Linda Yamamoto
linday@stanford.edu

AMS Library Committee Meeting minutes (New Orleans, LA, 01/12/01)

[complete minutes were posted on PAMnet]

Present: Bruce Berndt, Carol Hutchins, Robert Doran, Molly White, Robert Seeds (recorder), Keith Dennis, Reinhard Laubenbacher, Jane Kister, and Steven Rockey (interested observer)
Absent: Helena Warburg

• Helena Warburg, a librarian at Williams College, has been recruited to represent the interests of baccalaureate colleges on the committee.
• Due to changes at UT(enn) the MathLib discussion list needs to relocate, possibly to an AMS server. MathLib's usefulness / viability was debated, due to overlap with PAMnet.
• Ideas for supporting free e-journals included cataloging them to promote visibility and developing a minimal subscription mechanism to encourage more formal library support. Project Euclid (Cornell) may offer a model for helping free e-journals migrate to a more commercially self-sustaining mode. There was also general discussion of monograph / serial costs and selection / acquisition issues in libraries.
• Revising the traditional math library survey to look at mathematicians' use of journals and their relation to the current electronic journal environment was proposed. Some questions might measure readiness for completely paperless journals, confidence in digital only archives, and/or role of commercial archive provision.
• Sponsoring / co-sponsoring a panel discussion / program at future AMS/MAA meetings could raise the visibility of the committee and engage more mathematicians in relevant issues.

MathWorld Web Site Shut Down

If you were like me, and bought the paper copy of Eric Weisstein's CRC Concise Encyclopedia of Mathematics (CRC Press, 1999) for the library, but found its online counterpart "Eric Weisstein's World of Mathematics" (a.k.a. MathWorld at http://mathworld.wolfram.com/) to be valuable for reference work, you would have been as disappointed as I was when I visited the site a few months ago and saw a notice stating that "because of a copyright lawsuit filed by CRC Press against Eric Weisstein and others, we have been forced to remove our MathWorld web site from public view as of October 23, 2000. We are very hopeful that at some point in the future it will be possible to restore this valuable web resource to full public view."

Silvio Levy forwarded a letter to PAMnet from John Sullivan, a mathematician at UIUC and contributor to MathWorld, and posted with his permission. To see the discussion on PAMnet, go to:

http://listserv.nd.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A1=ind0010&L=pamnet#23

Then see PAMnetter replies at:

http://listserv.nd.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A1=ind0011&L=pamnet#24
http://listserv.nd.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A1=ind0011&L=pamnet#26

John had written to {orders, bstern, dpacker, rpowers}@crcpress.com, and received a form letter reply from KTaylor@crcpress.com, which stated that "CRC made every effort to amicably resolve the dispute." This statement was also posted at the CRC Press web site (http://www.crcpress.com).

Silvio (and many others) encourage you to circulate the information contained in Sullivan's letter among mathematicians and other scientists at your institution, so they can write to CRC and encourage them to allow reinstatement of this useful resource. Words of support for Eric can be sent to e.weisstein@wolfram.com.

If you wish to read the 20-page decision of the U.S. District Court, Central District of Illinois, which led to the shutdown of the site, it is available in PDF at http://www.ilcd.uscourts.gov/00-2262.pdf.

Additions to the PAM Resources in Mathematics page
http://www.sla.org/division/dpam/math.html

Pseudospectra Gateway
http://web.comlab.ox.ac.uk/projects/pseudospectra/
According to Mark Embree and Nick Trefethen of the Oxford University Computing Laboratory, "pseudospectra provide an analytical and graphical alternative for investigating non-normal matrices and operators."

Origami Mathematics
http://chasm.merrimack.edu/~thull/OrigamiMath.html
This site is an attempt to bring together information on the mathematics of paper folding. Includes a link to a method of trisecting an angle via folding.

Logic
http://www.rbjones.com/rbjpub/logic/log025.htm
A site that describes symbolic and philosophical logic and their relation to computing, math, and philosophy. Part of the Factasia site, the author cautions the reader that "this site consists almost exclusively of opinion."

W3C Math Home Page
http://www.w3.org/Math/
MathML resource site with the Mathematical Markup Language (MathML) Test Suite and the MathML Version 2.0 W3C Proposed Recommendation (08 Jan 2001).

From the Mathematics Beyond Dartmouth Web Page
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~krescook/qnetlinks/mathlinks.shtml

MathGuide
http://www.mathguide.de/
Internet-based subject gateway to scholarly relevant information in mathematics, located at the Lower Saxony State and University Library, Göttingen (Germany). Resources are described and evaluated with a set of Dublin Core metadata.

Diamond Theory, by Steven H. Cullinane
http://m759.freeservers.com/
This website updates a booklet Cullinane wrote in 1976, and is written for mathematicians and college students of mathematics. The booklet details the implications of what the author calls the "diamond theorem," after the diamond figure in Plato's Meno dialogue.

Mark Mounts regularly maintains and updates the Resources in Mathematics page on the PAM web site. Send corrections, changes and suggestions for the resources page to Mark Mounts, mark.mounts@dartmouth.edu