Mathematics

Eric Weisstein's World of Science contains budding encyclopedias of astronomy, scientific biography, chemistry, and physics.

This resource has been assembled over more than a decade by internet encyclopedist Eric W. Weisstein with assistance from the internet community.

Eric Weisstein's World of Science is written and maintained by the author as a public service for scientific knowledge and education. Although it is often difficult to find explanations for technical subjects that are both clear and accessible, this web site bridges the gap by placing an interlinked framework of mathematical exposition and illustrative examples at the fingertips of every internet user.

A general index of topics is provided in the box below. Click the topic of your interest. Users interested in a particular person, place, or topic are also reminded to use the 'Search' or 'Find' function found under 'Edit'.

These pages are an on-line museum celebrating Babbage's Analytical Engine. Here you will find a collection of original historical documents tracing the evolution of the Engine from the original concept through concrete design, ending in disappointment when it became clear it would never be built. You'll see concepts used every day in the design and programming of modern computers described for the very first time, often in a manner more lucid than contemporary expositions. You'll get a sense of how mathematics, science, and technology felt in the nineteenth century, and for the elegant language used in discussing those disciplines, and thereby peek into the personalities of the first computer engineer and programmer our species managed to produce. If you are their intellectual heir, perhaps you'll see yourself and your own work through their Victorian eyes.

The United Nations has declared 2001 INTERNATIONAL YEAR OF DIALOGUE AMONG CIVILIZATIONS.

This site is dedicated to increasing awareness of the way modern science grew through the dialogue of civilizations, and the contribution dialogue can make to promoting the growth of science in the future.

Although the dominant view in the past has been that the historical roots of modern science only lie within Europe increasing evidence accumulated over the last fifty years reveals the need for a more dialogical approach to the history of science. Understanding the role played by civilizational dialogue in the growth of modern science would also enable us to take more seriously the emerging realization among many leading thinkers that premodern traditions of science contain reservoirs of knowledge urgently needed to deal with serious problems - like environmental and health concerns -that confront the global community.

Here you can find a PostScript (460 Kbytes), gzipped PostScript (146 Kbytes) and pdf (358 Kbytes) version of Shannon's paper. PDF files can be viewed by Adobe's acrobat reader. Tarred and gzipped contents of the directory (63 Kbytes) that contain the LaTeX code for the paper is also available.

This is a dictionary of algorithms, algorithmic techniques, data structures, archetypical problems, and related definitions. Algorithms include common functions, such as Ackermann's function. Problems include traveling salesman and Byzantine generals. Some entries have links to implementations and more information. Index pages list entries by area and by type. The two-level index has a total download 1/20 as big as this page.

The VL is the oldest catalog of the web, started by Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of html and the web itself. Unlike commercial catalogs, it is run by a loose confederation of volunteers, who compile pages of key links for particular areas in which they are expert; even though it isn't the biggest index of the web, the VL pages are widely recognised as being amongst the highest-quality guides to particular sections of the web.

This is a brief outline of the development of string theory, the details of which will eventually fill many large volumes written by many people directly and indirectly involved in this rich and fascinating story.

From the Multi-Repository Mathematics Collections site you will gain access to three of the most significant mathematics collections digitally available: The Mathematics Collection from Cornell, the Mathematics Collection from Göttingen, and the University of Michigan's Historical Math Collection. From this access point you will be able to search across all three of these collections, and examine results as you would normally using the University of Michigan's user interface. It is important to point out that the University of Göttingen has only one item for which a fulltext search can be performed, but bibliographic searches across the collection are possible.

John Henry trained as a historian of science at Leeds and the Open Universities, and was a research fellow at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine in London before moving to Edinburgh University in 1986. He is interested in the interactions of and relations between science, philosophy, medicine, magic and religion in the Renaissance and early modern periods. He has recently published The Scientific Revolution and the Origins of Modern Science (Macmillian Press and St Martin's Press, 1997