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Re: Hardcopy or electronic books?

• To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
• Subject: [mg62658] Re: Hardcopy or electronic books?
• From: Paul Abbott <paul at physics.uwa.edu.au>
• Date: Wed, 30 Nov 2005 00:08:08 -0500 (EST)
• Organization: The University of Western Australia
• References: <dln1n3$glk$1@smc.vnet.net> <dlp2e0$mt$1@smc.vnet.net>
• Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com

In article <dlp2e0$mt$1 at smc.vnet.net>, AES <siegman at stanford.edu> 
wrote:

> On the other hand, nothing replaces doing a full-text electronic search 
> through a long electronic document or manual looking for some term; 

Actually, there is another "type" of searching: The Wolfram Functions 
site http://functions.wolfram.com permits searching via Mathematica 
patterns -- which is clearly an extension of text searching (see The 
Mathematica Journal 9(4), 2005: 713-726 for Michael Trott's article). 

To me, this is the most valuable type of search. Indeed, handbooks and 
tables in electronic form are, in principle, much more valuable than 
hardcopy. 

For example, suppose you want to find all formulas involving doubly 
infinite sums at http://functions.wolfram.com. Just click on the 
"Formula Search" tab and enter

  Sum[_,{_,-Infinity,Infinity}]

into the Mathematica patterns field. 

Cheers,
Paul

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Paul Abbott                                      Phone:  61 8 6488 2734
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