Announcing the Digital Library of Mathematical Functions

After a decade of preparation, the U.S. Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has released the Digital Library of Mathematical Functions (DLMF) and its printed companion, the NIST Handbook of Mathematical Functions, the much-anticipated successors to the agency's most widely cited publication of all time. These modernized reference works contain a comprehensive set of mathematical tools useful for any and all specialists who work with mathematical modeling and computation.

The works comprise a complete update and expansion of the 1964 Handbook of Mathematical Functions edited by Milton Abramowitz and Irene Stegun of NIST. That Handbook quickly became an indispensable reference for scientists and engineers who use the tools of applied mathematics in their work. While the 1964 volume has sold an estimated 1 million copies and still averages more than 1,600 citations per year in scientific papers, NIST embarked on the new work in response to advances in electronic information exchange as well as in mathematics itself.

The new 36-chapter tome is designed to be the definitive reference work on applied mathematics' "special functions," the term collectively used to describe the most important and widely employed mathematical functions. Special functions appear whenever natural phenomena are studied, engineering problems are formulated, and computer simulations are performed. They also crop up in statistics, financial models, and economic analysis. Read more »

The Digital Library of Mathemetical Functions is located at  http://dlmf.nist.gov/.