I have a few comments on this thread.
1) I agree with more-or-less everything Richard had to say in this
thread.
2) I would very much like to see TILU integrated into Maxima with a
suitably free table of integrals.
3) I see one advantage not listed by Richard: easy extensibility.
Specialized integrals pop up in various fields. It would even be easy
for a novice to add a few specialized integrals to a table.
4) Even if we were to all agree that CRC doesn't own the rights to the
integrals in their table, the Maxima project would be in no position to
challenge CRC on the issue.
5) Unfortunately, I don't completely agree that it "doesn't hurt to
ask." In the worst-case scenario, a publisher could decide to follow our
progress in creating a free table of integrals and object whenever we
added one from their table. Even if such objections lacked any legal
basis whatsoever, they could still make life very difficult for us.
--Jim
On Sun, 2003-02-16 at 09:21, Richard Fateman wrote:
> 1. UCB lawyers have other things to worry about than whether
> it is OK for some faculty member to (possibly) violate the
> copyright of some publisher.
>
> 2. CRC Press is not a university press or a professional
> society press. It is run for profit. I am reasonably
> certain that if someone approached them to say "we want
> to use your property" that they would not
> say "go ahead and use it free".
>
> 3. Regarding Weisstein's legal problems: it seems to me
> fairly clear that he sold CRC Press something that he
> didn't intend to sell them. I think he failed to read the contract
> he signed (or worse, read it and didn't believe it).
> Wolfram appeared to encourage him in some way to violate
> this contract, but eventually came to some agreement
> with CRC. I find this somewhat amusing since Wolfram
> threatened to sue me when I wrote a Mathematica language
> parser, claiming he owned the "commands" of Mathematica.
> He eventually dropped the matter.
>
>
> I think that the right thing to do is type into a computer
> the integration problems (NOT the solutions) in some suitable
> form, e.g. Mathematica, Macsyma, Maple, Mupad syntax. Then
> make a table of those inputs and the corresponding outputs
> (with simplifications applied). This should cover much of
> the usual tables. I doubt that Wolfram claims he has a
> copyright on the answers produced by Mathematica.
>
> The known integration ANSWERS that cannot be done by any of these
> systems will have to be entered by hand. These are mostly
> definite (improper or parametric) integrals with nice compact solutions
> not found by algorithms, or ones where the answers are not in
> closed form (e.g. indefinite summations, limits, other integrals).
>
> The amount of work is really not that much, assuming that many
> of the answers come out in a form that is good enough for
> further use.
>
> On the other hand one can ask the question: if the algorithm
> can find the result, why bother to put it in a table?
> (a) The table lookup is faster
> (b) The result may be simpler because a human made some
> clever choice of simplification commands
> and of course
> (c) some entries in the table cannot be done by the computer
> algorithms (yet).