Atlas of Mathematical Objects

http://www.lmfdb.org/

by rotrux • 10 years ago

174 37 10 years ago

lmfdb.org

kercker• 10 years ago

I don't understand why there is an "MIT" in the title.

rossdavidh• 10 years ago

It stands for "Mathematical Is Terribly-hard-to-spell"

dang• 10 years ago

Thanks—fixed. No more "MIT" in title either.

pizza• 10 years ago

Cryptic http://www.lmfdb.org/acknowledgment

williamstein6• 10 years ago

It was there before because one of the LMFDB contributors (Andrew Sutherland) is at MIT.

officialchicken2• 10 years ago

I was wondering how it was built since equations aren't the nicest things to render with HTML. A quick 'view source' shows the site is using MathJax (not MathML) for displaying the equations.

I presume a lot of content is submitted or formatted using Tex/Latex. Can any HN'ers elaborate on the workflow for review/editing/publishing on the site?

olamaria2• 10 years ago

https://github.com/LMFDB/

officialchicken2• 10 years ago

Thanks for that link. In one of the MD files[0], I found information on the editorial board.

[0] https://github.com/LMFDB/lmfdb/blob/master/Development.md#ba...

hasch2• 10 years ago

The simple reason for mathjax is,that it is the only one that has many of the required features and it works across browsers. MathML can't deliver any of that...

grandalf2• 10 years ago

In general, what is a mathematical object? Is the natural numbers one?

openasocket• 10 years ago

It's just a informal term for the things mathematicians study. So the natural numbers are mathematical objects, as well as a set, a function, a manifold, a vector space, etc.

hasch2• 10 years ago

I think, it's an instance of a mathematical "idea". E.g. 7 is an object of the idea "prime numbers".

dogecoinbase2• 10 years ago

This is actually a surprisingly complex question in mathematical philosophy -- I unfortunately can't find a copy online right now, but if the idea of mathematical objects interests you I'd highly recommend Paul Benacerraf's 1965 paper "What Numbers Cannot Be", which explores the complexity of the idea of even a single integer as an "object".

Cogito• 10 years ago

For those interested, the article is actually called "What Numbers Could not Be" (many references have "What Numbers Cannot Be" so maybe it was published under both names at some point?)

There is a copy at:

http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic1240846.files/Ben...

Someone2• 10 years ago

…in Number Theory.

Also: license is GPLv2+, so they seem to think this is software. That makes some sense.

(And moderators, please fix that typo; mathmatical is spelled with an 'e')

olamaria2• 10 years ago

Indeed it is: https://github.com/LMFDB/

williamstein6• 10 years ago

Calculating the data makes extensive use of http://www.sagemath.org/, which is GPL'd; moreover, the LMFDB contributors also contribute a lot to SageMath.

brudgers• 10 years ago

MIT's press release: http://news.mit.edu/2016/international-team-launches-atlas-m...

jiiam• 10 years ago

A bit disappoint by the narrow point of view. Atlas of Number Theoretical Objects would have been more appropriate. Still nice, though.

kafkaesq• 10 years ago

The site could use a better name. But presumably there's no reason the interface and cataloguing system can't be extended to other domains.

GFK_of_xmaspast2• 10 years ago

What are some specific examples of other types of objects you would like to see.

explanibrag• 10 years ago

All the finite simple groups would be nice, for example.

crb002• 10 years ago

https://github.com/chadbrewbaker/endoscope is more useful.

williamstein6• 10 years ago

Backup mirror sites: http://lmfdb.warwick.ac.uk/, http://lmfdb.maths.bris.ac.uk/

danbruc• 10 years ago

Here is a Numberphile video [1] that explains - at the very end - why this database was put together.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTveQ1ndH1c

williamstein6• 10 years ago

Timothy Gowers (Fields Medalist and open publishing advocate) just wrote a blog post about this: https://gowers.wordpress.com/2016/05/10/the-l-functions-and-...

partycoder• 10 years ago

Not criticizing or anything, just curious: What is the difference/advantage with respect to Wikipedia or Wolfram Mathworld?

has2k1• 10 years ago

LMFDB is more specialized. But given an infinite amount of time, the others would acquire that information.

Someone2• 10 years ago

Mathworld has broader scope and a tighter license (http://mathworld.wolfram.com/about/faq.html#copyright)

williamstein6• 10 years ago

LMFDB contains a large amount of extremely difficult to compute data about mathematical functions that arise in number theory, which took decades to compute and debug, and relations between that data. Just as hundreds of gigabytes of detailed astronomical data is not in Wikipedia or Wolfram Mathworld, this data about number theory is not in Wikipedia or Wolfram Mathworld either, and it never will be.

williamstein6• 10 years ago

I should add that behind the scenes LMFDB really is a (MongoDB) database, there's an API that @hasch (here on HN) wrote, so that data can be recovered in JSON format, etc. To give some sense of what is in there, this http://johncremona.github.io/ecdata/ is just a tiny bit of what is in LMFDB.

frobitz132• 10 years ago

Terry Tao blogged about this: https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2016/05/10/l-functions-and-mo...

BucketSort• 10 years ago

Someday we will draw the link between this area/program and AI. There's something deep here that has implications I don't think we understand.

frobitz132• 10 years ago

Stephen Wolfram has suggested something along these lines (more in the context of machine learning than AI, per se).

Atlas of Mathematical Objects

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