Eric Wolfgang Weisstein (born March 18, 1969) is an American scientist, mathematician, and encyclopedist who created and maintains the encyclopedias MathWorld and ScienceWorld.
As a graduate student, Weisstein also participated in research at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
In 1996 Weisstein published his doctoral thesis titled Millimeter/Submillimeter Fourier Transform Spectroscopy of Jovian Planet Atmospheres, which was completed under faculty advisor Dewey Muhleman and in association with Eugene Serabyn, who later became a member of the Caltech Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Upon completion of his doctorate, Weisstein became a research scientist at Caltech in January 1996 and continued work in the field of submillimeter spectroscopy.
In 1995, Weisstein converted a Microsoft Word document of over 200 pages to hypertext format and uploaded it to his webspace at Caltech under the title Eric's Treasure Trove of Sciences.
MathWorld was ready to be unveiled in December 1999 with nearly 13,000 entries, most of them written by Weisstein, encompassing a variety of disciplines, including algebra, geometry, calculus, discrete mathematics, topology, number theory, statistics, and the foundations.