mathematics

Scholarpedia

Scholarpedia is a mathematics topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Scholarpedia rather than just read about it. In short: Scholarpedia is an English-language wiki-based online encyclopedia with features commonly associated with open-access online academic journals, which aims to have quality content in science and medicine. Scholarpedia articles are written by invited or approved expert authors and are subject to peer review.

Key takeaways

Scholarpedia belongs to mathematics; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Scholarpedia to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Scholarpedia from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Scholarpedia is an English-language wiki-based online encyclopedia with features commonly associated with open-access online academic journals, which aims to have quality content in science and medicine. Scholarpedia articles are written by invited or approved expert authors and are subject to peer review. Scholarpedia lists the real names and affiliations of all authors, curators and editors involved in an article: however, the peer review process (which can suggest changes or additions, and has to be satisfied before an article can appear) is anonymous. Scholarpedia articles are stored in an online repository, and can be cited as conventional journal articles (Scholarpedia has the ISSN number ISSN 1941-6016). Scholarpedia's citation system includes support for revision numbers. The project was created in February 2006 by Eugene M. Izhikevich while he was a researcher at the Neurosciences Institute, San Diego, California. Izhikevich serves as the encyclopedia's editor-in-chief.

Scope

Scholarpedia content is grouped into separate "encyclopedias". As of August 2023, seven of these are described as "focal areas":

Astrophysics Celestial mechanics Computational neuroscience Computational intelligence Dynamical systems Physics Touch Other encyclopedias include diverse subjects including play science and models of brain disorders. As of November 2018, Scholarpedia had 1,804 content pages and 18,149 registered users, while as of November 2021, it had 1,812 peer-reviewed articles. The article creation count in 2024 was 7.

Funding Scholarpedia's maintenance and server costs are funded by Brain Corporation, a robotics company of which Izhikevich is co-founder and CEO. Scholarpedia's Frequently Asked Questions page says that the company "benefit[s] from Scholarpedia's extensive coverage of topics in computational neuroscience".

Authorship To ensure that articles are written by experts, authors are either invited by the editor-in-chief or other curators, or selected by a public election. Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger were nominated for the article on Wikipedia. As of May 2009, the list of authors included four Fields Medalists and sixteen Nobel Prize winners. Registered users must provide their full real name, and a recognized affiliation to an academic institution. Only registered users can edit an article, and those edits are subject to approval by the curator of the article, who is typically the author. Curatorship is transferable. Users have a curator index attribute which is incremented or decremented by activities and which affects the user's capabilities on the website. After October 20, 2011, anyone can propose an article for Scholarpedia, but articles must be sponsored by Editors or Curators before the article can be published.

Copyright Articles are available online without charge for non-commercial use, but may not be copied in bulk. Authors are credited on the article page and in the suggested citation formats. In January 2008 Scholarpedia changed their licensing policy and started accepting articles under the GNU Free Documentation License and the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license, in addition to the earlier system in which the author gives a non-exclusive license directly to Scholarpedia.

Software Scholarpedia uses the same wiki engine as Wikipedia, MediaWiki, with modifications to support voting on revisions. Software development is done privately.

See also Nupedia – which had similar design to Scholarpedia Citizendium List of online encyclopedias

References

External links Scholarpedia official website

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Scholarpedia

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Scholarpedia claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In mathematics, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Scholarpedia before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Scholarpedia ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Scholarpedia

In research: Scholarpedia appears in mathematics research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Scholarpedia in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Scholarpedia is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics American online encyclopedias, Internet properties established in 2006, Mathematics websites, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Scholarpedia outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Scholarpedia in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Scholarpedia means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Scholarpedia out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Scholarpedia in simple terms?

Why does Scholarpedia matter?

Because it connects several mathematics ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Scholarpedia?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Scholarpedia.