Last Thursday the Matrix math club and [Pi Mu Epsilon](http://www.math.uiuc.edu/PME/) here at the [University](http://www.uiuc.edu/)
hosted [Eric Weinstein](http://mathworld.wolfram.com/about/author.html), founder of [Mathworld](http://mathworld.wolfram.com).
For those who don’t know, Mathworld is an (excellent) online encyclopedia of mathematics from [Wolfram Research](http://wolfram.com).
His talk was interesting, and a good time was had by all.
He spoke about how Mathworld got started, first as a giant word document of class notes. He went on to talk about how he then put all those notes onto a website “Eric’s Treasure Trove of Mathematics” when that [internet](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web) thing was getting started. How he got [sued](http://mathworld.wolfram.com/about/erics_commentary.html#lawsuit), taken down, and then then a year later (2000), how it returned as the site we know and love today.
We also got a nice preview of Mathematica 6.0. I’m no [Mathematica](http://www.wolfram.com/products/mathematica/index.html) user, but I saw a few things that impressed me. Mathematica now supports anti-aliasing (the jaggly lines it draws currently have always been a turn off for me). Smooth Shading (makes surfaces much nicer). And also a cool little deally where you (as far as I can tell) treat graphics as objects (or whatever they are in Mathematica) – so their no longer static and stuff like that… cool.
There were also some other nifty tidbits as well – he commented a bit on his role as an advisor to the CBS TV series [Numb3rs](http://www.cbs.com/primetime/numb3rs/index.shtml) (I haven’t seen it myself but I hear it’s good). I also found out that in the not so distant future we should be able to expect a Mathworld podcast (awesome) and that (surprisingly) the entire site is, by-in-large, still a one person show.
Oh – yea, almost forgot, I got this nifty [Mathworld shirt](http://store.wolfram.com/view/misc/popup/mathworld-tshirt-pp.html) too! – rock on.
