What is MP?
The Multi Protocol (MP) aims to provide
efficient communication of mathematical data among
scientific computing systems.
Initial deliberations on Multi started in the late 1980's at Kent
and involved Peter Hintenaus, Michael Rothstein, Paul Wang, and
several graduate students.
Significant progress on the design and implementation of MP
began in 1990 as a result of joint work with N. Kajler and S. Gray.
The initial design of the Multi Protocol was done in 1992.
The first achievement
of this research was to provide an unambiguous protocol for the
efficient exchange of mathematical expressions between
scientifically-oriented packages.
The current Multi library is implemented in ANSI standard C.
See MP Homepage for more
information on MP.
Machine-readable Mathematical Results in MP
We are testing the sending and receiving of mathematical data,
encoded in the MP format, on the Web.
MP encoded files use the .mp file suffix and the
application/x-math-mp MIME content-type designation.
On the Web browser end, you need to set up the .mime.types and the
.mailcap files in your home directory. Here are suggested
settings:
Entry in .mime.types:
application/x-math-mp mp
Entry in .mailcap
application/x-math-mp; displaymp -infix %s
The .mailcap entry also enables you to receive email containing
MP encoded mathematical data. Use any MIME-compliant mailer
such as elm or mailto, to send/receive MP-encoded data.
With elm, a line in the form:
[include filename.mp application/x-math-mp base64]
includes the .mp data file in a mail message.
MP Displayer
You also need the displaymp program.
which provide the ability to view the retrieved MP data.
The displaymp can display in infix, prefix, and
latex formats. But the program does not handle all types of MP
data or annotations yet. Improvements are on the way.
Experimental executable versions of displaymp are available for UNIX
systems:
Send mail to pwang@cs.kent.edu,
sgray@ashland.edu, or kajler@paris.ensmp.fr
if you are interested in setting
up these programs to perform some tests or to investigate
producing .mp files on your Web site.
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