If Eric Weisstein (http://mathworld.wolfram.com/about/author.html) is out there reading, thank you for your work. I can't believe the longevity and quality of Mathworld.
That is, sites like Mathworld are great for finding information and an overview about a topic.
For example, it is a great place to learn about what a solvable group is.
Mathpendium, on the other hand, is designed to help you if you only want a concise definition of a solvable group, want to find all theorems that describe when a group is solvable, or find all conjectures related to solvable groups.
That is, Mathependium is used for when you want to get a list of all theorems related to a topic, with links to other sides for a deep dive or overview.
In a sense, theorems are the tools of mathematics, Mathpendium is a toolbox that helps you find those tools, and each item on the site has links to other sites to learn more about the tool.
Slighty OT but,
Apart from the fact that it looks and feels like 2006 (that latex renderer is so, so horrible, it's a distraction), and that you can't copy anything meaningful out of it, Mathworld is great. But honestly, as of 2020, I would have thought we'd have much better tools to learn a domain as thoroughly defined as mathematics (interactive, intuitive, etc etc etc). As it stands, it's still really hard without a teacher, but it shouldn't: a rich web experience with text as a basis should be able to produce at least as good understanding as a video (whose only major difference is voice).
I'd expect to be able to hover over anything and get a tooltip definition, be able to move things in equations and sliders for constants to see real-time graphs or limits or edge cases etc; with formulas that self-update in real time.
I mean, it's a poor state of affairs that the combined body of mathematicians on Earth still haven't come up together to find a way to explain and teach mathematics at least as well as a freaking catalog website can show and sell products. It's not that hard to leverage decent frontends...
I love your efforts because I think they're truly headed in the right direction; we need so many more of these tools, innovation on the way to building an actual "base of mathematical knowledge" that's not Wikipedia (too general) nor Matlab (too specific) nor YouTube (good thing but not enough).
Back on topic:
- are you considering a public-facing API?
- I think "discover" (in your title) is misleading and explains some slightly harsh reactions here (failing to honor a promise is really bad marketing). I'd suggest something more like "pro tools for pro math", I mean make the promise that it's a tool for people who already know these things, who don't "discover" but rather "reference", "recall", sort of a modern lookup table. Like, say I've forgotten formula or theorem X, I'd really value being able to get that info as fast as possible.
For example:
* I searched for "Lebesgue integral" and got no results. I searched for "Lebesgue" and got results on Lebesgue measures. I would expect the first search to ... say return an outbound link to the mathworld/wikipedia article for the high level overview. Then I would expect it to toss "integral" as too generic and show all following results for just "Lebesgue"
* I searched for "Zeta function" and got no results. I search for "zeta" and found some relevant material but not much. Similar expectations as I had around Lebesgue integral searches.
* I search for "Banach space" and got no results, nor anything for "Banach" which makes me think you have a lot more indexing to do.
* If you search for "Riemann" the first page/second result and second page/first results have rendering issues:
"\<astyle="text−decoration:underline;color:black;"href="javascript:globalEntitySelected( ′ bedb7aa7−eb4f−47fe−9de0−e50e262c3289 ′ , ′ 5e33c092981ec41bc6b27930 ′ )">sum</a> j=1 n
f(c j
)[g(x j
)−g(x j−1
)]−L ∣ ∣ ∣
<ϵ, "
and "\newline{}For all x\geq 2.01x≥2.01" respectively
* Finally, I understand the cookie notice, but don't have it overlap the page selector on paginated results. Until I hid the element I didn't realize there were multiple pages of results in some cases.
> He is also a prolific communicator of mathematics, having authored most of MathWorld's nearly 13,000 articles.
That's amazing. Reminds me of Salman Khan a full decade before.
> Weisstein is an advocate for author's rights, especially in the area of electronic publication
When I read this I cringed as it sounded like he was in favor of stronger copyrights, instead it seems like the opposite—some slimey Intellectual Monopoly troll once sued him and nearly ended MathWorld (http://www.ericweisstein.com/authors-rights/authors_note.htm...).
That then leads me to ask - how do I discover what content the site has, and what content is it likely to have in the near future?
This is something that I need to better communicate on the site and explains why the site currently has some content, but not others.
Is this just for people who already know lots about math? If so maybe that's why I didn't get it.
I'm thinking perhaps a list of categories to explore (calculus, real analysis, abstract algebra, etc.) could be helpful if one doesn't have a specific term to search for.
I think the home page needs to say what the site is for and what kinds of things are on it, otherwise we have no idea what to search for. Maybe start with something in the search box and the results already below?
There is an error in https://mathpendium.org/view/5e33c092981ec41bc6b27939 (two missed $ and the rendered is unhappy with \subset)
Can I edit without an account? Please. I'm too lazy to create one :) . I guess it's a tradeoff between spam and making it easy to make small contributions.
Thanks for letting me know about the error. Right now Mathpendium has around 1000 entries, and so it is easy for some errors to slip through the cracks.
I was debating about whether or not to require an account to make a contribution. As you mentioned, making an account helps decrease the chance of spam. However, I am open to allowing anonymous contributions, and it is good to know that others would appreciate that.
I love this. I work on this problem a lot. More generally of the form "what is everything currently known in X"?
I would love to be able to make statements like "I am familiar with X/Y/Z% of the nodes in Computer Science/Medicine/Arrested Development Season 2". I would love it if the abstract idea of the "dent" (http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/) a researcher makes could actually be concretely measured as nodes added/updated/subtracted from some corpus of knowledge.
Have you thought about moving the content to a git repo and allowing people to contribute via a pull request?
I am open to supporting pull requests, but my thoughts were that the custom user interface Mathpendium has allows for an easier contribution process.
Another meta suggestion: IMO knowing who you are is usually pretty important for establishing trust in academic circles. Maybe link to your personal homepage on the about page? Right now all we get is a project-specific email so you’re basically anonymous.
Also, I can add a bio page about myself.
It would benefit from some kind of taxonomy on the front page to give an indication of what content areas are available.
Also the site is grown similar to Wikipedia with user contributions, which is why there isn't as much content now.
This is something I need to better communicate on the site.
