About Eric Weisstein, Creator of MathWorld

Eric W. Weisstein began compiling scientific encyclopedias as a high school student nearly twenty years ago. Born in Bloomington, Indiana in 1969, Weisstein studied physics and astronomy at Cornell University and Caltech and received his Ph.D. from Caltech in 1996. In 1995, Weisstein took the vast collection of mathematical facts that he had been accumulating since his teenage years and began to deploy them on the early internet. These pioneering efforts at organizing and presenting online content helped define a paradigm that has subsequently been followed by other large-scale informational projects on the web.

Weisstein is responsible for the award-winning MathWorld site--the world's most widely accessed online mathematics resource. He is also a prolific communicator of mathematics, having authored most of MathWorld's nearly 13,000 articles.

Weisstein joined Wolfram Research in 1999 and unveiled the MathWorld website at mathworld.wolfram.com later that year. As a member of the Scientific Information Group at Wolfram Research, Weisstein has led the development of MathWorld, continuing to expand its scope and depth and fulfilling his vision for bringing accessible mathematical and scientific knowledge to the widest possible audience.

An expert Mathematica user since the 1990s, Weisstein has not only used Mathematica to develop content for MathWorld, but also continues to work closely with the main development teams at Wolfram Research, providing input and advice for future features of Mathematica. To date, he has authored more than 4000 Mathematica notebooks containing useful algorithms and visualizations that are freely downloadable from MathWorld.

Weisstein is a sought-after speaker on mathematics communication, scientific computing, and knowledge management on the internet. He has participated in a number of important standards initiatives and led Wolfram Research's contribution on a National Science Digital Library project.

Weisstein is an advocate for author's rights, especially in the area of electronic publication, as well as a consultant for the CBS television crime drama NUMB3RS. As a committed encyclopedist, he continues to assemble informational sites on other scientific and scholarly topics.