NIST Digital Library of Mathematical Functions

It's lovely when a website actually uses MathML on browsers that mostly support it (i.e. Firefox and IE with mathplayer). <rant> For those not convinced why MathML is preferable to javascript-polyfills: i) Browser rendering of MathML is much faster than MathJax and even slightly faster than client-side KaTeX. ii) It supports a wider range of mathematical notation that KaTeX. (This point is partially dubious since MathJax is slightly better than current implementations of MathML, in this regard, though that is…

I used the nist function library once to make a trig library on an ibm mainframe. long nights mounting tapes and running jobs, It used the vms/esa os with something called cms as the interactive shell. cms used rexx as the scripting language, I was trying to learn rexx on cms and wanted to make a screen saver, at this point those of you who know anything about the 3270 terminals used on mainframes can now start snickering. you see…

These functions are represented as LaTeX, because that's the gold standard for rendering math. But, they also want them available as XML so they're in a more sensible format for archiving. So, funnily, as part of this, NIST maintain a LaTeX to XML converter.[0] It's a pretty complete LaTeX runtime. (Yes, runtime -- TeX is a programming language, not a markup language!) This is the thing that powers arXiv Vanity[1] and other academic publishing projects. I just find it quite…

One of the nicer things about digital online resources of this kind is that they can be updated as soon as an error has been found. The scan of the classic version can be downloaded as a PDF from http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~aps/research/projects/as/book.php.