D-Lib Magazine
June 1996

ISSN 1082-9873

Clips and Pointers

Point-to-Point

Where to Go: Mathematics

Modern computing was invented in part to handle very large problems, such as processing census data or calculating artillery tables. Not surprisingly, the Internet hosts many sites related to mathematics and identifying resources in mathematics. Here are a few to get you started:

Clearinghouses

The Mathematics WWW Archives, maintained by the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, is a comprehensive collection with an emphasis on education in K- 12 through undergraduate settings. Included in the list are pointers to collections of teaching materials, software, and other sites related to mathematics. The Department of Mathematics at the University of Wisconsin Marathon Center has compiled a Catalog of Mathematics-related Servers with thirteen sections covering: General Mathematics WWW Servers - in the United States, General Mathematics WWW Servers - in other countries, Pure Mathematics, History of Mathematics and Biographies, Applied Mathematics, Math Teaching, Math Education and Math Student Servers, Statistics, Mathematics Gophers, Mathematics Discussion Groups, Mathematics Newsletters and Announcements, Mathematics Newsgroups, Mathematics Software, Books and Publications, Mathematical Art and Graphics, and Miscellaneous Web Pages in Mathematics. The Department of Mathematics at Pennsylvania State University also maintains a comprehensive list of mathematics resources as well as a directory of mathematicians and archives of teaching aids and preprints.

Mathematics Preprints

Preprints allow researchers to communicate the newest research quickly but without the benefit of formal peer review. In general, the preprint sites support searching and browsing; include submission, distribution, and notification procedures; and identify related sites. Among the oldest and best-developed of the preprint archives is the Physics e-Print archive at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). Both LANL and Penn State identify mathematics pre-print collections maintained by Duke/MSRI/SISSA and by the American Mathematical Society (AMS). LANL also notes the resources maintained by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) and the preprint collections at the University of Texas (mathematical physics). Penn State identifies the Canadian Mathematical Society (CMS) Electronic Preprints and Hypatia, a directory of researchers in mathematics and computer science as well as their papers, in addition to numerous collections maintained by departments in more specialized sub-fields.

The AMS Preprint Server supports browsing and searching Abstracts of the entire collection may be browsed by the mathematics subject classification, and the titles of most recent 100 submittals may also be browsed. The abstracts retrieved contain pointers to the full document, which is housed either by AMS or at remote locations. The archives at Duke/MSRI/SISSA have been divided into four topical areas, which may be individually searched by author/title or words and further limited by year (back to 1992 for two of the sub-archives). CMS Electronic Preprints also supports searching and browsing by general topics and includes a French version as well as a list of electronic journals in mathematics.

Curriculum and Tutorials

In addition to expediting communication of research, numerous sites devoted to mathematics offer tools for curriculum development and on-line tutorials targeting the full range of settings from K-12 to undergraduate. The April issue of Syllabus Magazine provides a good introduction to mathematics and software tools for mathematics instruction at the high school, undergraduate, and graduate levels including resources accessible on the Internet (note: the site provides highlights of the issue's contents). On the net, a useful place to start looking for information is NASA's Aerospace Education Services Program, which includes descriptions of other sites in addition to links to them. The Office for Mathematics, Science, and Technology Education (MSTE) at the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign also maintains Math Education Resources, which identifies resources by topic (e.g., General Mathematics Resources, K-12). Both the Mathematics Archive (especially What's New; Software, abstracts, and Reviews; and Other Teaching Materials) and the Eisenhower Clearinghouse provide links to software and curriculum development materials.

A few favorites:

In Print

Pointers in This Column:

ALCTS Task Force on Meta Access
Minutes from Midwinter (January 1996) meeting
http://www.lib.virginia.edu/alcts/about/meet.html
American Mathematical Society
(AMS) Preprint Server
http://e- math.ams.org/preprints/preprints-home.html
Beyond Bookmarks:
Schemes for Organizing the Web
http://www.public.iastate.edu/~CYBERST ACKS/CTW.htm
Canadian Mathematical Society
(CMS) Electronic Preprints
http://camel.math.ca/Preprints/
Catalog of Mathematics-related Servers http://mthwww.uwc.edu/wwwmahes/files/math01.htm
Duke/MSRI/SISSA
Preprint Archives
http://www.msri.org/preprints/archive.html
Eisenhower Clearinghouse
for Mathematics and Science Education
http://www.enc.org/
Fractal Microscope http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Edu/Fractal/Fracta l_Home.html
Geometry Center http://www.geom.umn.edu/
Hypatia http://hypatia.dcs.qmw.ac.uk/
Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory
University of Maryland, College Park
Technical and Video Reports
http://www.cs.umd.edu/projects/hcil/Research/tech-report-list.html
IFLANET Metadata Resources http://www.nlc-bnc.ca/ifla/II/metadata.htm
Math Education Resources http://mstemac4.ed.uiuc.edu/mathed/mathedlinks/html
Mathematics Archive http://archives.math.utk.edu/
MEGA Mathematics http://www.c3.lanl.gov/mega- math/index.html
MendelWeb http://www.stg.brown.edu/MendelWeb/
NASA's Aerospace Education Services Program http://www.okstate.edu/aesp/resource.html
Network-Based Electronic Publishing of Scholarly Works:
A Selective Bibliography
http://info.lib.uh.edu/pr/v6/n1/bail6n1.html
Pennsylvania State University
Mathematics Resources
http://alf1.cii.fc.ul.pt/EMIS/PSU-mirror/MathLists/Contents.html
Pennsylvania State University
Teaching aids
gopher://gopher.math.psu.edu/11/pub/teaching_ai ds/
Physics e-Print archive at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) http://xxx.lanl.gov/
Preserving Digital Information http://www.rlg.org/ArchTF/
Proceedings of the First IEEE Metadata Conference
April 16-18, 1996
http://www.nml.org/resources/misc/metadata/proceedings/paper_list.html
Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics
(SIAM)
http://www.siam.org/
Syllabus Magazine
April (1996) issue
(Highlights)
http://www.syllabus.com/april96mag.html
Untangling the Web http://www.library.ucsb.edu/untangle/
Workshop on Collaborative Filtering
University of California, Berkeley, March 16, 1996
http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/resources/collab/

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