PlanetMath is a free, collaborative, mathematics

online encyclopedia An online encyclopedia, also called an Internet encyclopedia, or a digital encyclopedia, is an encyclopedia accessible through the internet. Examples include Wikipedia and ''Encyclopædia Britannica''. Digitization of old content In January 199 ...

. The emphasis is on

rigour Rigour (British English) or rigor (American English; see spelling differences) describes a condition of stiffness or strictness. These constraints may be environmentally imposed, such as "the rigours of famine"; logically imposed, such as ma ...

, openness,

pedagogy Pedagogy (), most commonly understood as the approach to teaching, is the theory and practice of learning, and how this process influences, and is influenced by, the social, political and psychological development of learners. Pedagogy, taken ...

, real-time content, interlinked content, and also

community A community is a social unit (a group of living things) with commonality such as place, norms, religion, values, customs, or identity. Communities may share a sense of place situated in a given geographical area (e.g. a country, village, ...

of about 24,000 people with various maths interests. Intended to be comprehensive, the project is currently hosted by the

University of Waterloo The University of Waterloo (UWaterloo, UW, or Waterloo) is a public research university with a main campus in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. The main campus is on of land adjacent to "Uptown" Waterloo and Waterloo Park. The university also operates ...

. The site is owned by a US-based nonprofit corporation, "PlanetMath.org, Ltd". PlanetMath was started when the popular free online mathematics encyclopedia

MathWorld ''MathWorld'' is an online mathematics reference work, created and largely written by Eric W. Weisstein. It is sponsored by and licensed to Wolfram Research, Inc. and was partially funded by the National Science Foundation's National Science Di ...

was temporarily taken offline for 12 months by a court injunction as a result of the CRC Press lawsuit against the

Wolfram Research Wolfram Research, Inc. ( ) is an American multinational company that creates computational technology. Wolfram's flagship product is the technical computing program Wolfram Mathematica, first released on June 23, 1988. Other products include ...

company and its employee (and MathWorld's author)

Eric Weisstein Eric Wolfgang Weisstein (born March 18, 1969) is an American mathematician and encyclopedist who created and maintains the encyclopedias ''MathWorld'' and ''ScienceWorld''. In addition, he is the author of the '' CRC Concise Encyclopedia of M ...

Materials

The main PlanetMath focus is on

encyclopedic An encyclopedia (American English) or encyclopædia (British English) is a reference work or compendium providing summaries of knowledge either general or special to a particular field or discipline. Encyclopedias are divided into articles ...

entries. It formerly operated a self-hosted forum, but now encourages discussion via Gitter. , the encyclopedia hosted about 9,289 entries and over 16,258 ''concepts'' (a concept may be for example a specific notion defined within a more general entry). An overview of the current PlanetMath contents is also available. About 300

Wikipedia Wikipedia is a multilingual free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and using a wiki-based editing system. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read refer ...

entries incorporate text from PlanetMath articles; they are listed in :Wikipedia articles incorporating text from PlanetMath. An all-inclusive PlanetMath ''Free Encyclopedia'' book of 2,300 pages is available for the encyclopedia contents up to 2006 as a free download PDF file.

Content development model

PlanetMath implements a specific content creation system called ''authority model''. An author who starts a new article becomes its ''owner'', that is the only person authorized to edit that article. Other users may add corrections and discuss improvements but the resulting modifications of the article, if any, are always made by the owner. However, if there are long lasting unresolved corrections, the ownership can be removed. More precisely, after 2 weeks the system starts to remind the owner by mail; at 6 weeks any user can "adopt" the article; at 8 weeks the ownership of the entry is completely removed (and such an entry is called "orphaned"). To make the development more smooth, the owner may also choose to grant editing rights to other individuals or groups. The user can explicitly create links to other articles, and the system also automatically turns certain words into links to the defining articles. The topic area of every article is classified by the

Mathematics Subject Classification The Mathematics Subject Classification (MSC) is an alphanumerical classification scheme collaboratively produced by staff of, and based on the coverage of, the two major mathematical reviewing databases, Mathematical Reviews and Zentralblatt MATH. ...

(MSC) of the

American Mathematical Society The American Mathematical Society (AMS) is an association of professional mathematicians dedicated to the interests of mathematical research and scholarship, and serves the national and international community through its publications, meetings, ...

(AMS). The site is supervised by the Content Committee. Its basic mission is to ''maintain the integrity and quality of the mathematical content and organization of PlanetMath.'' As defined in its Charter, the tasks of the Committee include: * Developing/maintaining the standards for PlanetMath content * Improving individual PlanetMath entries in its Encyclopedia, Book, Paper, and Exposition) * Developing topic areas * Developing/improving site and user documentation * Managing the PlanetMath Request list and Unproved Theorems list * Improving categorization and other meta-attributes of entries. * Developing software recommendations for improved content authoring and editorial functions.

Technical details

PlanetMath content is licensed under the

copyleft Copyleft is the legal technique of granting certain freedoms over copies of copyrighted works with the requirement that the same rights be preserved in derivative works. In this sense, ''freedoms'' refers to the use of the work for any purpose ...

Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License. All content is written in

LaTeX Latex is an emulsion (stable dispersion) of polymer microparticles in water. Latexes are found in nature, but synthetic latexes are common as well. In nature, latex is found as a milky fluid found in 10% of all flowering plants (angiosperms ...

, a typesetting system popular among mathematicians because of its support of the technical needs of mathematical typesetting and its high-quality output. The software running PlanetMath is written in

Perl Perl is a family of two high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming languages. "Perl" refers to Perl 5, but from 2000 to 2019 it also referred to its redesigned "sister language", Perl 6, before the latter's name was offic ...

and runs on

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, w ...

and the web server Apache. It is known as ''Noösphere'' and has been released under the free

BSD License BSD licenses are a family of permissive free software licenses, imposing minimal restrictions on the use and distribution of covered software. This is in contrast to copyleft licenses, which have share-alike requirements. The original BSD lice ...

. As of March 13, 2013 PlanetMath has retired Noösphere and runs now on a software called ''Planetary'', which itself was implemented with Drupal.

Related projects

Encyclopedic content and bibliographic materials related to

physics Physics is the natural science that studies matter, its fundamental constituents, its motion and behavior through space and time, and the related entities of energy and force. "Physical science is that department of knowledge which r ...

, mathematics and

mathematical physics Mathematical physics refers to the development of mathematical methods for application to problems in physics. The '' Journal of Mathematical Physics'' defines the field as "the application of mathematics to problems in physics and the developme ...

are developed by

PlanetPhysics PlanetPhysics was a virtual community with several Internet sites supported by a non-profit organization registered in the USA in an open science, open data, peer-to-peer review mode that aimed to help make physics, and related mathematics, kno ...

. The site, launched in 2005, uses similar software (Noosphere), but a significantly different moderation model with emphasis on current research in physics and peer review.Free Book downloads
in PDF format, Original Papers (~10 pages) and Expositions (>30 pages) Additionally, a PlanetComputing project is envisaged that would also include

computational physics Computational physics is the study and implementation of numerical analysis to solve problems in physics for which a quantitative theory already exists. Historically, computational physics was the first application of modern computers in science, ...

and AI together with logical, categorical, ontological and mathematical foundations of computers and

automata An automaton (; plural: automata or automatons) is a relatively self-operating machine, or control mechanism designed to automatically follow a sequence of operations, or respond to predetermined instructions.Automaton – Definition and More ...

References

External links