About NumberDB
- Welcome
- Work in progress
- Acknowledgements
Welcome
NumberDB is a collaborative database of numbers.
The underlying idea is that in practise,
numbers are determined by their first 10 digits.
That makes them searchable.
NumberDB attempts to be a tool to identify numbers, and to show known descriptions.
Which numbers are stored depends on their simplicity and their relevance.
NumberDB stores numbers in tables.
Tables are families of numbers together with a description.
Thus a number can appear in several tables:
For example, the number 1 is in the table of
Integers,
Values of the Gamma function, and it has its own table
One as it is a special number.
Tables of numbers also contain a definition, a description of parameters, and possibly formulas, comments, references, links, programs, and further more specific information.
Furthermore tables are given
tags, which helps searchability and classification.
Work in progress
The database just started and is in active development.
There are various development goals:
-
Our aim is to have around 10000 tables of around 1000 numbers.
This makes around 107 numbers in total, which can be reasonably searched using 10 digits.
Which numbers we choose will be determined by their simplicity and significance.
Contributions are greatly welcome.
-
Search results should be ordered by significance.
Moreover, registered users should be allowed to do bulk searches.
-
Contributors will be named at the table webpages.
-
A short term goal is to include complex numbers; especially when they are more significant than their real and imaginary parts alone.
A long term goal is to include p-adic numbers.
-
For some users it will be useful to access the data in a programmable bulk way.
With some effort, this can already be done by cloning the numberdb-data repository.
It is however desirably to have a simpler interface that makes the data available to user's laptops, and to open source computer algebra systems such as SageMath and Pari/GP.
-
Users should be able to give comments, discuss tables, declare numbers as "wanted", rate tables, have a public(?) profile which includes a list of contributions.
Acknowledgements
NumberDB is build and runs on various open-source projects:
Django,
PostgreSQL,
SageMath,
Pari/GP,
arb,
nginx,
Gunicorn,
Pyro5,
git.
NumberDB's repositories are stored on
GitHub.
NumberDB's server is funded by the main developer Benjamin Matschke, who in turn is supported by
Boston University and
Simons Foundation grant #550023.