Useful Internet Resources
(Click
on picture to see the OSU Math Star) (with apologies to Roger
Penrose)
This is a guide to Internet resources and documents that may be of use
to members of the OSU Math Department. The references within were
derived mostly from the author's own experiences and tastes. The
reader may use this document as a starting point or template for
maintaining their own collection. Click below to enter the list
of categories of resources.
Index of Resources
Click here for more on the methodology behind this
list.
The NCSA Home Page (Starting point for Mosaic)
NCSA Mosaic Home Page
Click on this reference to learn how to use Mosaic and to obtain a
general overview of World-Wide-Web services. In addition, other
helpful documents may be obtained under the Documents
and Help menus in the titlebar of Mosaic.
OSU Math Department Personal Home Pages
It is possible for OSU Math Department members and affiliates to
create personal home pages and maintain these in their own accounts.
This is a convenient way to dispense information about yourself.
Brief instructions are given in the help subtree of our gopher. Click
here to see this:
How to create your own Home Page
Click to see list of personal Home Pages
When the Web started to explode in 1993, I began my own personal "Hot
List" of mathematical and other sites of interest to me, as I browsed
through NCSA Mosaic. I made this list available to other members of my
department, as I had taken it upon myself to supervise the development
of our research computer system and facilitate its use. I originally
collected this list of sites from many sources:
- What's
New with NCSA Mosaic
- Usenet News (
sci.math, sci.math.research, www news
groups
- Other catalogs as they arose: Yahoo, Virtual Library, etc.
- Odds and ends
It used to be a pleasant five minutes or so
to review the What's New page. Now that has become almost impossible,
especially with the explosion of commercial sites. Even Yahoo seems
daunted by the task; I now commonly refer to the major guides such as
Yahoo, keeping the Useful List mainly for common needs and arcana.
With the advent of Netscape, I changed my hot list into a Netscape
bookmarks file to take advantage of Netscape's fine bookmark editor.
The up-to-date (so to speak) bookmark file is available only to me, of
course; however, periodically (or almost-periodically) I convert my
bookmark file into a new version of the "Useful List" by means of the
following steps:
- I copy .netscape-bookmarks to resources.html in my "useful"
subdirectory.
- I apply a saved Emacs lisp routine I called "add-anchors" to the
file which adds target anchors to all the main headings.
- I save and exit resources.html. I then edit index.html which is the
index to the list.
- I delete the old index area in index.html and in that same area
I execute the Emacs command
C-u ESC ! sed -f resource.sed
resources.html. This applies a sed script to resources.html which
produces the index in index.html.
- I then execute a saved Emacs command I called "update-index" which
converts all the target anchors to hyperlinks.
- I then save and exit index.html and the new version is ready.
It's a pretty naïve and silly system, but it has been fairly
manageable for now. The issue of "taxonomy" for Web indices is
extremely difficult to deal with, due to the explosive growth of the
Web. I understand the AMS is going to try to take a coordinated
approach to classifying math resources. Good luck to them!
I was recently notified that the "Useful List" was
awarded "Three Stars" by the McKinley Review, whatever that means.
Anyway, I'll go ahead amd post their logo. If you click it, you can get
to their search engine.
Also here's a form for accessing directly:
