NIST Digital Library of Mathematical Functions | Hacker News Reader

NIST Digital Library of Mathematical Functions

dlmf.nist.gov

101 pointsmaxwelljoslyn17 comments

These functions are represented as LaTeX, because that's the gold standard for rendering math. But, they also want them available as XML so they're in a more sensible format for archiving.

So, funnily, as part of this, NIST maintain a LaTeX to XML converter.[0] It's a pretty complete LaTeX runtime. (Yes, runtime -- TeX is a programming language, not a markup language!)

This is the thing that powers arXiv Vanity[1] and other academic publishing projects.

I just find it quite amusing that the US Government maintains a LaTeX runtime written in Perl.

[0] https://dlmf.nist.gov/LaTeXML/

[1] https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/

Xml in what sense? Mathml?

It's own format, which is a rough semantic representation of a LaTeX document: https://dlmf.nist.gov/LaTeXML/manual/schema/

There are ways of exporting MathML within that schema, I think.

The site has MathML (pMML) representations that can be downloaded.

> This is the thing that powers arXiv Vanity.

Never heard of this. Does it have access to the LaTeX source of the arXiv paper? I didn't know arXiv hosted sources.

Depends what the authors upload. You can just upload a PDF. But if arXiv detects that the PDF came out of pdflatex it will pretty instantly nag you to give it the TeX sources. It will then render the PDF itself and also offer the sources for download. That is also how astro-ph-leaks [1] works.

[1] https://twitter.com/LeaksPh

Oh, wow. Had never heard of astro-ph-leaks. That is the best.

It reminds me of Rubi [0], a rule-based symbolic integration system. Unlike many CASs that use a variant of the Risch algorithm, Rubi simply solves the integrals by using a large number (6700+) of rules in its database. Benchmarks (72000+ test cases) show that it's able to get better and cleaner antiderivatives than Mathematica and Maple. All the rules [1] are both human and machine-readable.

The engine can be installed in Mathematica, SymPy and SymJa.

[0] https://rulebasedintegration.org/

[1] https://rulebasedintegration.org/integrationRules.html