Infocenter

Ed Pegg Jr

Wolfram Research

History of Infocenter

How to access MathSource with Gopher

Back in 1992, MathSource was launched within our newsletter.  Then, we instructed Mathematica users how to access files with the computer technology of the time, prior to the internet.

Library.wolfram.com

As MathSource grew, so did the supporting files we had for Mathematica books.  Our documentation grew.  The technical notes and white papers grew.

What did we actually have?

Resource Library website: demos, examples, how-tos, tech notes, ...

MathSource: 8–10 years of material, two separate repositories (v2.2 and v3+), copies of standard add-on packages, book supplements, author-contributed book advertisements, old issues of MathUser, installation guides for Mathematica on NeXT computers, and everything else under the sun

Mathematica books in a FileMaker database

Mathematica articles in a FileMaker database

Mathematica Journal website

Archival material from the Mathematica in Education and Research

Conference proceedings website

Courseware catalog website

Miscellaneous internal materials: tech talks, company talks, ... in various places

The Mathematica Information Center

A few years ago, Evaldas Imbrasas converted the whole structure of disparate files into one coherent database.

http://library.wolfram.com/infocenter

How is was all organized?

MathSource: had a subject classification

Included some such relatively ill-defined "subjects" as "enhancements," "applications," and "miscellaneous"

Not fine-grained

Quirky and user-unfriendly

Articles Database: had about 25 coarse categories

Completely different scheme from MathSource

Mathematics, physics, etc. were single monolithic categories

No categories for specific parts of Mathematica functionality, Mathematica-related products, etc.

Mathematica books

Yet another different scheme from either MathSource or the Articles Database

Had some relevant subcategories for Math, Science, Mathematica programming, etc.

Resource library

Yet another subject classification scheme

Others

Had *no* subject classification

How is it organized now?

Types of files available

In typical database fashion,each item in the Infocenter is broken up
into a set of fields .There are different fields for different collections.Here is an article record:

http://library.wolfram.com/infocenter/Articles/1499/

The article items are usually only bibliographic records,although certain records could be linked to actual article text. 

A Mathsource record:

http://library.wolfram.com/infocenter/MathSource/1170/

As you see, Mathsource items contain downloadable files.As one more example,here is a book record:

http://library.wolfram.com/infocenter/Books/4539/

Notice here the “buy this book” link as well as the supplementary
material that we have available. All items have fields for title,author,description,subject.

Using Infocenter -- Searching

So now that you know the basic item structure, how do you actually get 
to the records?

There are 2 main ways of navigating the Information Center. One is by 
browsing. And one is by searching. Using the browsing techniques, there 
are 3 different mechanisms to use. The primary mechanisms are browsing 
by collection and by subject. A third type of browsing is by what’s new. 
A fourth is by the Editor's Picks.

To start a search, go to

http://library.wolfram.com/infocenter/search/

For those of you who aren’t familiar with our search result display, 
this blue bar is a relevance indicator, with the most relevant items to 
your search being listed first on the search results page.

In simple search, we can also search for multiple words.

Some Stats

5291 Items
4609 authors
1430 items have downloadable files
972  URLs referenced

An expanding source of information

More Articles

Is there a feature about Mathematica on the web, or in a magazine?  We not only want to know about it, we want to preserve it.  For internal use, eventually, we want everyone here to have ready access to all Mathematica material

More Notebooks

When someone has done something good in Mathematica,we want to save it. Whether internal or external, someone might find such a notebook useful.  We are interested in preserving work.  One of you might be talking to a Mathematica user sometime, and they'll mention their project.  Invite them to store it on our site.  or, *you* might have a project.

Editor's Picks

We've started picking some of our favorite items.  I'll be picking new and old items frequently.  Feel free to write me at edp@wolfram.com with your own suggestions of which files deserve more recognition.

http://library.wolfram.com/infocenter

Other resources

NKS Forum

Many items in the NKS Forum have downloadable programs.  For example, I've posted art seen at the NKS2004 conference is available there.

http://forum.wolframscience.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=317

DensityPlot[
        Abs[1/(x + I y) 220 - 
            Floor[1/(x + I y) 220]], {x, -220, 220}, {y, -220, 
          220}, PlotPoints -> 400, ColorFunction -> Hue, 
        Mesh -> False, Frame -> False];

Stephen Wolfram has put several of his experiments on the forum:

http://forum.wolframscience.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=107

WolframScience.com

Programs from the Notes

This page gives access to the programs in the Notes at the end of A New Kind of Science. Included are both verbatim code from the book and complete runnable functions with examples.

mathworld.wolfram.com

Mathworld has thousands of downloadable programs.  For example, we can look at an exploration I did of two dimensional Turing Machines, often called Turmites. (see NKS page 930).

We can look at http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Turmite.html.  There, we can find downloadable code.

functions.wolfram.com

Michael Trott has made extensive amounts of code available.  For example, we can look at his code for the Sine function.

Show[{lcpRe, lcpIm},
      DisplayFunction -> $DisplayFunction,FrameLabel -> {"x","y"},
      FrameTicks -> {xTicks, yTicks, None, None}];

Summary

We have lots of programs.  If you have a program, then
I want to hear about it.