gripes

[Eric W. Weisstein]

On Mon, 9 Jul 2001, Simon Colton wrote:

> One problem which isn't easy to fix is the fact that the Eric
> Weisstein's World of Mathematics (formerly treasure trove) is no
> longer available online (pending court cases, which could take a
> considerable time to resolve).

Unfortunately, you are quite correct.  This has not proven easy to fix ;(

> Many sequences such as the one below have no definition, just a
> pointer to Eric's site. For example:
>
> %I A051038
> %S A051038
> 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,14,15,16,18,20,21,22,24,25,27,28,30,32,33,
> %T A051038
> 35,36,40,42,44,45,48,49,50,54,55,56,60,63,64,66,70,72,75,77,80,81,84,
> %U A051038 88,90,96,98,99,100,105,108,110,112,120,121,125,126,128,132,135,140
> %N A051038 11-smooth numbers.
> %H A051038 E. W. Weisstein, Link to a section of The World of Mathematics.
> %Y A051038 Cf. A002473, A003586, A051037.
> %K A051038 nonn
> %O A051038 1,2
> %A A051038 Eric W. Weisstein (eww at wolfram.com)
>
> Because we cannot go to the link, it is not possible to get a definition of
> 11-smooth numbers which (at least for me), makes the entry useless.
> A quick grep of the Encyclopedia showed that at least
> 2,000 sequences have a link to Eric's site, although it is not clear how many
> are definition-less. Any suggestions for fixing this problem? We could just
> wait and hope that the court case is resolved in Eric's favour, or we could
> possibly ask Eric to update some of the sequence definitions in the
> Encyclopedia.

I'm afraid I'm not very keen on rekeying hundreds or thousands of
definitions which link to MathWorld.  And while I apologize to all that my
on-line encyclopedia is currently unavailable, I ask for people's patience
in awaiting its return to the internet.  While I can't say when (or even
if) this might happen, I remain optimistic, and I ask your indulgence and
that of your colleagues in keeping links to MathWorld in place in
anticipation of its return.  There is a page that discusses the status of
MathWorld at http://mathworld.wolfram.com/docs/updates.html.

I have always felt that MathWorld and EIS compliment one another nicely,
and indeed have gone to considerable effort to make sure that all
sequences in MathWorld are cross-linked to EIS.  I hope the corresponding
links in EIS to MathWorld will soon be active once more.

Best wishes,
-Eric