The World Wide Web Consortium Issues MathML as a W3C Recommendation

MathML 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 techexplorer 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