Timeline for Elementary questions
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
26 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aug 5, 2014 at 11:45 | answer | added | Benoît Kloeckner | timeline score: 14 | |
| Aug 5, 2014 at 9:43 | comment | added | Tobias Kildetoft | This is why I was so quick to correct the phrase "beginning graduate level" to "advanced graduate level". Even if neither is very precise, they are also not completely arbitrary, since if you are about to ask a question like the one above and it says "beginning graduate level", you will probably not hesitate. If it says "advanced graduate level" there is a good reason you will hesitate a bit and then hopefully decide that it is probably not a good fit here. | |
| Aug 5, 2014 at 9:41 | comment | added | Tobias Kildetoft | To me it is very important that we are very careful when we close questions in the gray area, but we also need to make sure that the gray area does not move too far down (if the description for example said beginning graduate level, then it would be hard to argue that a question along the lines of "why is Hausdorff equivalent to the diagonal being closed" should be closed, since this is precisely the sort of exercise people would often come across in their first course on topology, which is again in many places a graduate level course). | |
| Aug 5, 2014 at 9:38 | comment | added | Tobias Kildetoft | @YemonChoi I completely agree that the term is not the best. By "first graduate course" I mean precisely the very first course someone takes at the graduate level (whether a specific course is graduate or undergraduate level is usually very clear, it just varies a lot between universities which courses are placed where). Whatever phrase is used to describe the level, it will result in questions that pretty much everybody agrees are on-topic, ditto for off-topic, and a gray area where people are less in agreement. (cont) | |
| Aug 5, 2014 at 2:52 | comment | added | Yemon Choi | My unease with "graduate level" is that it shunts emphasis onto the level of the jargon in the question, rather than how much thought and initiative has been displayed in asking the question. A question on the lines of "I'm an additive number theorist wondering if there is some form of Plancherel theorem for compact groups" is better in my eyes than "please help me understand the proof of Lemma 3.41 in this book on strawberry-flavoured Chow groups of vibranium stacks over Wakandan tori" | |
| Aug 5, 2014 at 2:37 | comment | added | Yemon Choi | @TobiasKildetoft What do you mean by "graduate level", and why do you think "first graduate course" makes universal sense? I recall an MO question where everyone was incredulous at a poster who did not know of Smith normal form, yet the poster knows more (I'll wager) about nuclear Cstar algebras than all the people who piled on to close. | |
| Aug 4, 2014 at 18:52 | comment | added | Tobias Kildetoft | However little precision there is behind either of those two terms, they do suggest very different levels of questions. Especially, they provide very different lower limits for which questions are definitely off-topic, and a change like that would in fact put questions formerly clearly off-topic into clearly on-topic (anything encountered by any student in their very first graduate course would suddenly become on-topic). | |
| Aug 4, 2014 at 18:50 | comment | added | Tobias Kildetoft | @TomLeinster I agree that the phrase does not have any precise meaning. But since the site is actually meant for professional mathematicians and questions at the advanced graduate level are "allowed" to encourage more participation from people who might later go on to be "full" contributors (at least I seem to recall a phrasing like that from somewhere, not sure where), I feel that it is important that "advanced graduate level" does not become replaced by "beginning graduate level". (cont.) | |
| Aug 3, 2014 at 19:50 | comment | added | Tom Leinster | @Tobias I'm regularly amazed (and dismayed) by the over-precise meaning some people attach to the phrase "graduate level". The level of knowledge of graduate students is wildly variable within individual departments, let alone countries, let alone the world. And, of course, it depends enormously on the student's interests (as Yemon says). To go even further and talk about "advanced" graduate level... I don't see how it could begin to be meaningful. The cynical side of me suspects that some people (not necessarily you!) simply use "graduate level" to mean "what I knew as a grad student". | |
| Aug 2, 2014 at 19:53 | comment | added | Karl Schwede | @Donu My impression is that a few years ago the projection question would have been appropriate, the standards of mathoverflow tend to creep upwards though. | |
| Aug 2, 2014 at 13:20 | comment | added | Yemon Choi | @FelipeVoloch while I agree overall with your comment and those above, I am a little uncomfortable: wasn't one of the original roles of MO to be a place where researchers could ask questions that they suspected would be well-known or straightforward to specialists in other areas? We don't all have "grad school" backgrounds and we don't all have people on our corridors who know about character theory, structure of semisimple Lie groups, etc. Functional analysts may not know "basic" results of geometric group theory, and vice versa | |
| Aug 2, 2014 at 1:36 | comment | added | Felipe Voloch | The point of MO is that highly technical questions may be only answerable by relatively few people and having these questions online allows for a better chance that an expert can answer them. An interesting question at the beginning graduate level that is not suitable for MO and perhaps too hard for most MSE users is the kind of question you can probably find someone in your math department (assuming you are at a university) to answer. | |
| Aug 1, 2014 at 16:54 | comment | added | Tobias Kildetoft | @donu Advanced graduate level, not beginning. | |
| Aug 1, 2014 at 16:13 | comment | added | Wesley Barnard | Maybe MSE should have a partition like: highschool/undergraduate/graduate. In this way the help given by everyone could be optimized with no waste of time. Again, this is just a thought offered to people already doing a nice "job". | |
| Aug 1, 2014 at 15:41 | comment | added | Donu Arapura | I had the impression that beginning graduate level questions were OK for MO, and it seems to me that projection question meets that standard. Have things changed? (Regarding MSE, I have nothing against it, but I personally don't want to spread myself any thinner.) | |
| Aug 1, 2014 at 14:37 | comment | added | Todd Trimble Mod | Wesley, my impression is that the level of MSE is generally sufficient for handling questions at the level of your projection question. There are plenty of reasonably high-powered mathematicians who visit the site; someone like Matt Emerton would surely have been capable of answering your question -- you had some bad luck getting the appropriate attention. My guess is that the real problem is that the volume of questions there is just too high, and many questions wind up slipping through the cracks. | |
| Aug 1, 2014 at 11:24 | comment | added | Wesley Barnard | I opened this discussion here just to say I see a problem: there is a huge gap between textbooks and research papers and between M.SE and MO. Those who swim in between get sometimes lost. Since the community behind the sites is really great and showed devotion and care, I would think that some feedback about the user's need may be interesting. Maybe I represent many others and maybe not... Again, thank you for your time and for everything you do for other people looking for help. | |
| Aug 1, 2014 at 11:18 | comment | added | Wesley Barnard | I know there is no law about answering math questions, nor for being kind. I am well aware of this. I was just wondering why people should waste time giving bad comments and voting against a question instead of answering or ignoring it. When a young student asks me something I usually answer and if I have no time (or will) to answer I give them a hint or a reference. This being said, I understand the rules and I appreciate every single word aimed at helping me or showing sympathy. | |
| Aug 1, 2014 at 1:01 | comment | added | Todd Trimble Mod | Well, I guess I'll go ahead. Wesley has asked two questions at MSE. The most recent is math.stackexchange.com/questions/883801/…, and back in May he asked this: math.stackexchange.com/questions/804083/…. Anyone feel like lending a hand? | |
| Aug 1, 2014 at 0:47 | comment | added | Eric Wofsey | This is an example of a very general phenomenon in life where it would seem harmless or even beneficial to bend some rule in any individual case, but it is nevertheless important to follow the rule because there would be serious problems if everyone always bent it. | |
| Aug 1, 2014 at 0:46 | comment | added | Eric Wofsey | I, for one, am very sympathetic to the point of view expressed in this question. Even if a question may be off-topic on this site, basic human kindness does suggest that people should provide some help if it would take a minimal amount of effort to do so. Nevertheless, we discourage people from doing so for the reason that Todd mentioned in his first comment: if we always answered off-topic questions, then MO would be flooded with them and it would be substantially harder for MO to serve its actual purpose of answering research-level questions. | |
| Jul 31, 2014 at 23:35 | comment | added | Gerry Myerson | You know, Wesley, there's no law guaranteeing everyone an answer to every math question, much less a free answer. Instead of criticizing MO and m.se for not being what you want them to be, be grateful for what the two sites accomplish, and, if you can't get what you want for free, hire a mathematical consultant to answer your questions for you. | |
| Jul 31, 2014 at 22:58 | comment | added | Todd Trimble Mod | Sometimes people who don't get a good reception at MSE go ahead and post at MO, linking each question to the other and explaining that no one answered satisfactorily. Of course just because it's not answered there doesn't mean it's appropriate here, but often such an action elicits someone at MO to go there and set things right. Alternatively and maybe better: if there's a question you posted there that's bugging you now (and prompted the writing of this post), link to it now. You can ask whether it would be legitimate to ask at MO, and anyway someone reading this might go there and help. | |
| Jul 31, 2014 at 22:39 | comment | added | Wesley Barnard | Never got a useful answer there. Sometimes it is a wrong answer, sometimes it is just something I already know and sometimes I only get comments of people who would like an answer to my question as well. I understand your point. Maybe it would be good if some MO users would help with MSE as well; I know someone does but still it looks to me there is a considerable gap between the level of the two sites. | |
| Jul 31, 2014 at 22:32 | comment | added | Todd Trimble Mod | Sometimes people do answer such elementary questions, usually in comments. But many users don't want to encourage the asking of such questions by offering quick answers, because of the potential for opening the floodgates and have the site be overrun by elementary questions. This would certainly turn away a large number of valued users who don't want that. There's Mathematics.StackExchange for the more elementary questions. What's wrong with using that? | |
| Jul 31, 2014 at 21:34 | history | asked | Wesley Barnard | CC BY-SA 3.0 |