W3C Issues MathML as a Recommendation - Testimonials

The World Wide Web Consortium Issues MathML as a W3C Recommendation 

   MathML Testimonials 


             Press Release


                                   Fact Sheet


                                                     Testimonials





   · Adobe Systems · American Mathematical Society · Design Science ·
Digital Equipment Corporation · Elsevier Science · Geometry Technologies
· Hewlett Packard · IBM · SIAM  · Stilo Technology · University of
Western Ontario · Waterloo Maple · Web Pearls · Wolfram Research · Zona
Research · 



   "Written mathematics encodes complex information succinctly and
relies on the eye's ability to read a mathematical expression in any one
of several desired ways. Providing equivalent functionality when
presenting mathematics aurally requires access to the underlying
representation and meaning of a math expression as opposed to any
specific visual appearance. MathML captures the best of many previous
mathematical encoding systems to provide a notation that can be
translated to rich visual as well as aural presentations. The desire to
arrive at a system that enables mathematical information to be both
presented and computed on has led to a system that allows audio
formatters of MathML to present a rich browsing interface to the
listener as introduced in systems like AsTeR --Audio System For
Technical Readings."
   -- T.V. Raman, Adobe Systems 

   "The American Mathematical Society continues to support the
development of electronic standards for encoding mathematics that began
with its support of TeX in the early 1980s. Finding effective ways to
communicate mathematics on the Web and melding TeX into the Web
environment have been especially important challenges. The AMS is proud
to have been a participant in the development of the MathML
specification, which goes a long way toward meeting these challenges." 
   -- Dr. Donald G. Babbitt, Publisher, American Mathematical Society 

   "Approval of the MathML Specification is an important step toward the
ultimate goal of making it as easy to include mathematics in Web pages
as it is to include text. As mathematics is the language of science and
engineering, and the Web was created by scientists and engineers, this
is well overdue." 
   -- Paul Topping, President, Design Science, Inc. 

   "The ability to deliver formulas, and in particular mathematical
formulas has been a significant challenge with SGML, and the web based
derivatives of SGML. MathML is a major step forward in developing a
common solution to this requirement, and will facilitate the movement of
significant amounts of technical material into the Web, and digital
   libraries in general."
   -- Jim Isaak, Director Information Infrastructure Standardization,
Digital Equipment Corporation 

   "The Mathematical Markup Language is of critical importance for
establishing a high level quality environment for math publishing on the
World Wide Web. Elsevier Science, as a full member of the World Wide Web
Consortium, is happy to have participated actively in developing this
new standard and to ensure it fits with the scientific community.
   -- Eefke Smit, Publisher Mathematics and Computer Science, Elsevier
Science 

   "The importance of effectively sharing scientific knowledge on a
global scale cannot be overestimated. MathML is an important enabling
technology for making available richly-interconnected, interactive,
scientific information to anyone with an inquisitive mind and a web
browser."
   -- Richard McGehee, President, Geometry Technologies, Inc. 

   "Hewlett Packard welcomes MathML as a major advance, with tremendous
potential for improving the quality of printing for math on the Web.
Students, technicians and scientists will be no longer be distracted by
the inferior quality inherent in using bitmapped images or ASCII
renditions."
   -- Tim Campbell, R&D Project Manager, Laser Systems Group,
Hewlett-Packard 

   "As a contributor in the creation of the MathML Proposed
Recommendation, we expect MathML to be an enabler for many areas of
Web-based education. In addition, the flexibility of MathML could
revolutionize scientific and technical electronic publishing for
engineers, physicians, scientists, and researchers. Through IBM's tech
explorer Hypermedia Browser on the IBM alphaWorks site, we are already
providing a preview of software to render MathML."
   -- John Patrick, Vice President of Internet Technology, IBM 

   "SIAM wholeheartedly supports MathML. We publish eleven journals and
put all eleven journals on line since January 1997. However, we have
limited on line posting of journal articles to PDF and Postscript
formats, because we felt there was not a good solution to displaying
mathematics on the web. This has limited our ability to link articles.
We feel there is a critical need for simple methods for rendering and
displaying mathematics on the web, and MathML promises to provide this
capability."
   -- Jim Crowley, Executive Director, SIAM (Society for Industrial and
Applied Mathematics) 

   "MathML is a major advance in the development of markup for
mathematics,particularly in the support for the encoding of mathematical
semantics. It is an important step forward in the development of
electronic scientific publishing. Stilo Technology are proud to have
   contributed to the development of MathML." 
   -- Prof. Roy Pike FRS., Chairman, Stilo Technology Ltd. 

   "Universities are built upon the communication of ideas. So far the
World Wide Web has been very effective in conveying visual and textual
content. Many subjects require mathematical content, which up to now
could not be conveyed readily. With MathML, the Web becomes an enabling
tool in the instruction of technical subjects and research communication
in the quantitative disciplines."
   -- Dr. Paul Davenport, President and Vice Chancellor, The University
of Western Ontario, Canada 

   "As the developer of the leading technical computing product Maple V,
Waterloo Maple is committed to support industry standards such as
MathML. The accurate, standards-based communication and presentation of
technical information represented by MathML, facilitates the reality of
live math on the Web. As an integral partner in W3C's development of
MathML, Waterloo Maple is pleased to see MathML 1.0 reach this important
milestone. We are dedicated to further development and adoption of this
revolutionary specification." 
   -- Dieter Hensler, President & CEO, Waterloo Maple Inc. 

   "At Web Pearls we are implementing interactive Mathematics components
and applications using MathML and its natural semantics-oriented
companion, OpenMath, so we are absolutely delighted that W3C has adopted
MathML. Finally, it will be possible to 'do Mathematics' on the Web in a
standard way."
   -- Dr. Chris Howlett, President and CEO Web Pearls Inc. 

   "While developing Mathematica 3, Wolfram Research learned how to
create the first truly integrated mathematical display and evaluation
environment. We contributed the result of our research to the MathML
standard—-MathML and Mathematica 3 share the same conceptual framework.
With MathML, Mathematica users have yet another format to exchange their
results on the web. MathML will allow both importing and exporting of
formulas—-structure intact."
   -- Roger Germundsson Director, Research & Development, Wolfram
Research, Inc. 

   "This is to the engineering and scientific community what HTML was to
the rest of us."
   -- Martin Marshall, Zona Research, InfoWorld, Feb 26 1998 

             Press Release


                                   Fact Sheet


                                                     Testimonials


    Contact America --
                       Ian Jacobs <ij@w3.org>
                       +1.212.624.1814 

                       Kathryn Esplin <kesplin@w3.org>
                       +1.617.258.0604
    Contact Europe --
                       Ned Mitchell <ned@ala.com>
                       +33 1 43 22 79 56
                       Andrew Lloyd <allo@ala.com>
                       +44 127 367 5100
    Contact Asia --
                       Yumiko Matsubara <matsubara@w3.org>
                       +81.466.47.5111 ext. 3257

Received on Tuesday, 7 April 1998 13:17:56 UTC