Twenty thousand reviewers!

Posted on November 17, 2016 by Edward Dunne

As of November 12, Mathematical Reviews has over 20,000 active reviewers! The input of researchers from around the world helps to make MathSciNet such a valuable tool. We are truly grateful for your efforts. Thank you! Continue reading →

Posted in Announcements, General information | 1 Comment

Links with the MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive

Posted on November 6, 2016 by Edward Dunne

One of the great – and oldest – resources for mathematics on the web is the MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive. Before there was Wikipedia, there was MacTutor. It was founded by two mathematicians, John J. O’Connor and Edmund F. Robertson, both of whom are at the University of St. Andrews. You can read the MacTutor origin story here. I have been a fan of the archive for almost twenty years. So I am especially happy that there is now linking between the MacTutor archive and MathSciNet. Continue reading →

Posted in Math on the web, Mathematicians | 4 Comments

French Doctoral Theses from the Entre-deux-guerres Period

Posted on October 19, 2016 by Edward Dunne

MathSciNet now has bibliographic information (metadata) for 263 French doctoral theses from the “Between Two Wars Period”: 1913-1947, courtesy of NUMDAM. The data includes links to the full texts of these theses. Some notable mathematicians are included in the collection. Continue reading →

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MathSciNet Demos at AMS Sectional Meetings

Posted on October 8, 2016 by Edward Dunne

Editors from Mathematical Reviews will be at two upcoming AMS Sectional Meetings to give demos of MathSciNet, as well as to answer questions. This is a great chance to learn more about using MathSciNet, about updating your author profile, about reviewing, or about Mathematical Reviews in general. Continue reading →

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Metadata

Posted on September 27, 2016 by Edward Dunne

MathSciNet is full of metadata. We create our own metadata. We receive metadata from many of the publishers of the journals we cover. So what are metadata? (Or what is metadata?) The simplest explanation of metadata is that they are a type of data that describes other data. The classical example is the metadata found in card catalogs from libraries.

A card from a card catalog, with annottions

Lots of information is on the card. Note that before the annotation, nothing is labeled. There are accepted rules that tell a librarian (or a patron) what each piece of data is. For most pieces of this data, a non-librarian would be likely to figure out what everything meant. Continue reading →

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An exceptional review about inner model theory

Posted on August 27, 2016 by Edward Dunne

Today I’m making two blog posts about exceptional reviews: one review of a book and one of a paper. This post is about Grigor Sargsyan‘s exceptional review of a paper: John Steel‘s chapter, An outline of inner model theory, in the Handbook of Set Theory edited by Matthew Foreman and Akihiro Kanamori [MR2768678]. The other post is about Harald Helfgott‘s review of Terry Tao‘s book Expansion in finite simple groups of Lie type. Continue reading →

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An exceptional review about expansion in groups

Posted on August 27, 2016 by Edward Dunne

Today I’m making two blog posts about exceptional reviews: one review of a book and one of a paper. This post is about Harald Helfgott‘s review of Terry Tao‘s book, Expansion in finite simple groups of Lie type, published by the AMS. The other post is about Grigor Sargsyan‘s exceptional review of a paper: John Steel‘s chapter, An outline of inner model theory, in the Handbook of Set Theory edited by Matthew Foreman and Akihiro Kanamori [MR2768678]. Continue reading →

Posted in Exceptional reviews | 2 Comments

Jonathan Borwein

Posted on August 3, 2016 by Edward Dunne

Jonathan Borwein passed away on August 1st. He was a prolific mathematician, with 427 publications as of this writing. He was also quite broad, publishing in number theory, operations research, calculus of variations, and many other subjects. Many people knew him for his book with his brother Peter, Pi and the AGM. His most cited work in MathSciNet is his paper “On projection algorithms for solving convex feasibility problems” with Heinz Bauschke (the review is reproduced below). Borwein was also known for promoting experimental mathematics, and was the founding director of the Centre for Experimental and Constructive Mathematics at Simon Fraser University. But many people knew Borwein’s mathematics directly as a mentor or as a collaborator. He had many graduate students and 163 collaborators on published papers. Continue reading →

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MSC2020 – Mathematics Subject Classification update

Posted on July 26, 2016 by Edward Dunne

MSC2020

Announcement of the plan to revise the Mathematics Subject Classification

Mathematical Reviews (MR) and zbMATH cooperate in maintaining the Mathematics Subject Classification (MSC), which is used by these reviewing services, publishers, and others to categorize items in the mathematical sciences literature. The current version, MSC2010, consists of 63 areas classified with two digits refined into over 5000 three- and five-digit classifications. Details of MSC2010 can be found at www.msc2010.org or www.ams.org/msc/msc2010.html and zbmath.org/classification/.

MSC2010 was a revision of the 2000 subject classification scheme developed through the collaborative efforts of the editors of zbMATH and MR with considerable input from the community. zbMATH and MR have initiated the process of revising MSC2010 with an expectation that the revision will be used beginning in 2020. Continue reading →