Undergrad Reflections on Relativity web pages broken at mathpages.com

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SUMMARY

The forum discussion centers on the broken links at mathpages.com, attributed to a failed data restoration attempt. Users speculate that the website's owner, Kevin Brown, may not have executed the updates correctly, resulting in local file paths appearing in the URLs. A recent update on Amazon indicates that the second edition of the author's work was released on July 5, 2023, suggesting the author is still active. As of the latest posts, it appears that the website issues have been resolved, with all pages and navigation functioning correctly.

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m4r35n357
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see https://www.mathpages.com/rr/rrtoc.htm

Hovering over the links within reveals what looks like a failed data restoration (just hover over one to see) - other pages seem unaffected.

Is anyone here capable of contacting the site operators?
 
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The owner of that website is well known for preserving his/her anonymity.
 
Yes. However, at some point the author will no longer care about anonymity!

I am guessing from the path details that the person doing the restoration is not the author.
 
Yes, I know all this; my original question stands. If you are unwilling or unable to answer it please leave it to someone else.

The author is not immortal, and I have no idea whether he is even still alive.
 
m4r35n357 said:
Yes, I know all this; my original question stands. If you are unwilling or unable to answer it please leave it to someone else.

The author is not immortal, and I have no idea whether he is even still alive.
1) the author obviously owns the website
2) the second edition came out on 5 July on Amazon. I doubt that he has died in the last week and a half

Now I am done.
 
Well I can at least thank you for that news! Unfortunately I cannot decide whether to buy the new version (my old paperback is disintegrating) as there is no information on what has been updated, and no online version to check for myself.

Perhaps the author attempted to update the online text and messed up . . . ?

Incidentally, a typical link now looks like: https://www.mathpages.com/Kevin/Documents/Kevin Restore/My Documents/mathpages/rr/preface/preface.htm which is obviously a local file or backup path. I was partly suspicious (that it was done by someone else) because I would not put my own name in my backup path! Doing so gives me the impression that the files are located on a shared computer (so probably not the author's).
 
Last edited:
Last edited:
Frabjous said:
The owner of that website is well known for preserving his/her anonymity.
Well he is not trying very hard (unless of course the following is incorrect):
Code:
$ whois mathpages.com
...
Admin Name: Brown, Kevin
Admin Email: ksbrown@comcast.net
...
 
  • #10
Ok, I am confused - every page and navigation I tried works fine.
 
  • #11
PAllen said:
Ok, I am confused - every page and navigation I tried works fine.
Yeah, looks like it's been fixed some time in the last fortnight.
 

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