This week there was the common meeting of the Austrian and German mathematical societies at the University of Salzburg and besides many interesting math talks there was also a session about the future of knowledge management.
One feature that Zentralblatt announced to work on is the future possibility to search for all publications containing a given formula. The main problem for this is that published papers are usually available as PDF only. For that reason, Zentralblatt wants to link all papers to their ArXiv version (whenever that exists) because the ArXiv also provides the TeX versions.
It is of course already possible to search for strings inside a TeX file as in the screenshot above, but the future feature should also have the ability to find all TeX strings yielding a similar outlook, and of course it also should identify self-defined macros.
Another plan is that the Zentralblatt wants to connect itself to open source projects such as mathoverflow. For example one is thinking of linking a paper to all the mathoverflow questions or answers that make a reference to that paper as in the screenshot below.
The focus of the meeting was of course on mathematics and there were of course many interesting talks at the meeting. The first plenary lecture was given by Martin Hairer about sequences of random variables converging towards normal distributions like (conjecturally) the example in the video below.
The Emmy Noether Lecture was given by Ursula Hamenstädt about the work of Marina Rather and Maryam Mirzakhani, who both deceased in July. Before that lecture the exhibition “Women in Mathematics throughout Europe” was officially opened.
Monday’s third plenary lecture was given Michael Eichmair about isoperimetry and its applications in relativity.
