms of other works. They not only put onerous restrictions on the terms under which you can distribute your work if their material is incorporated, they can be incompatible with the terms of other third party materials. So, even if you are allowed to incorporate viral licensed work A and non-viral licensed work B with your own materials C to produce derivative work D in your intended application and license, the inclusion of A can prevent the inclusion of B.

Re:Epic Fail

[lee1]

All of your examples, such as flash cards, seem to involve copying chunks of the book and republishing them in some form. Perhaps it's regrettable that people can't profit from these activities because of the copyright; I tend to have more sympathy with business plans that involve making your own stuff rather than rehashing other people's work. I was thinking more of the typical scientific or engineering work that uses the handbook as a source of mathematical information; how does the copyright hinder these legitimate uses at all? (It can't, of course, because the mathematical facts are not copyrighted. Indeed, any information in the handbook that was of critical importance to a particular piece of research or engineering would, naturally, be checked against another source and/or derived anew.)

VRML examples

[ColorTheory]

VRML graphs are used for non-trivial purposes on my web site, http://www.jimworthey.com . The general topics of the web site are lighting and color.

Filesystem safety

[jd]

Well, I found your post interesting, so even if we split the difference, there'd be half a post.