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 Publications College & Research Libraries News Back Issues 2000 May Internet Resources This science isnt just for mathematicians a
INTERNET RESOURCESThis science isn't just for mathematicians anymore: Mathematics resources on the InternetC&RL News, May 2000 by Timothy E. McMahon Math is cool . . . and it has been for a long time. Throughout the ages, mathematicians have made earth-moving discoveries and contributed to our species ever-present drive into the technological future. Think of this past half-century alone. During the 1950s, Cathleen Morawetz wrote influential papers that helped revolutionize airplane wing design, leading to smoother flight. In 1998, she was awarded the National Medal of Science, America’s highest scientific honor, for her contributions to science. In 1994, Andrew Wiles’s long and solitary work led to his much celebrated proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem. And on a more whimsical note, a team from Macalester College won second prize at the Breckenridge International Snow Sculpture Competition this year. Their entry? You guessed it—a model of the Enneper Surface, a minimal surface with tremendous symmetry and huge overhangs.1 While there have been some highly visible achievements in mathematics, it’s only over the past five or six years that mathematics has emerged into the spotlight of popular culture. Books like The Man Who Loved Only Numbers, which highlights the life of prolific mathematician Paul Erdös, or the controversial work The Bible Code—whose thesis is that through mathematical analysis, coded prophesy can be drawn from the Hebrew Bible—are flying off bookshelves everywhere. Good Will Hunting drew huge crowds to the theaters to see a fictional mathematical genius from the wrong side of the tracks in South Boston grapple with his inner demons. Some of these works are not without controversy, but this only serves to get people talking about mathematics. An increasing number of reporters are also including mathematics in their coverage of scientific advancement. In his New York Times column, Paul Lewis pointed to an article that appeared in The Notices of the American Mathematical Society highlighting “What’s New in Mathematics.” The Web’s growth has allowed mathematics to percolate up to the desktop of anyone willing to take a few minutes to look for the topic. Web sites, reviewing literature databases, preprint servers, journals, and a host of other resources are but a click or two away. This article will point to a select set of resources in the hopes that by doing so, the reader’s appetite will be stimulated enough to gather additional resources and to pass these on to friends and colleagues. In some cases throughout this article, resource descriptions provided by the content creators have been used. Metasites • Yahoo! Science: Mathematics. With half a million sites divided into more than 25,000 categories, Yahoo! is both browsable and searchable—a good place to find links to relevant resources. Access: http://dir.yahoo.com/Science/Mathematics/. • Galaxy. Launched in January 1994, Galaxy is the Internet’s oldest searchable directory. Like Yahoo! and The Open Directory Project, this resource provides a robust group of pointers to mathematical resource sites on the Web. Access: http://galaxy.einet.net/galaxy/Science/ • Penn State Mathematics Department. This site is included here because of its robust offering of Web resources in the mathematical science. Access: http://www.math.upenn.edu/MathSources.html.
Mathematical societies • Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). SIAM was formed in 1952 to advance science and technology in industry. The SIAM site contains a professional opportunities area, conference highlights and a resources area containing TeX macro packages, information about mathematics in industry, and graduate programs. • Mathematical Association of America (MAA). The MAA bills itself as the world’s largest organization devoted to the interests of collegiate mathematics. The society serves 30,000 members, which include college and university faculty, two-year college faculty, high school teachers, government and corporate workers, graduate school faculty, research mathematicians, and graduate and undergraduate students. Like many professional societies, the organization hosts a set of electronic journals, employment opportunities, and meetings. Some nice features of the Web site are the free book reviews and the Student and Student Chapter page, which provide links to student chapters that have Web sites. Access: http://www.maa.org/.
Preprint servers • Mathematics section of the Los Alamos (Ginsparg) e-Print Archive. Started in August 1991, http://xxx.lanl.gov is a fully automated electronic archive and distribution server for research papers. Covered areas include physics and related disciplines, mathematics, nonlinear sciences, computational linguistics, and neuroscience. Users can retrieve papers from the archive either through an online Web interface or by sending commands to the system via e-mail. Users can register to automatically receive e-mail notification of newly submitted papers in areas of interest to them when papers are received in those areas. Mechanisms for searching through the collection of papers are also provided. Access: http://xxx.lanl.gov/archive/math. • Mathematical Preprint Search System (MPRESS/MathNet.preprints). MPRESS is an index of mathematical preprints and not a full-text archive. MPRESS, supported by the Math-Net Project, started under the auspices of the European Mathematical Society. Further development of this resource is currently in the planning phase. Access: • University of Illinois Department of Mathematics Preprints. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Department of Mathematics Home Page contains an archive of current and previous preprints dealing with Algebraic Number Theory, K-Theory, and the department’s Faculty and Graduate Student Research Reports. Each of these sections is frequently updated. Unprocessed new submissions are also accessible. A link to the department’s homepage provides information on the various types of math research being conducted at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Access: http://www.math.uiuc.edu/Preprints/. Journals Databases • Zentralblatt MATH. Zentralblatt’s database of mathematical reviews is a competitor to MathSciNet. Math libraries • University of Washington Mathematics Research Library. Access: http://www.lib.washington.edu/math/. • The Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences Library. Access: http://www.nyu.edu/pages/cimslibrary/. • Physics Astronomy Mathematics Library at the University of Texas at Austin. Access: http://www.lib.utexas.edu/Libs/pma/. • University of Notre Dame Mathematics Library. Access: http://www.nd.edu/~mathlib/. • Cornell University Mathematics Library. Access: http://www.math.cornell.edu/~library/. Biographies • The MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive. Provides access to an integrated collection of more than 1,000 biographies and historical articles of a mathematical nature, with interactive birthplace maps and the famous curve applet. Access: http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/history/. • Biographies of Women Mathematicians. This site is an ongoing project by students in mathematics classes at Agnes Scott College, in Atlanta, Georgia. Designed to illustrate the numerous achievements of women in the field of mathematics, the site contains biographical essays or comments on prominent women mathematicians and some photos. Access: http://www.agnesscott.edu/lriddle/women/women.htm. • Catalog of the Scientific Community in the 16th and 17th Centuries. A collection of 631 detailed biographies on members of the scientific community during the 16th and 17th centuries, with vital facts about each individual and their contributions to science. One hundred sixty-four entries in the database claim mathematics as their primary scientific discipline. Access: http://es.rice.edu/ES/humsoc/Galileo/Catalog/catalog.html. • newton.org.uk. This “virtual museum” contains a richly populated set of resources dedicated to Newton. The author intends to broaden the scope of the site to include general history of science information and a comprehensive catalog of links. Access: http://www.newton.org.uk/. Other resourses • Jahrbuch. The aim of the JFM-project is to build a digital library for classical mathematics on the Internet. This will consist of a complete electronic catalog of mathematical publications from 1868 to 1943 and a full-text archive that stores the most relevant publications from that period. Access: http://www.emis.de/projects/JFM/. Note About the Author
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• EulerService: European Libraries and Electronic Resources in Mathematical Sciences. The European Libraries and Electronic Resources (EULER) Project in Mathematical Sciences provides a site for searching out mathematical resources, such as books, preprints, Web pages, abstracts, proceedings, serials, technical reports, and theses. Access: 
• European Mathematical Society (EMS). EMS was founded in 1990 in Madralin near Warsaw, Poland. Today its membership consists of all mathematical societies in Europe and about 2,000 individual members who joined through their national societies. Access: 
and Current Mathematical Publications (from 1940 to the present). AMS adds more than 66,000 new items to the database annually. Reviews in the database are contributed by nearly 11,000 active mathematicians worldwide and are drawn from more than 1,700 journals in the field of mathematics. Reviews appear in TeX. Access: 
Zentralblatt adds approximately 55,000 reviews to their database each year and claims approximately 5,000 mathematicians as reviewers worldwide. This database contains reviews of mathematical articles from 1931 forward. Access: