# Mathematical Sciences Research Institute

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# Library: Book Catalog: Search Hints

This searches the listing of all the MSRI Library books. The data base contains author, title, publisher, year, some Math. Review data, and other information about each book. Search is not case sensitive. In a pattern | means OR (slower),  \b  matches a word "boundary". Accented characters (umlauts, etc.) are not found -- but see Patterns with Accents below for some tricks.

   pattern                finds
-------        ------------------------------------------
ring		ring rings bring string scattering Springer etc.
\bring		ring  rings  (but not: bring scattering Springer or string)
ring\b         ring  bring  string  scattering  (but not: rings or Springer)
\bring\b	ring  Ring  RING  (but not: rings  bring  etc.)
algebraic sy	algebraic systems  algebraic symbols  etc.
modu|gauss     unimodular  Gauss  gaussian etc. [NO extra spaces around  |  ]

The more complicated pattern:
    representation|lie groups|lie algebra|cohomology|deformation

today located all books (about 350) with any of representation, Lie groups, Lie algebra, cohomology, or deformation in their title or as their subject.

Notes: Some MR class descriptions (and other data) are in the data base but are not printed out. However you can use these in a search pattern (Example 5 and last Example above). A search may "mysteriously" match because of the data we do not print.

If you also enter a second pattern, the (faster) search will match only if BOTH patterns are found. For instance if the first pattern is  riemann and the second pattern is  geometry , then it will only match entries in which both  riemann  AND  geometry  occur somewhere (case insensitive always). This runs faster if the least likely pattern is placed first. Thus, riemann AND geometry runs faster than geometry AND riemann.

## Patterns with Accents

In most cases, to search for a name that has an accented character, such as Poincaré or Kähler, you can substitute an unaccented character, so Poincare or Kahler should work. Another procedure is to use only a portion of the name that does not contain any accented character; thus poincar and hler might be used for Poincaré or Kähler.

A better procedure is to substitute a "wild card" for the accented character: replace each accented character by \S*. Thus search for poincar\S* and k\S*hler This procedure will even catch versions such as Kaehler where an additional letter has been used.

## Patterns with En-dashes

Type two dashes for an en-dash, e.g., Cohen--Macaulay.

EXPERTS: these are perl patterns. You can look in the Unix man page for perl for more hints on patterns (see "Regular Expression" in the perl man page Perl Manual).