Maths handbook

Mandelbrot set illustration from MathWorld

The printed version of Eric Weisstein’s Mathematics reference book is around 3,200 pages long, A4 format, and the book weights quite a few kilograms. Articles are arranged alphabetically and there is no index, but there are lists of all the theorems andeach article cross references to other relevant articles.

The online version is fully searchable, includes hyperlinks to other articles, and includes doanloadable Mathematica notebooks. If you get the reader from Wolfram Research, you can use interactive notebooks for some 85 of the key articles.

I shall probably end up getting the book just on the principle that I don’t need to boot the laptop and connect to the Internet to find something, and because the level the handbook is pitched at means I can ‘retire’ about 10 textbooks to Oxfam, thus saving on volume and weight.

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