Mathworld is an online encyclopedia of mathematics created largely by Eric Weisstein. The Mathworld website is here.
Blog posts where I talk about Mathworld:
History summary: Mathworld is largely the work of Eric Weisstein. He started collecting individual entries for what would eventually became Mathworld way back in the 1980s. In 1995, he put up all the entries he had collected under the name “Eric Weisstein’s Treasure Trove of Mathematics”. Using feedback, corrections, comments, and contributions from the readers of the website, he improved and enhanced the website’s content. CRC Press created a book version of the encyclopedia, called CRC Concise Encyclopedia of Mathematis. In 1999, Eric Weisstein chose to join Wolfram Research Inc. and they offered to host Mathworld on the Wolfram website, also offering to integrate it with Mathematica. This integration happened around 1999-2000. CRC Press filed a lawsuit against Weisstein and Wolfram for putting up the contents of the encyclopedia for free, since they claimed to have rights to the contents as they had published those contents. The lawsuit was settled privately and Mathworld continued to be hosted for free. Since then, many new features, such as Notebooks and Classroom Demonstrations have been added to Mathworld.
General information pages within Mathworld:
Other general information about Mathworld:
-
Eric Weisstein’s discussion of some controversies surrounding Mathworld.
-
Eric Weisstein’s research talks, including this presentation in 2004 and this presentation in 2005 at Joint Mathematics Meetings.
Coverage of the controversy/lawsuit between CRC Press and Eric Weisstein, Wolfram Research Inc.:
-
Treaure Trove Looted (1 November 2000) by John Macdonald on O’Reilly’s website.
-
Champaign, Illinois man allowed to restart website after lawsuit (December 2001).