Sometime in the early 2000s I found myself reading MathWorld the way some people read Wikipedia -- just start on some random article, and follow links to anything I don't understand. It helped to rekindle my love of mathematics and I eventually went back to school and got a math degree, which is one of the most satisfying things I've done.
2. I think it's cool how Weisstein followed his passion and found a way to share it with others around the world.
3. My personal opinion is that its better written and better cross referenced than Wikipedia. I believe the consistency is the result of one person taking responsibility, the project having direct funding due to it's relationship to Wolfram Research's commercial interests, and it's narrow domain focus.
The CRC Encyclopedia of Mathematics is $450. I'm curious as to why someone would consider resolving the lawsuit in a way that allowed MathWorld to stay online a fiasco?
I think this page could serve as a textbook example for how not to write an about page. I didn't know MathWorld before, but the first paragraph is so high-level that after reading it, I had a very vague idea at best.
Then follow three paragraphs about how MathWorld came about -- for someone like me who'd just like to know what the heck this is a complete waste of space.
Then finally, in the middle of the page, you get the bullet points that contain concrete information.
And then, in paragraph five, you get some technical background in that it is based on Mathematica. Okay, perhaps the URL could have let me guess that ;-)
One a positive note, they do invite feedback, so I may contact them with a similar note to this one (perhaps more politely phrased).
The last paragraph of the page, I could do without. It really doesn't contain any "about" information anyway.
