While researching the specializations of the faculty at UMD, I stumbled upon a link to the Cornell Digital Math Library, which I find really neat. They have scanned old volumes in mathematics that have gone out of copyright, and made them freely accessible to anyone. No username/password mess. Along with other initiatives, such as ArXiv, this bodes well for the digital commons. Just imagine, all the world’s knowledge, freely accessible to anyone with comparably cheap technical means! Compare that to the effort it took just years ago to get a hold of, say, a copy of a historical mathematics book, such as Hilbert’s or Weierstrass’s. While their treatments of math are certainly not the most “up-to-date”, I usually find it most interesting to find out how someone came up with something in the first place, what ideas they had, which I firmly believe is of some value, even in today’s world of content overflow. If there only were more hours in the day…
Back to current priorities: grad school applications. :O