The Matrix Cookbook has passed the magic boundary of half a million downloads since the first release in August 2004. And the cookbook is still the most downloaded document at Department of Informatics and Mathematical Modelling, Technical University of Denmark. Yay.
This is a continued story - read also Part 1 and Part 2. I have received the following mail from Amazon:
Dear Mr. Petersen:
Thank you for your message. Without any admission of wrongdoing, please be advised that we are in the process of removing ”The Matrix Cookbook (Kindle Edition)” ASIN: B0027P9C2S from Amazon.com. It typically takes 2-3 days for a listing to disappear once it has been removed from our catalog. We trust this will bring this matter to a close.
This letter is written without prejudice to any rights, remedies or defenses to which Amazon.com and its affiliates may be entitled, all of which are expressly reserved.
Thank you - what a relief.
This is continued story starting here. Ok, so they didn’t respond to the first email sent via a webform to Amazon Kindle. Today I sent the following mail to copyright@amazon.com
Dear Sirs/Madams
I have found out that the document “The Matrix Cookbook” is available from Amazon Kindle
http://www.amazon.com/The-Matrix-Cookbook-ebook/dp/B0027P9C2S
I am co-author of the document, and have no idea how or why it has ended on Amazon. The copyright holder is Technical University of Denmark and they have not authorized this, so I will strongly urge you to remove it from your services immediately.
On the kindle website, the document have so-called editors named “TFTPG” which stands for The Flying Tigers Printing Group (http://www.tftpg.com). “The Matrix Cookbook” has nothing to do with this organization and I don’t know why they are related on Amazon.
I would appreciate a swift respons to this email. Thanks.
Best regards, Kaare
Lets see if that helps …
This morning, I found out that The Matrix Cookbook is being sold at Amazon (Kindle version). How often does that happen - that Amazon find something on the internet and starts making money on it, without even contacting the authors, publisher, copyright holders, or someone otherwise related to the material?
So I wrote them an email instructing them to remove it immediately - lets see if they have the curtesey to respond to that.
Stephen Wolfram, the guy behind the software Mathematica, has launched something called Wolfram Alpha. Wolfram Alpha is a kind of search engine with a very ambitious goal; in their own words: “Wolfram|Alpha’s long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, andalgorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything.” Ambitious indeed.
Typing in “Matrix”, the result is a help page on matrix computations, i.e., one can compute the trace, determinant, eigenvalue, etc about a specific matrix typed in, in a Mathematica-like syntax. The output for a specific matrix is a colorplot of the matrix along with the computed trace, determinant, eigenvalues, eigenvectors and inverse.
Entering positive definite, Hadamard matrix or covariance matrix, Wolfram Alpha doesn’t find anything, which means that Wolfram Alpha is either in a beta stage or is not very focussed on matrix matters.
In contrast to Google, Wolfram Alpha can compute results and present them with graphs which is a major step forward and places Wolfram Alpha as more of a knowledge gateway than a search engine. But there seem to be quite a gap from the ambitions and the present level of completeness.
Tim Davis of the University of Florida is maintaining an amazing collection of sparse matrices with applications in many diverse scientific fields such as geometry, fluid dynamics, acoustics, networks, finance and what not. And these sparse matrices have beautiful visual representations.
