Tuesday, November 14, 2000

BW Online | November 9, 2000 | Is It an Encyclopedia or a Web Site?



When Eric Weisstein was a forgetful freshman at Cornell University, he began
jotting down useful facts in an effort to better remember fine details. These
notes covered everything from music to math, from the meaning of the bass clef
to the number of times physicist John Bardeen won the Nobel prize. Weisstein
scribbled through his master's and doctoral studies in planetary astronomy. By
1995, his math notes had become the basis of a popular Web site dubbed Eric's
Treasure Trove of Math.

Figuring he had plenty of solid material, Weisstein asked a number of publishers if they might be interested in
publishing his math encyclopedia. Technical publisher CRC Press took the bait and published the 1,969-page,
Concise Encyclopedia of Mathematics in 1998.

MATH PROBLEM. But the once-amicable relationship between CRC and Weisstein has since disintegrated into
a litigious slugfest. After technical software company Wolfram Research Inc. (WRI) began sponsoring Weisstein's
Treasure Trove site in June, 1999, CRC claimed that Weisstein's continuing work on the Web infringed on CRC's
copyright. On Oct. 23, a U.S. District Court in Illinois, at the behest of CRC, forced Weisstein to close down the
math portion of his site.

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