A focus on Mathematics

Knowledge Management in der Mathematics - 140 Years of Information on World-wide Literature

A FIZ Karlsruhe booklet on the occasion of the »Year of Mathematics«

Mathematical publications are the core of the mathematical knowledge. Today, more than 100.000 journal articles, books, reports and other monographs are published per year.
How to make all this knowledge visible, retrievable and accessible, what opportunities do the modern media of information technology provide? Our little brochure comprises the history of information about mathematics for mathematicians and for the general public. It presents the potential of our databases by means of concrete case studies and identifies possible perspectives for their development.

In order to make mathematical publications visible and retrievable for scientists and the scientifically interested public, they must be documented and analyzed. The necessity for this was already realized in the 19th century and lead to the foundation of the first independent review journla in mathematics, the »Jahrbuch Über die Fortschritte der Mathematik«.

Today FIZ Karslruhe offers ZMATH, the world's largest bibliographic database in mathematics which contains information (»metadata«) of more than 2.750.000 publications.

However, the potential of the internet and the web is more versatile. With ElibM, FIZ Karlsruhe provides the most comprehensive free accessible collection of full texts in electronic form. This may serve as a module of possible world library of mathematics. The database MATH provides links to the complete texts of the publications, the electronic output formats allow for simple further processing of the results.

Special information on mathematics today is a central tool for mathematicians and users of mathematics in research, development and education. Also for the interested public and for students our services offer valuable help and information on mathematical questions of any kind. Special information on mathematics thus perveives itself as an interface between the mathematical community and the general public.

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