Scholarpedia:Invitation to Numerical Analysis
Dear %NAME%,
As editors, we would like to invite you to write a short entry "%TITLE%" for the Numerical Analysis chapter of Encyclopedia of Dynamical Systems, which is hosted by Scholarpedia - the free peer-reviewed encyclopedia. This project, being a synthesis of philosophies of Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia, is ambitious and unique. You can read more about it at http://www.scholarpedia.org. Your article will be peer-reviewed, and upon acceptance, you will become the curator of the whole topic "%TITLE%" in Scholarpedia (see below).
Most articles in Scholarpedia are written by the original authors. For example, Benoit Mandelbrot, the inventor of fractals, wrote "Fractals" and "Mandelbrot Set". Franz Halberg, who coined the word 'circadian', wrote "Chronobiology" and "Circadian Rhythm". Edward Lorenz, the discoverer of phenomenon of chaos, wrote "Butterfly Effect". Robert Galambos, the discoverer of sonar in bats, wrote "Echolocation in Bats". Michel Jouvet, the discoverer of REM sleep, wrote "REM (paradoxical) Sleep". Dmitri Anosov wrote "Anosov Diffeomorphisms". Nail Fenichel wrote "Normal Hyperbolicity". Richard FitzHugh wrote "FitzHugh-Nagumo Model". Kiyoshi Ito wrote "Ito Calculus". John Milnor wrote "Attractor". Otto Rossler wrote "Rossler Attractor". Yakov Sinai wrote "Kolmogorov-Sinai Entropy". Steven Smale wrote "Smale Horseshoe", and so on. Among participants of Encyclopedia of Computational Neuroscience (a sister project in Scholarpedia) there are 5 Nobel Laureates.
Many individuals have contributed articles for the numerical analysis chapter: Kendall Atkinson contributed an account of numerical analysis from various perspectives [1]. John Butcher contributed an article on Runge_Kutta methods for ODES [2]. Bill Gear contributed an article on the backward differentiation formulas [3]. Larry Shampine and Skip Thompson contributed an article on initial value problems for ODEs [4] and a second article on stiff systems of ODEs [5]. Ernst Hairer will contribute an article on linear multistep method [6]. Zdzislaw Jackiewicz contributed an article on general linear methods for ODEs [7]. Alan Hindmarsh and Radu Serban contributed an article on the SUNDIALS suite of ODE and DAE solvers [8]. Stephen Campbell, Vu Hoang Linh, and Linda Petzold contributed an article on DAEs [9]. Ian Gladwell contributed an article on [BVPs] [10]. Samir Hamdi, Bill Schiesser, and Graham Griffiths, contributed an article on method of lines [11]. Bill Schiesser and Graham Griffiths contributed an article on linear and nonlinear waves [12]. Andrei Polyanin, Bill Schiesser, and Alexei Zhurov contributed an article on PDEs [13]. David Gottlieb and Sigal Gottlieb contributed an article on spectral methods [14] Skip Thompson contributed an article on DDEs [15]. Christopher Baker and Christopher Paul will contribute an article on neutral DDEs [16]. Neville Ford and Christopher Baker will contribute an article on integro-differential equations [17] Nicola Guglielmi and Ernst Hairer contributed an article on stiff DDEs [18]. Barbara Zubik-Kowal contributed an article on delay PDEs [19].
Scholarpedia hosts multiple focused encyclopedias; most of them are published in a printed form and all are freely available online. Your article will be part of many of them. In addition, your article will be automatically linked to from every other article in Scholarpedia that mentions your title anywhere in the text, resulting in potentially millions of readers during next few years.
Click "Random article" (left menu) to see sample peer-reviewed articles. If you want to change the title or have other preferences, please let us know.
We have created the following account for you in Scholarpedia: Username: %USERNAME% Password: %PASSWORD% To accept this invitation, please click %URL%
The main idea of Scholarpedia is that articles should outlive their authors via the process of curatorship. Similarly to Wikipedia (a free non-reviewed encyclopedia), anybody can edit or revise articles in Scholarpedia, even after they are peer-reviewed and published. For example, other scientists may find and correct an error in your article, add a figure, rewrite a paragraph that is not clearly written, and so on. In contrast to Wikipedia, each article in Scholarpedia has a Curator (typically, its author), whose name is at the top of the article and who accepts or rejects each such revision. For example, if you read an article in Wikipedia "Kolmogorov-Sinai Entropy", you do not know who wrote it and whether or not you could trust it. If you read Scholarpedia article "Kolmogorov-Sinai Entropy", which is written and curated by Yakov Sinai, then you know that everything there is either written by or was later approved by Dr. Sinai. In this sense, Scholarpedia is unlike anything else that has ever been done with scientific publications. Just think of what your article would look like 50 years from now!
The 13th edition of Encyclopedia Britannica has "Space-Time" entry written by A. Einstein and "Psychoanalysis" entry written by S. Freud. If Britannica had the feature of curatorship, physicists and psychologists of today would be fighting each other for the honor to be curators of these articles. The goal of Scholarpedia is to invite today's authorities to write entries on their major discoveries so that future generations of experts would be willing to maintain these articles via the process of curatorship.
Another unique feature of Scholarpedia is that its authors are either invited by the editors (this letter) or elected by the public. Public election of authors ensures fairness in assigning articles to the corresponding experts in each field. Soon Scholarpedia will be transferred to election-only regime.
We hope your schedule would allow you to contribute to the Encyclopedia. We would appreciate if you could make a decision within a month. We are looking forward to hearing from you.
Sincerely Yours,
William E. Schiesser, Lehigh University, USA <wes1@lehigh.edu>
John Butcher, Mathematics Department, The University of Auckland, New Zealand <butcher@math.auckland.ac.nz>
Barbara Zubik-Kowal, Department of Mathematics, Boise State University, Idaho, USA <zubik@math.boisestate.edu>
