planetmath.org

[Mitchell Harris]

On Mon, 7 Mar 2005, David Wasserman wrote:

>Dear Seqfans,
>    I just came across the website planetmath.org.  From a brief 
>inspection, it appears to be a competitor of mathworld.wolfram.com.

Not exactly competitors... see the story at

   http://planetmath.org/?op=about

executive summary:
 - plantemath was created in 2000 in reaction to mathworld being shut down 
temporarily for legal reasons). so in that sense it is an attempt to 
emulate mathworld.
 - it is a collaborative project (like wikipedia). so there's lots of 
freedom but lots of variation.


>If any of you are familiar with it, please comment.  Is it a reliable 
>reference?

I haven't used planetmath enough to have a good idea. I'd be interested in 
opinions, too.


>Is it worth contributing to?

It is possible to contribute to mathworld, too, but planetmath is designed 
to be easily updatable. I couldn't say about "worth".


>    I did a search, and found that OEIS has 10 links to planetmath, vs. 
>thousands to mathworld. 

That's just a sign of history, not content. Like the OEIS, the fact that 
either exists is a wonderful thing. But they all take a lot of work. They 
just do it in different ways.


-- 
Mitch Harris
Lehrstuhl fuer Automatentheorie, Fakultaet Informatik
Technische Universitaet Dresden, Deutschland
http://lat.inf.tu-dresden.de/~harris