MathWorld

MathWorld is an online mathematics reference work, sponsored by Wolfram Research Inc., the creators of the Mathematica computer algebra system. It is also partially funded by the National Science Foundation's National Science Digital Library grant to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

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Eric W. Weisstein, the creator of the site, was a physics and astronomy student who got into the habit of writing notes on his mathematical readings. In 1995 he put his notes online and called it "Eric's Treasure Trove of Mathematics"; it contained hundreds of pages/articles, covering a wide range of mathematical topics. At the time it was by far the best single collected resource on mathematics on the web, and became very popular. Eric continuously improved the notes and accepted corrections and comments from online readers. Around 1997, he made a contract with CRC Press and the contents of the site were published in print and CD-ROM, titled "CRC Concise Encyclopedia of Mathematics". The free online version became only partially accessible to the public. In 1999 Weisstein went to work for Wolfram Research, Inc. (WRI), and WRI renamed the Math Treasure Trove to MathWorld at http://mathworld.wolfram.com and hosted it on the company's website without access restrictions.

Wolfram Research: Wolfram Research is a private company that makes math programs. Its main product is Mathematica, an environment for technical computing. The founder and CEO of Wolfram Research is Stephen Wolfram, scientist and author, who maintains close involvement with the development of Mathematica....

Mathematica: Mathematica is a widely-used computer algebra system originally developed by Stephen Wolfram and sold by his company Wolfram Research. Mathematica is also a powerful programming language emulating multiple paradigms on top of term-rewriting....

Computer algebra system: A computer algebra system (CAS) is a software program that facilitates symbolic mathematics. The core functionality of a CAS is manipulation of mathematical expressions in symbolic form....