Abstract

Although there have been no major revisions of the National Bureau of Standards Handbook of Mathematical Functions [1] since its first publication in 1964, it continues to be widely used by the mathematical and scientific community. As a result, NIST is engaged in a large scale project to update and expand the handbook and disseminate it in digital format on the World Wide Web. This electronic handbook is being called the Digital Library of Mathematical Functions (DLMF). A key feature of the DLMF will be dynamic 3D visualizations of special functions. This paper discusses some of the visualization results obtained to date using VRML, the Virtual Reality Modeling Language, a standard file format for describing the behavior and geometry of a 3D virtual world.

Keywords: VRML, Virtual Reality Modeling Language, visualization, 3D graphics, clipping, special functions