To celebrate Christopher Zeeman’s 90th birthday and their own 150th, the London Mathematical Society have opened an online archive of Sir Christopher’s work.

That’s all they’ve done – the Zeeman Archive, as far as I can see, is a simple list of every document they’ve got, linking to PDF scans. It’s searchable, by title, medium, and date. I’d like a bit more presentation and information to put stuff in context.

Disconcertingly, a few of the papers have the scary JSTOR licence page at the front. I assume the LMS has cleared their redistribution with JSTOR, but you’d think they’d arrange at least a customised cover page.

Anyway, making stuff available for free and easy to access is always a good thing — at least they haven’t gone for one of those awful museum archive systems that puts all sorts of barriers between you and the content.

I’m not particularly familiar with Zeeman’s work so I just went for a browse. There’s a fun note called “Unknotting spheres in five dimensions”, and the famous Royal Institution Christmas Lectures are all there (well, there’s a link to the corresponding pages on the Ri Channel). The photos and letters categories are currently empty; maybe someone is working away at gathering them.

Have a dig around: The Zeeman Archive at the LMS