PlanetMath

PlanetMath

PlanetMath

is a free, collaborative, online mathematics encyclopedia. The emphasis is on peer review, rigor, openness, pedagogy, real-time content, interlinked content, and community. Intended to be comprehensive, the project is located at the Digital Library Research Lab at Virginia Tech.

PlanetMath was started when the popular free online mathematics encyclopedia

MathWorld

was taken offline by a court injunction as a result of the CRC Press lawsuit against the Wolfram Research company and its employee (and MathWorld’s author)

Eric Weisstein

.

PlanetMath uses the same copyleft as

Wikipedia

: the

http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html

GNU Free Documentation License. An author who starts a new article becomes the owner of that article; he or she may then choose to grant editing rights to other

individuals

or groups. All textual content and mathematical

formulas

are written in LaTeX, a typesetting system that requires some learning but is popular among mathematicians because of its

support

of the technical needs of mathematical typesetting and its high-quality output. The user can explicitly create links to other articles, and the system also automatically turns certain words into links to the defining articles. For more details on the automatic linking, see the collaboration on

http://planetmath.org/?op=getobj&from=collab&id=32

PlanetMath automatic reference linking. For more details on controlling the linking of an article, see the collaboration on

http://planetmath.org/?op=getobj&from=collab&id=33

controlling linking The topic area of every article is classified by the

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

Mathematics Subject Classification

of the

American Mathematical Society

. Users may attach addenda, errata, and discussions to articles.

The most common method of public communication within PlanetMath is posts. Users can add posts in the

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

forums as well as attach posts to articles,

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

corrections,

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

collaborations,

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

requests for new articles, and other posts. A system for private messaging among users is also in place.

Users who are new to PlanetMath are highly encouraged to read the following collaborations:

•

http://planetmath.org/?op=getobj&from=collab&id=36

New user guide

•

http://planetmath.org/?op=getobj&from=collab&id=35

The PlanetMath FAQ

•

http://planetmath.org/?op=getobj&from=collab&id=113

PlanetMath Content Committee ‘Guidelines’-Draft v.

•

http://planetmath.org/?op=getobj&from=collab&id=28

PlanetMath content and style guide

•

http://planetmath.org/?op=getobj&from=collab&id=55

Forum policy

The software

running

PlanetMath is written in Perl and runs on Linux and the Apache Web server. It is known as

N

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⁢

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⁢

s

⁢

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⁢

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⁢

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and has been released under the

http://www.opensource.org/licenses/bsd-license.html

free BSD License.

Most of the very most basic topics are covered, though PlanetMath is striving to improve coverage of

elementary

and intermediate topics. Due to the increasing popularity of the package PSTricks, more members of PlanetMath are able to incorporate graphics into their articles. This has enabled PlanetMath to cover many elementary and intermediate topics in

geometry

that were once lacking. There are several methods of creating graphics on PlanetMath. For more details on creating graphics on PlanetMath, see the collaboration on

http://planetmath.org/?op=getobj&from=collab&id=53

graphics and PlanetMath.

PlanetMath also has entries on highly advanced and specialized topics. PlanetMath has entries on the integers 42 (

http://planetmath.org/FortyTwo

) and 666 (

http://planetmath.org/NumberOfTheBeast

). The following top-level Mathematics Subject Classification categories have only one or two topic entries at PlanetMath:

•

74-XX, mechanics of deformable solids;

•

76-XX, fluid mechanics;

•

85-XX, astronomy and astrophysics.

The Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/PlanetMath Exchange project assists in content exchange between PlanetMath and Wikipedia.

This entry was adapted from the Wikipedia article

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlanetMath

PlanetMath as of February 24, 2007.

Title

PlanetMath

Canonical

name

PlanetMath

Date of creation

2013-03-22 16:45:07

Last modified on

2013-03-22 16:45:07

Owner

PrimeFan (13766)

Last modified by

PrimeFan (13766)

Numerical id

13

Author

PrimeFan (13766)

Entry type

Definition

Classification

msc 01A65

Classification

msc 01A61

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