The Mathematics Survey

1 Overview
2 Open access electronic survey journals
3 The encyclopedia layer
4 Advisory board
5 Organizational partners

1 Overview

The Mathematics Survey project seeks to encourage development of infrastructure for communicating mathematical knowledge, at or near the research level, freely over the web. A five page article to appear in the Notices of the AMS [.html] [.pdf] [.ps] presents our vision as of August 2005. This site describes the current state of the project and will provide future updates. We encourage anyone interested in participating in the project to contact us (Jim Pitman, David Aldous) by email to x@y where x = mathsurv and y = stat.berkeley.edu .

2 Open access electronic survey journals

Survey articles are an intrinsically worthwhile way to communicate mathematical knowledge. But there are few existing venues where survey articles in mathematics can be published with open access via the web. In 2004 we founded the journal Probability Surveys devoted to survey papers in probability. Volumes 1 and 2 are complete and Volume 3 (2006) is growing. We are in the process of launching a companion journal Statistics Surveys Another journal participating in the project is Ensaios Matemáticos published by the Sociedade Brasiliera de Matemática. We encourage other mathematicians to found sister survey journals in mathematics, to be supported by a variety of organizations. More details .....

3 The encyclopedia layer

For any mathematical topic there ought to be a place on the web where you can find a brief description (encyclopedia entry) of the topic, together with annotated links to survey papers, research papers etc. Today, only a few such sites exist, created independently by different individuals. For instance

The Mathematical Atlas created by Dave Rusin, provides a guide to the top level of the Mathematics Subject Classification (MSC 2000);
The Number Theory and Physics Archive created by Matthew Watkins, provides a guide to research literature which links number theory and physics.
The site Perfectly Random Sampling with Markov Chains created by David Wilson is one of a small number of high quality sites devoted to specialized subjects.

We have agreed with the creators of these sites to reconstitute them as part of a larger system of such sites with an automated linking infrastructure. We hope to persuade the maintainers and developers of similar sites to follow suit. We plan to provide a template which any research mathematician can use to create an authoritative up-to-date site on a topic within their expertize, with linking infrastructure which gives site maintainers an incentive to adhere to common standards. We are founding an electronic journal, The Mathematical Atlas which will provide a forum for mathematicians of all kinds to publish peer-reviewed encyclopedia entries on diverse mathematical subjects, suitable for inclusion in such websites. In particular, we plan to solicit entries for each of the 5531 subjects appearing in the Mathematics Subject Classification (MSC 2000) utilized by Mathematical Reviews and Zentralblatt MATH and each of the 441 subjects listed in the Core Subject Taxonomy for Mathematical Sciences Education. If you know where such entries can already be found on the web, or if you would like create one yourself, or persuade others to do so, please let us know.

To provide access to various subject sites, companion Mathematics Survey journals, and other online resources in mathematics, including subscription services such as

as well as free services such as

we intend to provide subject navigation and linking software comparable to what is provided by the last three sites, with indexing by various subject classifications. For a preliminary form of such navigation software brought up with help of ZMATH, see MatNav.

4 Advisory board

Don Burkholder Professor of Mathematics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Persi Diaconis Mary V. Sunseri Professor of Statistics and Mathematics, Stanford University.
Lawrence Craig Evans Professor of Mathematics, University of California, Berkeley.
Ann Jensen Mathematics Statistics Librarian, University of California, Berkeley
Jerry Marsden Carl F. Braun Professor of Engineering and Control and Dynamical Systems, California Institute of Technology.
Richard Melrose Professor of Mathematics, MIT.
David Mumford University Professor, Div. of Applied Mathematics, Brown University.
Marc Rieffel Professor of Mathematics, University of California, Berkeley.

5 Organizational partners

The Mathematics Survey is supported by a number of organizational partners. These include:

The Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS) and the Bernoulli Society, which are the are copublishers of Probability Surveys. These societies have indicated a strong interest in continued support of electronic infrastructure projects to improve professional communication in probability and statistics. We expect them also to support a companion Statistics Surveys journal about to be launched, and to support development of the The Mathematical Atlas in probability, statistics and neighbouring fields. The journal infrastructure developed for contributions in these areas will then be available across all fields of mathematics.
Cornell University Library manages Project Euclid which provides web hosting, and we expect soon archiving, for Probability Surveys. We hope to find adequate support from institutional sponsors to provide similar web hosting and archiving for a growing family of Math. Survey journals.
VTEX is the IMS technical typesetting contractor and primary web host of electronic journals in the Math. Surveys family. See also their sponsoring proposal for open access electronic journals
The Department of Statistics, University of California hosts Jim Pitman's BibServer which provides bibliographic management software being developed in collaboration with VTEX for use in IMS journal production and for provision of biblographic services to IMS members.
Zentralblatt MATH has cooperated by allowing use of its index of mathematical literature and the MSC2000 tree to develop MatNav, a general tool for subect navigation in mathematics.
Math Gateway A pathway to Undergraduate Mathematics. The Math. Survey has recently become one of the partners in this project, which is supported jointly by the MAA and the National Science Digital Library. The Math Gateway will bring together collections with significant mathematical content and services of particular importance to the delivery and use of mathematics on the Web.
The Sociedade Brasiliera de Matemática is the publisher of Ensaios Matemáticos which is one of the family of Math. Survey journals.

File translated from T_EX by T_TH, version 3.60.
On 16 Oct 2005, 15:56.