NIST Releases Updated Handbook of Math Functions 128
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.
Ob (Score:5, Funny)
Let the number of the post be defined by a monotonically increasing function f, such that the initial value of f is zero.
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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:
/b/tards approximated inside
t[10,60] seconds, with T(t) approaching 0 as t approaches infinity.
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
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Corrolary 1.2:
The score function is not strictly positive on the set of posts.
Re:Ob (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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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.
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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?
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I'm a C programmer, you insensitive clo01@m.
One day I'll fix that bloody pointer error.
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Let the number of the interesting post be defined by the zero function...
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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 s
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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.
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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
Filesystem safety (Score:2)
Well, I found your post interesting, so even if we split the difference, there'd be half a post.
42 (Score:3, Funny)
That's all you need to know about maths.
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Re:42 (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Only on Slashdot (Score:3, Funny)
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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,
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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.
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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 [wikipedia.org]: Canadian, Mexican, Belizean, Brazilian etc.
US citizens are the only ones called Americans. Citizens of other countries are not.
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Do you also refer to people from West Virginia as "Virginians" and people from New Mexico and "Mexicans"?
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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.
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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 trut
Re:42 (Score:4, Insightful)
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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.
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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.
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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 t
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So take this as me officially calling you a liar.
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may be offtopic (Score:4, Interesting)
If you are looking for a good math reference I would recommend Mathematical Handbook for Scientists and Engineers by Korns [amazon.com]
Russian translation of it was a must-have for every member of Russian "technicheskaya intelligentsiya".
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Mathematical Handbook for Scientists and Engineers by Korns
Math Freak on a Leash?
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Opera MathML support (Score:4, Interesting)
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 [nist.gov] ). Anyone else getting similar results?
-molo
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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 writte
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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-
VRML! (Score:2)
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Lat time I saw a website with VRML was in 2002. It was a great idea that failed, I don't know why.
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I wouldn't bet on it either, for the same reason modern games aren't supplied in DOOM WAD files.
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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.
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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 ?
967 pages? (Score:3, Funny)
So, the limit as geekiness approaches infinity... (Score:1)
...is procreation probability approaches zero?
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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.
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It would be... (Score:1)
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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 (Score:4, Informative)
It also has alternative coding for every equation in TeX, pMML [wikipedia.org] (XML wrapped default coding) and PNG
I've had my copy for 40 years (Score:5, Insightful)
From my experience... (Score:2)
It's not a textbook; it assumes you basically know the math
That applies to every math book out there.
Re:From my experience... (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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another reason to encourage people to abandon IE (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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Wikipedia renders bitmaps as equations
That sounds quite difficult. Are the bitmap-derived equations small enough to fit into the margins of the articles?
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Only small ones, like "a^n + b^n = c^n, n > 2"...
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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.
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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
Re:another reason to encourage people to abandon I (Score:2)
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.
Statistics (Score:1)
I would love to see the same thing with statistical formulae, does anyone know if such a creature exists?
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Never mind I answered my own question
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/topics/ProbabilityandStatistics.html [wolfram.com]
Math PNGs not optimal (Score:2)
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They did do a better
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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 tha
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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/ [stixfonts.org]
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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?
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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.
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Useless. (Score:2)
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. (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
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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 (Score:4, Interesting)
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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.
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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.
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967 pages of mirth (Score:1, Funny)
I finally got around to reading the NIST Handbook of Mathematical Functions.
Turns out the Zeta function did it.
Copyrighted unlike the original (Score:2)
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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.
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
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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
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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.
No, I am a federal employee. If all the authors on a paper are federal employe
A+S (Score:1)
Epic Fail (Score:4, Interesting)
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 (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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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.
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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 sentenc
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Thanks for pointing that out. Credit card info needed to be updated due to expiration and reissue.
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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