Ask HN: Where are the good search engines for mathematical formulas?
Here's what I found so far
approach0.xyz : offline
searchonmath.com : Gives irrelevant results such as p = m v when searching for F = m a
https://search.mathweb.org/: A collection of abandoned projects and offline sites
The encyclopedia of integer sequences can be quite useful: https://oeis.org/
There’s an awesome hard copy book of these: https://oeis.org/book.html
+1 to wolfram alpha. But just like Chegg, I thought wolfram alpha would be harshly affected by the AI disruption.
I used it a lot in college but never since. Are current college folks still using it?
sure are
theoremgraph/theoremsearch, which comes from the two papers published by the math ai lab at the university of washington.
search tool links: https://www.theoremsearch.com/ (https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05216) + tagline (Describe a result in natural language, and TheoremSearch finds it across arXiv, the Stacks Project, and more. 70% more accurate than LLM search.)
https://www.theoremsearch.com/theorem-graph (https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.25363) + tagline (A unified statement-level dependency graph spanning both informal and formal mathematics, including 11.7 million arXiv statements linked to Mathlib through a shared embedding space.)
it also exposes an MCP you can see the api and its documentation so it should work with an agent!
Perhaps not quite what you're looking for but related - I recently made this modernized Rust / WASM version of RIES, which finds algebraic equations from their solutions: https://maxwellsantoro.com/projects/ries-rs/
Slightly related: https://oeis.org
Where are the good search engines, for anything?
As the push to force users onto LLMs, search has plummeted in effectively finding relevant pages. And not just goggle.
Why isn't anyone applying LLMs to interpreting the semantic meaning of the search query, and finding pages that closely match?
If the formula generates an integer sequence, then searching that sequence on OEIS should give a lot of good information.
Wolfram Alpha
ChatGPT and family has been effective for me, even to connect equations I’m familiar with to areas I hadn’t encountered before.
Claude