CRC Concise Encyclopedia of Mathematics, 2nd Edition

E. W. Weisstein, " CRC Concise Encyclopedia of Mathematics, 2nd Edition, Volumes 1, 2, 3, & 4 "
Chapman & Hall/CRC ISBN-10: 1584883472 2 edition (December 12, 2002) 3252 pages PDF 310 MB

I cannot praise the work too highly: Its vast scope and readability make the encyclopedia a great success.


The CRC Concise Encyclopedia of ibfuthemutics is a compendium of mathematical definitions, formulas, figures, tabulations, and references. It is written in an informal style intended to make it accessible to a broad spectrum of readers with a wide range of mathematical backgrounds and interests. Although mathematics is a fascinating subject, it all too frequently is clothed in specialized jargon and dry formal exposition that make many interesting and useful mathematical results
inaccessible to laypeople. This problem is often further compounded by the difficulty in locating concrete and easily unders+ood examples. To give perspective to a subject, I find it helpful to learn why it is useful, how it is connected to other areas of mathematics and science, and how it is actually implemented. While a picture may be worth a thousand words, explicit examples are worth at least a few hundred! This work attempts to provide enough details to give the reader a flavor for a subject without getting lost in minutiae. While absolute rigor may suffer somewhat, I hope the improvement in usefulness and readability will more than make up for the deficiencies of this approach.
The format of this work is somewhere between a handbook, a dictionary, and an encyclopedia. It differs from existing dictionaries of mathematics in a number of important ways. First,, the entire text and all the equations and figures are available in searchable electronic form on CD-ROM. Second, the entries are extensively cross-linked and cross-referenced, not only to related entries but also to many external sites on the Internet,. This makes locating information very convenient. It also provides a highly efficient way to “navigate” from one related concept to another, a feature that is especially powerful in the electronic version. Standard mathematical references, combined with a few popular ones, are also given at the end of most entries to facilitate additional reading and exploration. In the interests of offering abundant examples, this work also contains a large number of explicit formulas and derivations, providing a ready place to locate a particular formula, as well as including the framework for understanding where it comes from.
The selection of topics in this work is more extensive than in most mathematical dictionaries (e.g., Borowski and Borwein’s Harper-Collins Dictionary of Mathematics and Jeans and Jeans’ Muthematics Dictionary).
At the same time, the descriptions are more accessible than in “technical” mathematical encyclopedias
(e.g., Hazewinkel’s Encyclopaedia of Mathematics and Iyanaga’s Encyclopedic Dictionary of Mathematics).
While the latter remain models of accuracy and rigor, they are not terribly useful to the undergraduate, research scientist, or recreational mathematician. In this work, the most useful, interesting, and entertaining (at least t o my mind) aspects of topics are discussed in addition to their technical definitions. For example, in my entry for pi (n), the definition in terms of the diameter and circumference of a circle is supplemented by a great many formulas and series for pi, including some of the amazing discoveries of Ramanujan. These formulas are comprehensible to readers with only minimal mathematical background, and are interesting to both those with and without formal mathematics training. However, they have not previously been collected in a single convenient location. For this reason, I hope that, in addition to serving as a reference source, this work has some of the same flavor and appeal of Martin Gardner’s delightful Scientific American columns.
Everything in this work has been compiled by me alone. I am an astronomer by training, but have picked up a fair bit of mathematics along the way. It never ceases to amaze me how mathematical connections weave their way through the physical sciences. It frequently transpires that some piece of recently acquired knowledge turns out, to be just what I need to solve some apparently unrelated problem. I have therefore developed the habit of picking up and storing away odd bits of information for future use. This work has provided a mechanism for organizing what has turned out to be a fairly large collection of mathematics. I have also found it very difficult to find clear yet accessible explanations of technical mathematics unless I already have some familiarity with the subject. I hope this encyclopedia will provide jumping-off points for people who are interested in the subjects listed here but who, like me, are not necessarily experts.
The encyclopedia has been compiled over the last 11 years or so, beginning in my college years and continuing during graduate school. The initial document was written in Microsoj? Word@ on a Mac Plus@ computer, and had reached about 200 pages by the time I started graduate school in 1990. When Andrew Treverrow made his OLQX program available for the Mac, I began the task of converting all my documents to 7&X, resulting in a vast improvement in readability. While undertaking the Word to T&X conversion, I also began cross-referencing entries, anticipating that eventually I would be able to convert, the entire document to hypertext. This hope was realized beginning in 1995, when the Internet explosion was ifi full swing and I learned of Nikos Drakes’s excellent 7QX to HTML converter, UTG2HTML. After some additional effort, I was able to post an HTML version of my encyclopedia to the World Wide Web, currently located at www.astro.virginia.edu/-eww6n/math/
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