About MathWorld

MathWorld^TM is the web's most extensive mathematical resource, provided as a free service to the world's mathematics and internet communities as part of a commitment to education and educational outreach by Wolfram Research, makers of Mathematica.

MathWorld has been assembled over more than a decade by Eric W. Weisstein with assistance from thousands of contributors. Since its contents first appeared online in 1995, MathWorld has emerged as a nexus of mathematical information in both the mathematics and educational communities. It not only reaches millions of readers from all continents of the globe, but also serves as a clearinghouse for new mathematical discoveries that are routinely contributed by researchers. Its entries are extensively referenced in journals and books spanning all educational levels, including those read by researchers, elementary school students and teachers, engineers, and hobbyists.

MathWorld continues to grow and evolve with the assistance of thousands of contributors. Careful oversight of all aspects of its content and interface by creator Eric Weisstein, and more recently with able assistance from MathWorld associate Ed Pegg, Jr., provides an exacting level of quality, accuracy, and consistency. As a result, MathWorld is considered not only the clearest and most readable online resource for mathematics, but also one of the most reliable.

MathWorld is actively developed and maintained. The site is updated daily, thus achieving extremely rapid communication of new and extended results--many of which are provided by outside contributors--while at the same time maintaining a degree of editorial oversight and consistency across (and among) the site's nearly 13,000 entries that is simply not possible for other sites.

MathWorld currently features a number of innovative interactive elements that enhance its usability for a variety of different readers. These features include:

• The MathWorld Classroom, which provides a set of pop-up "capsule summaries" for more than 300 mathematical terms.
• Extensive citations to books and journal articles, many of which are active hyperlinks.
• Thousands of downloadable Mathematica notebooks.
• Several types of interactive entries, including LiveGraphics3D applets for interactive three-dimensional geometry.
• A powerful full-text search engine with both basic and advanced searching capabilities.
• Dublin Core and Mathematics Subject Classification metadata in the HTML headers of each page.
• Special information for Mathematica users.

The technology behind MathWorld is heavily based on Mathematica. In addition to being indispensable in the derivation, validation, and visualization of MathWorld's content, Mathematica is used to build the website itself, taking advantage of its advanced mathematical typesetting and data-processing capabilities.

The MathWorld team welcomes your feedback. Please visit the extensive set of Q&A pages where you can find answers to many common queries. If you have comments, please use the comment form to send a message to the MathWorld team. Contributions of new entries are especially appreciated and, after editorial review, appear on MathWorld with grateful attribution to their authors. Please also note that there are a number of things you can do to help support MathWorld as a free public resource. Finally, feel free to add links to MathWorld entries to your own pages.

On behalf of the MathWorld team and Wolfram Research, thanks for using MathWorld. We hope that you find it helpful in your mathematical journeys, and we look forward to continuing building--with your help--what has become one of the world's great internet encyclopedias.