MathWorld Headline News

New NKS|Online, Functions, and MathWorld Websites Unveiled

By Eric W. Weisstein

February 11, 2004--The new year has ushered in some big changes in the mathematical and scientific websites hosted by Wolfram Research. On January 7, a major upgrade of The Wolfram Functions Site was unveiled, and this rollout was followed on February 6 by the brand-new NKS|Online website as well as the unveiling of a new logo and modern new look for MathWorld.

NKS|Online

Readers of MathWorld headline news and students of math and science worldwide will be familiar with A New Kind of Science, Stephen Wolfram's groundbreaking book. Completed after more than two decades of research, discovery, and writing, this book presents a new way of looking at the operation of the natural world in terms of the behavior of sets of rules that can be embodied in simple computer programs (MathWorld headline news, May 6, 2002).

The entire contents of A New Kind of Science, complete with full text, images, and 30,000 links, are now available online at the new NKS|Online website. More than just an online book, NKS|Online also offers user forums, extensive cross-linking, downloadable programs, and an annotation feature for posting comments. Accompanying the rollout of the NKS|Online site, MathWorld's many references to material in A New Kind of Science have now been turned into live hyperlinks so that MathWorld readers are only a click away from the original source. When combined with its index and full-text search capabilities, NKS|Online is sure to be a great asset to NKS students and researchers.

The Wolfram Functions Site

On October 13, 2001, Wolfram Research unveiled the first version of The Wolfram Functions Site, functions.wolfram.com (MathWorld headline news, October 13, 2001). Through its vast collection of more than 37,000 formulas, this website provided the mathematical and scientific communities with the world's most comprehensive resource about mathematical functions. The website was developed by special functions experts Michael Trott and Oleg Marichev under the direction of Stephen Wolfram.

As of January 7, 2004, The Wolfram Functions Site has been greatly expanded and enhanced. The number of formulas has been more than doubled to 87,160, and 10,828 graphical visualizations of mathematical functions have been added. These visualizations not only are works of mathematical art in their own right but also provide unique visual insights into the intricate and sometimes unexpected properties of even simple mathematical structures. MathWorld readers will also note that the textual descriptions accompanying the visualizations make extensive use of hyperlinking to MathWorld for more detailed explanations of many of the terms.

Material in The Wolfram Functions Site can be downloaded in several standard formats, including Mathematica InputForm and StandardForm, MathML, and PDF. Each formula has been assigned a unique permanent ID that can be used by documents in which the formula is cited. Formulas can be copied from the site and immediately used as input to a computer system. The Wolfram Functions Site, which contains more than 30 gigabytes of data, is a tour de force by any standard and is made possible by a new generation of automated website-construction technology based on Mathematica symbolic documents.

MathWorld

Since returning to the internet in November 2001 (MathWorld author's note, November 6, 2001), MathWorld has continued to grow in size and popularity. MathWorld is the planet's most widely read resource for mathematics and as of February 2004 contains more than 11,625 entries. It also continues to grow under the authorship and guidance of Eric W. Weisstein, its creator and the author of this news story. While reader feedback is an indispensable part of MathWorld's success, hundreds of contributors have also been instrumental in building MathWorld into the preeminent mathematics resource that it is today.

While maintaining the convenient navigation structures that help make the vast amount of content on MathWorld easy to navigate, the new site design unveiled on February 6 gives it an elegant, modern look and provides improved readability for its pages.

In addition, the website has been designed to highlight and encourage user contributions to the site. As a reader of MathWorld, you may already know the site as the world's most visited mathematical resource. You may even have noted that MathWorld is updated with new and enhanced material on an almost daily basis. What you may not know is that your input and contributions are welcome. While the author of this news story has personally written the vast majority of material appearing on the site, MathWorld has also benefited from the input of more than 150 contributors. Since creating a website that attempts to cover all things mathematical is a truly monumental task, please consider joining Eric in continuing to expand and extend this free mathematical resource. Information about contributing to MathWorld can be found on the site's Become a Contributor page as well as on the contributor FAQ.

More to Come...

In addition to being hosted and sponsored by Wolfram Research, both MathWorld and The Wolfram Functions Site are partially supported by the National Science Foundation under its National Science Digital Library initiative. In addition to the new visualization gallery for The Wolfram Functions Site and a new didactic-based navigation layer for MathWorld that is currently under development, a number of other new exciting components are in the works for each site. Readers of these sites should therefore stay tuned for exciting developments in the near future!