E-mail: web@matr
E-mail: web@matrIt has some interactive content about set theory, built on the fly from an underlaying formal representation. From it you get a natural-language view of the theorems, proofs, etc., and can do exercises to test your knowledge about that content, like in this example about set union. There you can change the names of the variables so that it's easier for you to read ("Modify Variable Names"), view the background you need to know to understand this theorem ("Show Background"), and take a fill-in-the-blanks exercise ("Test").
It's interesting that you can pick your own variable names and the program will accept a correct answer even if those names are different from the ones displayed before (this is technically called "equivalence modulo alpha-conversion").
The page for the MINSE project, from 1996-06-22. As of 2001-02-10 still works. Consist of what its creator, Ka-Ping Yee, calls a "polymediator", a server program that generates the html source from an ASCII document written in its own math markup language, which can be retrieved by the application from another servers. Formulas are rendered as inline images.
A reaction to the publication of MathML 2.0. Advocates the use of Mathematica's ASCII input language instead of markup languages such as MathML. Even if you, as me, think SGML-esque markup languages are The One True Way, you should read the entire document. He makes some very good points.
In particular, the idea that refusing to use Mathematica's notation is an implicit agreement on WRI's alleged ownership of it, while he affirms that its just traditional math notation put in ASCII, and thus nobody can claim its possesion. On the mockmma incident, Prof. Richard J. Fateman says in mma.mailer (It's a text file) that "WRI's initial legal concern with the availability of an alternative 'Mathematica' parser seems to have faded.".
Among other things, says that OpenMath doesn't address the hard problems in encoding maths, and what it does can already be done with many other proven techniques, such as LISP for the semantics and TeX for the presentation.
Prof. Fateman also has some opinion on MINSE: http://www.openmath.org/archive/om/msg00111.html.
A processor that generates a variety of formats from a LaTeX-like ASCII document.
There is a note that I find specially interesting, about getting meaning from legacy TeX/LaTeX expressions. Prof. Fateman and Eylon Caspi also have a document (1999-08-04) where they explain their experiences in getting Macsyma expressions from TeX markup.
Where many math symbols came from.
A program that generates LaTeX expressions from ASCII text written in a format resembling speech.
From the website:
The mission of the Scientific and Technical Information Exchange (STIX) font creation project is the preparation of a comprehensive set of fonts that serve the scientific and engineering community in the process from manuscript creation through final publication, both in electronic and print formats. Toward this purpose, the STIX fonts will be made available, under royalty-free license, to anyone, including publishers, software developers, scientists, students, and the general public.
About the old web page:
2000-10-19.
The aim of this project seems to be to help create a set of fonts for mathematical symbols. This contains a catalogue of math glyphs, with equivalences between different encodings.
Abstract: "How will scholarly publishing evolve? The history of other technological innovations suggests the shift to electronic publications will be rapid, but fundamental changes in the nature of scholarly communications will be much slower."
The technology is here, but the mentality isn't.
Other interesting papers from him:
There is a complementary update to this, published in 1996 in the Euromath Bulletin, titled "On the road to electronic publishing".