
Atlas of Mathematical Objects - rotrux
http://www.lmfdb.org/
======
brudgers
MIT's press release: [http://news.mit.edu/2016/international-team-launches-
atlas-m...](http://news.mit.edu/2016/international-team-launches-atlas-
mathematical-objects-0510)

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danbruc
Here is a Numberphile video [1] that explains - at the very end - why this
database was put together.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTveQ1ndH1c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTveQ1ndH1c)

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officialchicken
I was wondering how it was built since equations aren't the nicest things to
render with HTML. A quick 'view source' shows the site is using MathJax (not
MathML) for displaying the equations.

I presume a lot of content is submitted or formatted using Tex/Latex. Can any
HN'ers elaborate on the workflow for review/editing/publishing on the site?

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olamaria
[https://github.com/LMFDB/](https://github.com/LMFDB/)

~~~
officialchicken
Thanks for that link. In one of the MD files[0], I found information on the
editorial board.

[0]
[https://github.com/LMFDB/lmfdb/blob/master/Development.md#ba...](https://github.com/LMFDB/lmfdb/blob/master/Development.md#basic-
organization--editorial-board)

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Someone
_…in Number Theory._

Also: license is GPLv2+, so they seem to think this is software. That makes
some sense.

(And moderators, please fix that typo; mathmatical is spelled with an 'e')

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williamstein
Calculating the data makes extensive use of
[http://www.sagemath.org/](http://www.sagemath.org/), which is GPL'd;
moreover, the LMFDB contributors also contribute a lot to SageMath.

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williamstein
Timothy Gowers (Fields Medalist and open publishing advocate) just wrote a
blog post about this: [https://gowers.wordpress.com/2016/05/10/the-l-
functions-and-...](https://gowers.wordpress.com/2016/05/10/the-l-functions-
and-modular-forms-database/#more-6143)

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grandalf
In general, what is a mathematical object? Is the natural numbers one?

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dogecoinbase
This is actually a surprisingly complex question in mathematical philosophy --
I unfortunately can't find a copy online right now, but if the idea of
mathematical objects interests you I'd highly recommend Paul Benacerraf's 1965
paper "What Numbers Cannot Be", which explores the complexity of the idea of
even a single integer as an "object".

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Cogito
For those interested, the article is actually called "What Numbers Could not
Be" (many references have "What Numbers Cannot Be" so maybe it was published
under both names at some point?)

There is a copy at:

[http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic1240846.files/Ben...](http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic1240846.files/Benacerraf.pdf)

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dogecoinbase
Thank you! I just checked my copy of Cambridge's Philosophy of Mathematics and
it is indeed "could not" \-- the PDF I have on my laptop, however, is
"cannot". I wonder when/where that happened.

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williamstein
Backup mirror sites:
[http://lmfdb.warwick.ac.uk/](http://lmfdb.warwick.ac.uk/),
[http://lmfdb.maths.bris.ac.uk/](http://lmfdb.maths.bris.ac.uk/)

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jiiam
A bit disappoint by the narrow point of view. Atlas of Number Theoretical
Objects would have been more appropriate. Still nice, though.

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GFK_of_xmaspast
What are some specific examples of other types of objects you would like to
see.

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explanibrag
All the finite simple groups would be nice, for example.

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GFK_of_xmaspast
I assume you mean the sporadic groups? Because the families are all unbounded.

There's also this:
[http://brauer.maths.qmul.ac.uk/Atlas/v3/](http://brauer.maths.qmul.ac.uk/Atlas/v3/)

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partycoder
Not criticizing or anything, just curious: What is the difference/advantage
with respect to Wikipedia or Wolfram Mathworld?

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williamstein
LMFDB contains a large amount of extremely difficult to compute __data __about
mathematical functions that arise in number theory, which took decades to
compute and debug, and relations between that data. Just as hundreds of
gigabytes of detailed astronomical data is not in Wikipedia or Wolfram
Mathworld, this data about number theory is not in Wikipedia or Wolfram
Mathworld either, and it never will be.

~~~
williamstein
I should add that behind the scenes LMFDB really is a (MongoDB) database,
there's an API that @hasch (here on HN) wrote, so that data can be recovered
in JSON format, etc. To give some sense of what is in there, this
[http://johncremona.github.io/ecdata/](http://johncremona.github.io/ecdata/)
is just a tiny bit of what is in LMFDB.

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frobitz13
Terry Tao blogged about this:
[https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2016/05/10/l-functions-and-
mo...](https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2016/05/10/l-functions-and-modular-
forms-database-now-out-of-beta/)

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BucketSort
Someday we will draw the link between this area/program and AI. There's
something deep here that has implications I don't think we understand.

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frobitz13
Stephen Wolfram has suggested something along these lines (more in the context
of machine learning than AI, per se).

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crb002
[https://github.com/chadbrewbaker/endoscope](https://github.com/chadbrewbaker/endoscope)
is more useful.

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kercker
I don't understand why there is an "MIT" in the title.

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rossdavidh
It stands for "Mathematical Is Terribly-hard-to-spell"

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dang
Thanks—fixed. No more "MIT" in title either.

