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Atlas of Mathematical Objects
- kercker 10y agoI don't understand why there is an "MIT" in the title.
- rossdavidh 10y agoIt stands for "Mathematical Is Terribly-hard-to-spell"
- dang 10y agoThanks—fixed. No more "MIT" in title either.
- pizza 10y agoCryptic http://www.lmfdb.org/acknowledgment http://www.lmfdb.org/acknowledgment
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- williamstein 10y agoIt was there before because one of the LMFDB contributors (Andrew Sutherland) is at MIT.
- officialchicken 10y agoI was wondering how it was built since equations aren't the nicest things to render with HTML. A quick 'view source' shows the site is using MathJax (not MathML) for displaying the equations. I presume a lot of content is submitted or formatted using Tex/Latex. Can any HN'ers elaborate on the workflow for review/editing/publishing on the site?
- olamaria 10y agohttps://github.com/LMFDB/ https://github.com/LMFDB/
- officialchicken 10y agoThanks for that link. In one of the MD files[0], I found information on the editorial board. [0] https://github.com/LMFDB/lmfdb/blob/master/Development.md#basic-organization--editorial-board https://github.com/LMFDB/lmfdb/blob/master/Development.md#ba...
- hasch 10y agoThe simple reason for mathjax is,that it is the only one that has many of the required features and it works across browsers. MathML can't deliver any of that...
- grandalf 10y agoIn general, what is a mathematical object? Is the natural numbers one?
- openasocket 10y agoIt's just a informal term for the things mathematicians study. So the natural numbers are mathematical objects, as well as a set, a function, a manifold, a vector space, etc.
- hasch 10y agoI think, it's an instance of a mathematical "idea". E.g. 7 is an object of the idea "prime numbers".
- dogecoinbase 10y agoThis is actually a surprisingly complex question in mathematical philosophy -- I unfortunately can't find a copy online right now, but if the idea of mathematical objects interests you I'd highly recommend Paul Benacerraf's 1965 paper "What Numbers Cannot Be", which explores the complexity of the idea of even a single integer as an "object".
- Cogito 10y agoFor those interested, the article is actually called "What Numbers Could not Be" (many references have "What Numbers Cannot Be" so maybe it was published under both names at some point?) There is a copy at: http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic1240846.files/Benacerraf.pdf http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic1240846.files/Ben...
- grandalf 10y agoThanks for posting that!
- dogecoinbase 10y agoThank you! I just checked my copy of Cambridge's Philosophy of Mathematics and it is indeed "could not" -- the PDF I have on my laptop, however, is "cannot". I wonder when/where that happened.
- Someone 10y ago…in Number Theory. Also: license is GPLv2+, so they seem to think this is software. That makes some sense. (And moderators, please fix that typo; mathmatical is spelled with an 'e')
- olamaria 10y agoIndeed it is: https://github.com/LMFDB/ https://github.com/LMFDB/
- williamstein 10y agoCalculating the data makes extensive use of http://www.sagemath.org/ http://www.sagemath.org/, which is GPL'd; moreover, the LMFDB contributors also contribute a lot to SageMath.
- brudgers 10y agoMIT's press release: http://news.mit.edu/2016/international-team-launches-atlas-mathematical-objects-0510 http://news.mit.edu/2016/international-team-launches-atlas-m...
- jiiam 10y agoA bit disappoint by the narrow point of view. Atlas of Number Theoretical Objects would have been more appropriate. Still nice, though.
- kafkaesq 10y agoThe site could use a better name. But presumably there's no reason the interface and cataloguing system can't be extended to other domains.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 10y agoWhat are some specific examples of other types of objects you would like to see.
- explanibrag 10y agoAll the finite simple groups would be nice, for example.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 10y agoI assume you mean the sporadic groups? Because the families are all unbounded. There's also this: http://brauer.maths.qmul.ac.uk/Atlas/v3/ http://brauer.maths.qmul.ac.uk/Atlas/v3/
- crb002 10y agohttps://github.com/chadbrewbaker/endoscope https://github.com/chadbrewbaker/endoscope is more useful.
- williamstein 10y agoBackup mirror sites: http://lmfdb.warwick.ac.uk/ http://lmfdb.warwick.ac.uk/, http://lmfdb.maths.bris.ac.uk/ http://lmfdb.maths.bris.ac.uk/
- danbruc 10y agoHere is a Numberphile video [1] that explains - at the very end - why this database was put together. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTveQ1ndH1c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTveQ1ndH1c
- williamstein 10y agoTimothy Gowers (Fields Medalist and open publishing advocate) just wrote a blog post about this: https://gowers.wordpress.com/2016/05/10/the-l-functions-and-modular-forms-database/#more-6143 https://gowers.wordpress.com/2016/05/10/the-l-functions-and-...
- partycoder 10y agoNot criticizing or anything, just curious: What is the difference/advantage with respect to Wikipedia or Wolfram Mathworld?
- has2k1 10y agoLMFDB is more specialized. But given an infinite amount of time, the others would acquire that information.
- Someone 10y agoMathworld has broader scope and a tighter license (http://mathworld.wolfram.com/about/faq.html#copyright http://mathworld.wolfram.com/about/faq.html#copyright)
- williamstein 10y agoLMFDB contains a large amount of extremely difficult to compute data about mathematical functions that arise in number theory, which took decades to compute and debug, and relations between that data. Just as hundreds of gigabytes of detailed astronomical data is not in Wikipedia or Wolfram Mathworld, this data about number theory is not in Wikipedia or Wolfram Mathworld either, and it never will be.
- williamstein 10y agoI should add that behind the scenes LMFDB really is a (MongoDB) database, there's an API that @hasch (here on HN) wrote, so that data can be recovered in JSON format, etc. To give some sense of what is in there, this http://johncremona.github.io/ecdata/ http://johncremona.github.io/ecdata/ is just a tiny bit of what is in LMFDB.
- frobitz13 10y agoTerry Tao blogged about this: https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2016/05/10/l-functions-and-modular-forms-database-now-out-of-beta/ https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2016/05/10/l-functions-and-mo...
- BucketSort 10y agoSomeday we will draw the link between this area/program and AI. There's something deep here that has implications I don't think we understand.
- frobitz13 10y agoStephen Wolfram has suggested something along these lines (more in the context of machine learning than AI, per se).