Brooks Library Research Guides: Mathematics

Math Archives

This website includes historical biographies of women in mathematics, a list of links to professional societies in mathematics, K-12 teaching materials, the full text to proceedings from the International Conference on Technology in Collegiate Mathematics (1994-2003), and a indexed page of links to other websites on various math topics.

Mathworld

This website is best explained as a mathematics encyclopedia. It is interactive and contains an index of links to internal pages on a variety of subjects: algebra, applied math, calculus, discrete math, the foundations of math, geometry, math history and terminology, number theory, probability and statistics, recreational math, and topology.

Oxford Reference Online
Oxford Reference Online, with over 2 million entries, many of which are illustrated, is a superb cross-searchable resource to use when you are at the 'looking for a clue' or 'needing verification' stages of your research.  Oxford Reference provides quality, up-to-date reference content from its extensive series of well-respected books - and unlike Wikipedia you can cite Oxford Reference in a paper!

The Quick Reference materials include information on many Subjects, a series of informative Timelines, a wide variety of Quotations, as well as English Dictionaries, and Bilingual Dictionaries.

The Reference Library is divided into Subject Categories, drawn from the 308 volumes of the Oxford Reference Library.  Those categories are:

Archaeology	Media studies
Art & Architecture	Medicine and health
Bilingual dictionaries	Music
Classical studies	Names studies
Encyclopedias	Performing arts
English Dictionaries and Thesauri	Philosophy
History	Quotations
Language reference	Religion
Law	Science and technology
Linguistics	Social Sciences
Literature	Society and culture

Assistance and advice with using the Quick Reference and the Reference Library are available at this link, and by contacting your friendly neighborhood Brooks Library Librarians.

Notes: The Search Box is in the upper right corner of each Oxford Reference page, with additional options on the left-side and in the center of the page before you scroll down.  Most Oxford Reference results pages are scrollable lists of information, and scrolling is worth doing.
          There is also an Advanced Search available.
          To cite an entry click on the individual entry, the Citation Tool is now visible - it is the 'little pencil' to the right and above the entry that you wish to cite.

Oxford Reference Online: Physical Sciences & Mathematics

Oxford Reference Online is a suite of databases available electronically to CWU affiliated users.  The entire suite of encyclopedias, dictionaries, handbooks and companion works can be accessed and searched from the "Databases by Title" link found on the library's homepage.  The set of references covering the physical sciences and mathematics deal with statistics, weights, measurements, space exploration, scientists, chemistry, astronomy, cosmology, mathematics, and physics.

Brooks Library Online Catalog - CATTRAX
Cattrax is the online catalog that describes nearly all the materials held by the Brooks Library: books, government documents, maps, microforms, journals, and other items.  Below is everything you might want to know about how to use Cattrax - but all you need to know to start searching is summarized in the numbered items and note directly below:

Using Cattrax to find an item in the Brooks Library:
1. Enter a search term – a word, a phrase, whatever – in the search box.

2. Use the drop-down menu to select whether you wish to do a keyword/word search, a title search, a subject search, an author search, or one of the other options.  Click 'Search'.

3. Results that are 'relevant' to the search term that you used will be retrieved.  Examine the results.  Repeat steps 1 through 3 as needed.

*** Note: Information is often described in several different ways; you may need to try a variety of terms before you find ones that provide you with the information you are looking for. And spelling counts.***

More Information about Cattrax:
You can sort the results by 'relevance', date or by title, by clicking on those words below the Search Box.

Click on a title to see a detailed bibliographic record about that title.  The ‘bib record’ will contain a variety of additional information about the book: the author, location, call number, often a summary, status, subject terms, etc.  Any and all of that information can be important clues.

The ‘bib record’ will also have a link to a location map, two ways to send the information to your mobile phone, a citation tool, and will often have book cover images.

You can also save the ‘bib record’ to either ‘My Lists’ (requires you to use your ‘Library Log-in’) or you can ‘Save to Bag’ and remember to email, save, or print the resulting list of titles before you finish your session with Cattrax.

Once you have saved the useful results of your first search you can perform more searches – perhaps starting by opening the author link, the subject terms (towards the bottom of the ‘bib record’), or the 'Call #', in a new browser tab, or using the search box to start a totally new search using what you have learned so far from your search.

(Note: the books are in Call Number order on the shelves and clicking on the "Call #" will display a list of books in something like 'shelf order', which can help you find some good ideas for searching Cattrax.  It is also a good idea to look on the shelves, discovery happens in many ways.)

When you finish your session with Cattrax remember to email, save, or print the ‘Save to Bag’ list of items that you found.

Additional Cattrax Information:

• Note: the “Request” service located in the upper left of a 'bib record' page is only available for Center Campus Students.  This is because the Center Campus Students would need to use more than the stairs or the elevator to get the book from the Brooks Library.  (If you are a Main Campus student wishing to check out a book in a Center Library please consult the Circulation Desk.)


• The ‘Modify Search’ link at the top of any Cattrax page is almost the same as the ‘Advanced Search’ option.  The ‘Modify Search’ option is very useful for narrowing down your list of results.  The "Limit/Sort Search" option is a way to narrow your Subject, Author, or Title search results.


• If you have the citation for an article you can select Journal/Serial Title to find out what kind of access (print/digital, which issues/years) we have to a particular journal.  We often have access to a journal through more than one database.  If you do not succeed in locating the journal or article that you need please consult one of our charming Brooks Library Librarians, or submit a request to our very resourceful Interlibrary Loan Department.


• If your professor said that something you needed to read was 'on Reserve' (the professor may have said 'in the library' or something else roughly equivalent) you can check our Reserved List by searching in Cattrax by course name or by the professor's name.


• Last, but certainly not least, if what you are looking for is not available in Cattrax try repeating your searches in Summit.  Summit enables you to search the catalogs of 37 academic libraries in Oregon, Washington, and Idaho and request materials owned by those libraries; a courier service provides near-daily delivery of library materials here to Central Washington University.


• Summit Notes: There is usually a three to five day interval between your making a request and receiving the book, DVD, or other item.  Summit is part of Worldcat.  Each result will have a notation "Libraries that own this item:".  Items owned by a Summit member library can be requested by clicking the purple 'Request Summit Item' button.  Items owned by a Worldcat Library will need to be requested through Interlibrary Loan.

The book collection is shelved on the 3rd (A-J) and 4th (K-Z) floors of the main campus library and shelved by Library of Congress subject classification.  The Government Documents, Maps, and Microforms are on the 3rd floor.  The Music Library is on the 4th floor.  Our physical journal, magazine, and serials collection is on the 2nd floor.  DVDs, video tapes and films are on the 1st floor.  Children's Books are on the 4th floor.  Cattrax also contains links to a variety of e-books, and links to digital materials located elsewhere.

Ebsco eBook Collection
The Brooks Library has permanent access to 3037 digital books from the EBSCO eBook Collection.  EBSCO eBooks are digital full-text versions of books in the areas of:

Children's & Young Adult Nonfiction	Literature & Criticism
Arts & Architecture	Mathematics
Biographies & Memoirs	Philosophy
Business & Economics	Political Science
Computer Science	Psychology
Education	Reference Works
Engineering & Technology	Religion
Fiction	Sciences
General Nonfiction	Self-Help & Family
Health & Medicine	Social Sciences
History	Study Aids & Language Learning
Law

Note: EBSCO's classifications of these books is a bit imaginative, in each of the above categories there will be some books that you would not expect to see in that list.

You can copy and paste from these ebooks, you can access them from off-campus, and you can save portions of them as a pdf.

WorldCat
WorldCat is an essential service run by the imaginatively named Online Computer Library Center (OCLC).  OCLC is a nonprofit, membership, computer library service and research organization dedicated to the public purposes of furthering access to the world’s information and reducing information costs.

WorldCat aspires to be a library catalog for the entire world; it contains all the records cataloged by the more than 72,000 OCLC member libraries around the world.  WorldCat offers millions of bibliographic records and includes records in 400 languages.

The more than 179 million records cataloged by OCLC member libraries include books, manuscripts, websites and internet resources, maps, computer programs, musical scores, films, slides, videotapes, DVDs, newspapers, journals and magazines, sound recordings, articles, chapters, and papers.  The dates covered in WorldCat range from before 1000 BCE to literally earlier today.

The Basic Search is useful when you know precisely what you are looking for.  The Advanced Search is the default search and works well for most everyone.  There is also an Expert Search available in which you can write your own Boolean Search Expressions.

Assistance is available from WorldCat at this link, and from Brooks Librarians at this link.

ArticleFirst
The Online Computer Library Center, Inc. (OCLC) provides this index of more than 27,000,000 of the articles published since 1990.  The articles are from over 16,000 journals, covering nearly all fields of knowledge.  The items indexed include every article, news story, letter, or other item listed on the table of contents page of the journal.  This database also provides, for most items, a list of libraries that have the journal title – information that makes finding the article in the Brooks Library Collection, or through Interlibrary Loan, much easier.

Please ask the Reference Help Desk, on the 1st Floor of the Brooks Library, or at (509) 963-1021, for any assistance you might wish in searching this index or searching for citations found in the index.

International Conference on Technology in Collegiate Mathematics

The website "Math Archives" is the home to the Electronic Proceedings of the International Conference on Technology in Collegiate Mathematics. This is an annual conference, and the Math Archives has full text of the papers from 1994 to 2003. There is both an author and subject index.

JSTOR

Our subscription to JSTOR (short for 'Journal Storage') contains every issue of over 600 core scholarly journals in the arts, humanities, the social sciences, as well as the natural and applied sciences.  These journals have been digitized back to the first issue published (in some cases that is the 1600s).  JSTOR also contains citations (bibliographic records) for more than 1,500 leading academic journals, as well as select monographs and other materials valuable for academic work.  (This is why "Include only content I can access" should not be checked, even if you are in a hurry.  Articles not available in JSTOR are often available in our other databases or through Interlibrary Loan.)

As always please consult the Reference Desk or the nearest librarian if you have any questions about finding articles in JSTOR or elsewhere.

Mathematics ArXiv [UC Davis]

Articles and ICM conference proceedings organized by math topics. Full text PDF is available. You can also search by author, or title/ID. The archive contains over 45,000 articles.

MathSciNet
Searchable Web database providing access to over 59 years of Mathematical Reviews and Current Mathematical Publications (from 1940 to the present).

Scitation & SPIN Web

The SPIN database (Searchable Physics Information Notices) provides the most current indexing and abstracting of major American and Russian physics and astronomy journals. SPIN contains the abstracts of over 80 scientific journals published by the American Institute of Physics and its Member Societies since 1975, as well as selected articles from other scientific journals, totaling close to 1 million articles. Scitation covers science and technology (particularly engineering) journals online portal sites, magazines, and conference proceedings. Select the "Scitation & SPIN" radio button prior to entering your search terms. 

This is a citation / abstract database only.  To search for the full text, you will need to type in the journal or book title into the Summit Catalog (see library homepage) to see if the item is at Central or to request the item Interlibrary Loan.

Web of Science

Index, abstracts, bibliographies, and cited references to articles from over 6,400 of the world's leading scholarly science and technical journals covering more than 150 disciplines.

USA.gov - Official Government Web Portal

USA.gov is the U.S. government web portal to all federal, state, tribal, and local government web resources and services. USA.gov is intended to help people navigate government information, procedures, and policies.

Through USA.gov you can apply for benefits online (including grants), contact a government agency or department, or use the most comprehensive search of government websites.  You can also search for Government Publications, for information specifically relevant to you, and for contact information for government employees and officials.
 

CRC Standard Mathematical Tables and Formulae (31st Edition)
Print Location: Ref QA47 .M315 2003
Each of the 10 chapters in this book tackles a topic in math. These topics are on the analysis of numbers, algebra, discrete math, geometry, continuous mathematics, special functions, probability and statistics, scientific computing, financial analysis and a concluding chapter on miscellaneous topics such as biographies and a list of resources.

Facts on File Calculus Handbook
Print Location: Ref QA303.2 M36 2003

Intended use is for middle school, high school and college students taking single-variable calculus. It's a comfortingly slim book. There are included a number of well-known calculus theorems, definitions and formulas. There are also charts and tables, biographies, and a historical introduction and a chronology of the subject.  See also:  Facts on File Geometry Handbook in the Reference Dept. [ Ref QA445.2 G67 2003 ]

American Mathematical Society
Founded in 1888 to further mathematical research and scholarship, the American Mathematical Society fulfills its mission through programs and services that promote mathematical research and its uses, strengthen mathematical education, and foster awareness and appreciation of mathematics and its connections to other disciplines and to everyday life.

Association for Women in Science and Engineering

Aim is to advance the participation of girls and women in the sciences, from biomedicine to mathematics and the social sciences, in engineering, and in the technologies, in all areas and at all levels.

National Council of Teachers of Mathematics

Organized in 1920, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics is now the world's largest group of its kind. You can find content standards for teaching mathematics here, as well as weekly problems and games for you to try with students of all ages.

Nature Network

Nature Network is the online meeting place for you and fellow scientists to gather, talk and find out about the latest scientific news and events. Science is an international endeavor and deserves a global stage for discussion. Scientists can also benefit from interactions at the local level. That's why you'll see an increasing number of local city hubs on Nature Network, starting with Boston and London.

Dictionary of Scientific Quotations

Extensive list of quotations, from Isaac Asimov to Einstein to Stephen Hawking to Mark Twain. Useful and amusing.  Available online. 

Institute of Mathematical Statistics
Worldwide organization whose purpose is to spread awareness on the applications and developments of statistics and probability. Student membership is free. You can also get full text on many of the articles found within the recent issues of four IMS publications: Annals of Applied Probability, Annals of Probability, Annals of Statistics, and Statistical Science.

Metric Conversion Factors

Extensive list of conversion factors from the Washington Department of Transportation.

Statistical Reports of U.S. Science and Engineering

A wealth of surveys, reports, and statistics on the sciences. Surveys describe the workforce and current educational trends in science.

Intute: Science, Engineering and Technology Gateway

A free online service providing you with access to the very best Web resources for education and research, evaluated and selected by a network of subject specialists. It covers the physical sciences, engineering, computing, geography, mathematics and environmental science. See also the "E-journals" search for freely available full text journals in the sciences.  Formerly known as EEVL--Internet Guide to Engineering, Mathematics, and Computing.

MathGuide
The MathGuide is an Internet-based subject gateway to scholarly relevant information in mathematics, located at the Lower Saxony State- and University Library, Göttingen (Germany).

OAIster Catalog of Digital Resources
OAIster is a catalog more than 25 million records of open access digital resource.  The Catalog was built by harvesting information from open access collections around the world  The digital resources in OAIster include items such as digitized books and articles, born-digital texts, audio files, images, and movies.

The OAIster Catalog is searchable by title, author/creator, subject, language, keyword and several other forms of metadata.  Searching in the OAIster Catalog is by Boolean Search (And, Or, Not).  Like playing chess the best way to become good at boolean searching is to do a lot of boolean searching.  Here are the 'basic moves' for searching the OAIster Catalog:

Combining the search terms 'Cat' and 'Dog' (Boolean)
    Cat and Dog
    Cat or Dog
    Cat not Dog
Note: 'and', 'or', & 'not' are in drop-down boxes to the left of the search boxes.

Plurals, truncation, and wildcards
    Use + for plurals (s and es)
    Use * for truncation
    Use # for a wildcard character
    Use ?N for up to N characters

Adjacent terms (proximity)
    Cat w Dog    (Cat is followed by Dog)
    Cat wN Dog  (Cat is followed by Dog with at most N terms between)
    Cat n Dog     (Cat is next to Dog, either order)
    Cat nN Dog   (Cat is within N terms of Dog, either order)

The available Limiters are Year, Document Type, and Language.  A Basic Search and an Expert Search interface is also available.  You can also create an account that will enable you to save searches.

NOTE:  Sometimes OAIster may direct you to items that are access restricted.  The Librarians in the ARC or at any of the service desks can help you with accessing information that is ‘access restricted’ and with any questions that you might have.

OAIster Catalog of Digital Resources
OAIster is a catalog more than 25 million records of open access digital resource.  The Catalog was built by harvesting information from open access collections around the world  The digital resources in OAIster include items such as digitized books and articles, born-digital texts, audio files, images, and movies.

The OAIster Catalog is searchable by title, author/creator, subject, language, keyword and several other forms of metadata.  Searching in the OAIster Catalog is by Boolean Search (And, Or, Not).  Like playing chess the best way to become good at boolean searching is to do a lot of boolean searching.  Here are the 'basic moves' for searching the OAIster Catalog:

Combining the search terms 'Cat' and 'Dog' (Boolean)
    Cat and Dog
    Cat or Dog
    Cat not Dog
Note: 'and', 'or', & 'not' are in drop-down boxes to the left of the search boxes.

Plurals, truncation, and wildcards
    Use + for plurals (s and es)
    Use * for truncation
    Use # for a wildcard character
    Use ?N for up to N characters

Adjacent terms (proximity)
    Cat w Dog    (Cat is followed by Dog)
    Cat wN Dog  (Cat is followed by Dog with at most N terms between)
    Cat n Dog     (Cat is next to Dog, either order)
    Cat nN Dog   (Cat is within N terms of Dog, either order)

The available Limiters are Year, Document Type, and Language.  A Basic Search and an Expert Search interface is also available.  You can also create an account that will enable you to save searches.

NOTE:  Sometimes OAIster may direct you to items that are access restricted.  The Librarians in the ARC or at any of the service desks can help you with accessing information that is ‘access restricted’ and with any questions that you might have.

Physical Sciences, Engineering,Computing and Math from INFOMINE
Most major disciplines in these areas are well covered. Basic science resources are emphasized though there is much of an applied nature as well. Climatology (incl. climate change information), paleontology and environmental science information with a physical science leaning are included.

Shodor.org

Shodor.org is a nonprofit organization that provides interactive learning tools for computational math and science, such as their "Interactivate" pages for 3rd -12th grade students.  Shodor's Computation Science Reference Desk [CSERD] is a searchable portal to topical websites; see also the "Resources" tab to search through a number of tutorials on topics in computational science.

Strategian: The Strategic Guide to Quality Information in Biology, Chemistry, Computer Science, Mathematics, Medicine, Physics, and Psychology

Searchable database with lots of links, including a database that provides citations to important articles, books, documents published before 1969.

Scientific American: Ask the Experts

"Queries range from the profound (Is it possible to travel through time?) to the everyday (How does a.microwave oven cook food?) and from the interesting (What illnesses do insects get?) to the surprising (How do whales sleep without drowning?"