Some of us have been discussing the relationship between mathematics
and computation. One particular element of this is how math is a
second class citizen within the web and computing world.
Its tough for me to send you an equation, for example, one with a
standard representation and easily input into your particular math
software (MatLab, Maple, Mathematica). The specialization of math
software bears this out .. all the packages are quite expensive and
not particularly interoperable. MathML has not matured and is not
yet ubiquitous, nor can it be used as input to these math packages.
TeX can typeset math, but has no semantics tied to it.
One particular example came to me yesterday while thinking about
searching for certain kinds of exponentials: How would I search for
an equation on the web, and how could I "grep" through a set of
papers using a regular expression containing mathematics?
The semantics of mathematical notation has to be considered in regex
as well: a*b is the same as b*a, and the regex engine would have to
know that.
I'm wondering if this is just that math has not yet had its day in
the web sunlight, or it is deeper .. a fundamental problem.
-- Owen
Owen Densmore http://backspaces.net
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