A recent announcement by the folks at NIST brought back visions of dancing Spherical Bessel Functions and reminded me of my early days in advanced math & physics.
I was so strongly impressed with the 1964 version of the original Abramowitz & Stegun that I bought a copy as soon as I could afford one and only let loose of it when I stopped doing real math – (about 20 years ago, I think). But the memory lingers even to this day, it was that strong!
Their list of algorithms for creating computer approximations to certain functions was a dream come true for me and many others, I suspect, in the early days of computer modeling of things like transient temperature distributions in solids. Things are so much easier now, but a detailed reference resource always has value.
The preface to the latest version begins:
The NIST Handbook of Mathematical Functions, together with its Web counterpart, the NIST Digital Library of Mathematical Functions (DLMF), is the culmination of a project that was conceived in 1996 at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The project had two equally important goals: to develop an authoritative replacement for the highly successful Handbook of Mathematical Functions with Formulas, Graphs, and Mathematical Tables, published in 1964 by the National Bureau of Standards (M. Abramowitz and I. A. Stegun, editors); and to disseminate essentially the same information from a public Web site operated by NIST.
The new Handbook and DLMF are the work of many hands: editors, associate editors, authors, validators, and numerous technical experts. A summary of the responsibilities of these groups may help in understanding the structure and results of this project.
The NIST Digital Library of Mathematical Functions (companion to the NIST Handbook of Mathematical Functions) is online and FREE at: http://dlmf.nist.gov/
The official Press release is on the NIST website and will be republished on our companion website: Measurement Databases.
Plus, a news story about the printed version, available with DVD from Cambridge University Press will be published on our website concerned with Publications, MeasurementMedia.com
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