I’ve just found three books by J. Peter May with descriptions of mathematics notation in the title:
- E [sign for infinity] ring spaces and E [sign for infinity] ring spectra
- [The mathematical expression for infinite loop] ring spaces and [The mathematical expression for infinite loop] ring spectra
- E [infinity subscript] ring spaces and E [infinity subscript] ring spectra
It is difficult to write software that can tell these titles are the same, yet they are. The Open Library book merging code has failed to recognize these are all the same book, and so we have three records in the database, where there should be one.
I wonder how often descriptions of mathematical notation appear in bibliographic records; this is the first time I’ve seen it.
I think there are a few books on C*-algebras (C* is pronounced C-star) and I’m not sure how I would index those. Knuth’s “TeX” (appears in several book titles) is supposedly spelled with greek letters (tau epsilon chi) and printed with a weird glyph, but I bet it’s always catalogued as roman letters.
My favorite math book (although its looking a little tatty now) is “The World’s Most Famous Math Problem: The Proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem and Other Mathematical Mysteries”. Its a delightful, informative, and accurate book about the probable proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem.