How to Build a Search Engine for Mathematics - Issue 29: Scaling
▻http://nautil.us/issue/29/scaling/how-to-build-a-search-engine-for-mathematics
On the average summer Saturday, the mathematician Neil Sloane woke up to a crisis. “There are always crises,” he said— albeit crises of the teapot tempest variety. One Saturday over breakfast, he faced an inbox message titled “edits from outer space.” Without authorization, a contributor in France had deleted an entry in Sloane’s Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences, which, like Wikipedia, is powered by volunteer contributors and editors. The Day’s Work: Neil Sloane in his attic study, command central for the encyclopedia. He has taped to the wall an epigram from Kipling that reads “He had a theory that if a man did not stay by his work all day and most of the night he laid himself open to fever: so he ate and slept among his files.”Siobhan Roberts But everyday, tending his encyclopedia (...)