Questions tagged [discussion]
The question you're asking is designed to solicit opinions or best-practices on a particular topic, with the goal of reaching community consensus.
1,016
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(When) are “career advice” questions on-topic here? If and when such a question is on-topic, what to keep in mind in answering such a question?
We have a tag career and a tag advice. We don't have a flood of questions under these tags, but for several reasons I think it would also be appropriate for us to have a bit more guidance on meta ...
2
votes
1answer
75 views
How are hot meta posts decided?
I'm curious about the exact mechanisms behind the 'hot meta posts' blurb on the right hand side of the main/meta page.
I have been monitoring it for the past few days to see if my recent question ...
8
votes
1answer
216 views
Proposing a change to the close-vote interface
The feature request in this post is at the bottom; I will first highlight why I think it should be implemented. Currently, when I go to close-vote a question I see the following pop-up menu:
If I ...
32
votes
1answer
488 views
2021 Community Moderator Election Results
MathOverflow's second moderator election has come to a close, the votes have been tallied, and the three new moderators are:
They'll be joining the existing crew shortly — please thank them for ...
3
votes
1answer
139 views
How could I compute my “candidate score”?
I have noticed that, during elections for moderators, the candidates are awarded a "candidate score", computed from their activity on MO.
Is its algorithm public, so that I be able to ...
6
votes
1answer
212 views
Migration of a detailed answer on MathOverflow Meta to Math.SE
Upon reading Professor Hamkins' detailed answer to this recent Question about $i$ versus $-i$ here on MathOverflow Meta, and his accommodating comments:
Oh, I see now that this was a meta question,...
8
votes
2answers
331 views
What are the exact mechanics of the vote for MO moderators?
The election for moderators is currently going on. Three new moderators will be elected.
On the election page you are allowed to rank your choices of the candidates. It is a little unclear whether you ...
11
votes
3answers
398 views
Moderator Elections: bug reporting for new voting UI
As we announced a few weeks ago, there is a new user interface for voting in moderator elections. Math Overflow will be the first Stack Exchange community to use the new UI when voting for your ...
16
votes
3answers
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Question about $i$ versus $-i$
I vaguely recall that some years ago, there was an MO question about how to distinguish between the complex numbers $i$ and $-i$, and in what sense this might be meaningful.
I also recall that I ...
11
votes
0answers
397 views
What do moderators do these days?
More than 7 years ago, Scott Morrison asked a great meta question: What do moderators do?, and recorded some useful answers. Some seem to be of general significance, but many of the answers were ...
8
votes
1answer
345 views
Reason for the 2021 moderator election
There are three possible reasons for having the moderators election this year (with 3 positions to fill):
3 moderators from the current team have decided to step down (for reasons that I consider ...
16
votes
8answers
3k views
2021 Moderator Election Q&A - Questionnaire
In connection with the moderator elections, we are holding a Q&A thread for the candidates. Questions collected from an earlier thread have been compiled into this one, which shall now serve as ...
7
votes
0answers
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2021 Community Moderator Election
The 2021 Community Moderator Election is now underway!
Community moderator elections have three phases:
Nomination phase
Primary phase
Election phase
Most elections take between two and three weeks, ...
9
votes
4answers
436 views
How acceptable is prosemirror-math as an editor style for this site?
This is a follow-up to one of the possible answers to the recently-announced changes to the editor.
Prosemirror-math is a math editing framework that allows for direct editing of a rich-text preview. ...
5
votes
0answers
149 views
Remove [tag:slick-proof] or make it a synonym of [tag:alternative-proof]
@YCor made a suggestion in an answer to another post (What is the intended use of the (proofs) tag?) a bit over a year ago. It received several upvotes, but does not appear to have been acted upon. ...
27
votes
2answers
529 views
Would newly elected moderators join the board of MathOverflow Inc.?
MathOverflow is a bit different from most of the sites in the network in that it is not operated only by Stack Exchange, but it "belongs" also to the nonprofit MathOverflow corporation.
If I ...
7
votes
0answers
259 views
`positive-characteristic` and `characteristic-p` are synonyms
I thought that tag synonyms were meant simply to be proposed and left to survive or die on their own, but I see another question in HNQ about tag synonyms, so maybe one is supposed to raise a ...
22
votes
13answers
2k views
2021 Moderator election: suggestions for nominees?
As you may have seen, the nominations for the 2021 moderator election will be open on March 29. Per StackExchange rules, MO users are expected to nominate themselves for the election. For some ...
15
votes
11answers
1k views
2021 Moderator Election Q&A - Question Collection
The purpose of this thread was to collect questions for the questionnaire. The questionnaire is now live, and you may find it here.
MathOverflow is scheduled for an election next week, 29 March, 2021....
4
votes
1answer
177 views
Should [tag:feynman-integral] be a synonym of [tag:path-integral]?
The question is in the title: I see no benefit from having these two tags for essentially the same concept (particularly as the path-integral wiki excerpt refers to the path integral formulation of ...
1
vote
1answer
77 views
What about bountying a meta question?
While I do agree in principle that anything meta should not have anything to do with reputation changes, there might still be cases when one would like to stimulate more activity with some difficult ...
0
votes
0answers
218 views
Discouraging (Some) Upvotes
I'm tagging this as "discussion", not as a feature request, because I am quite agnostic about whether it's a good idea.
That said: My subjective impression is that lately a lot of very bad/...
7
votes
1answer
656 views
Why do many experts on MathOverflow mention their full names on their profiles?
Sometimes I click on the users accounts on both MSE and Math Overflow sites. I noticed there are many users on MSE, prefer to be anonymous unless on the other site. and noticed there are many ...
8
votes
1answer
423 views
Reviving questions from the PROMYS application?
This elaborates on a comment I made on David Speyer's meta post.
Someone posted at least one problem from this year's PROMYS application on MO--without labeling it as such, of course. One concerned ...
5
votes
2answers
175 views
Tag [upper-bounds] is nowhere to be found
At the moment, MathOverflow has tag lower-bounds (100 questions), but no tag upper-bounds. Are lower bounds that much harder to compute? Or that much more interesting?
Worse, due to the non-existence ...
-1
votes
1answer
116 views
A fuller story of up/down-voting
MO-participants should appreciate the difference between information about +1 vote and +4 vs -3 votes. This is especially the case of closed questions.
I hope that MO will implement the more ...
6
votes
1answer
298 views
How should [applications] be applied?
Is tag applications for
applications of mathematics to mathematics itself?
applications of mathematics to other fields?
applications of mathematics to any field?
job applications? (e.g., ...
9
votes
0answers
501 views
Rationale for reputation change on “my” reputation page that says 'User was removed'
At MathOverflow > Help center > Reputation & Moderation I see the following:
[...] a user who voted for one of your posts had their account deleted (either by request or due to violating ...
23
votes
0answers
811 views
Request to keep an eye out for PROMYS admissions problems
Many of you may be familiar with PROMYS, a camp based out of Boston University which teaches number theory to high school students each summer. Students applying to the program are asked to submit ...
15
votes
1answer
505 views
What does the graph of MO questions-and-links look like?
Consider the graph $G$ whose vertices are MO questions and edges are links between the questions. What does $G$ look like?
I'm happy to define a "link" in the same way the SE software seems ...
26
votes
4answers
587 views
Which Latex / MathJax features do we need or want to have supported on the site?
As we've started discussing, Stack Exchange is planning to redo the editor for all questions and answers across all their sites. As articulated by Emilio Pisanty, these changes will have significant ...
49
votes
2answers
1k views
Nudge: the new Stacks editor has significant implications for this site
You have probably seen already a link, on the Featured on Meta sidebar, to an announcement of an upcoming upgrade to the text editor on Stack Exchange, Opt-in alpha test for a new Stacks editor. As a ...
34
votes
6answers
2k views
How can we attract more grad students?
To quote an answer to a recent meta.MO question:
Here are some examples of people we would like the site to be
welcoming to:
Prominent mathematicians who are less "online" than the typical ...
35
votes
3answers
1k views
Answers in comments are increasingly more common
I have checked a random sample of questions in the main page, and it seems that almost every one of them has some form of answer in the comments, apart from completely unanswered/untouched ones.
This ...
7
votes
0answers
272 views
2020: a year in moderation
As we say goodbye to the old year and welcome the new one, we have a tradition of sharing moderation stats for the past 12 months.
As most of you here are aware, sites on the Stack Exchange network ...
8
votes
2answers
666 views
Do we use the downvote button more than other sites?
Is there data available (besides crawling thousands of questions) on how often we use the downvote button, and how quickly?
The motivation for this question is Carlo Beenakker's recent answer on MOM.
...
10
votes
9answers
2k views
What do we mean by welcoming when we're a site aimed at researchers?
I was just browsing the main page this morning, and I decided to look at some of the posts by new people. One of the questions had garnered three votes to close and a comment from a regular user to ...
14
votes
3answers
853 views
Scope and mission of MathOverflow
I followed with much interest the recent discussions on Meta about the community being perceived as unwelcoming to outsiders and the importance of looking for solutions (if any).
In order to do this, ...
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votes
1answer
492 views
A radical proposal on votes and reputation
I was trying to explain the current controversy how “welcoming” MO is to a non-mathematician friend. The current best hypothesis for why MO is either attractive or repellent in general is that it has ...
17
votes
5answers
2k views
MathOverflow policymaking and transparency
There goeth rumours abroad that some off-site groups are seeking a private forum together with the moderators here in order to make policy for MO.
I hope that the moderators will commit to ...
21
votes
4answers
592 views
Customize the modal window for the first-time askers
When a user asks their very first question on a Stack Exchange site, they are shown a modal window with a short advice. The content can be either a generic message or it can be customized for a ...
5
votes
1answer
277 views
Once a thread is deleted, is it really too late to bring it back?
I was under the impression that "deleted" threads were still visible by moderators or other high-level members of the community. Is this correct? If a post was deleted that shouldn't have ...
1
vote
0answers
78 views
Appropriateness and cross-posting
I am interested in this question on math.stackexchange. To me it is interesting because while it looks "obvious" that there isn't a solution with 6 turns (I have some very partial results ...
0
votes
2answers
205 views
A question of notation: what does $x\lt y\in S$ mean? [closed]
I've seen expressions like $x\lt y\in S$ used on this site to mean "$x\lt y$ and $x\in S$ and $y\in S$." This has me worried because I sometimes use $x\lt y\in S$ to abbreviate "$x\lt y$...
26
votes
3answers
2k views
What are our procedures if a user complains about harassment or abuse?
Context for this question: I am writing an article on MathOverflow for the Notices of the AMS. One thing I try to address is the apparent gender skew of our website. One of the readers of my draft ...
0
votes
0answers
78 views
Can I ask for advice or opinions about the choice of a variant of a theory?
Basically, I have 2 versions of a theory. This is like having two competing theories of complex numbers, one where $i^2=-1$ and the other where $j^2=1$ (hyperbolic numbers) or extending reals with $+\...
8
votes
5answers
259 views
Is it possible to temporarily comment out part of a post?
Scenario (true story): after posting something I became doubtful about certain claim there,
so I want to hide it until I clarify my doubts.
Of course I could just move that part to a temporary file, ...
12
votes
1answer
245 views
Should we have a tag for second-order logic?
There are a number of questions on this site about second-order logic (admittedly I may have asked a few more of them than is reasonable). For example, searching "second-order logic" (in ...
11
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0answers
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Utility of Mathematics: Is this question appropriate here, and if not/if so, how can I phrase it better?
I would like to know if this question is appropriate for Math Overflow, and if so, how I can phrase it better to get the best results.
Question:
I recently spoke with a very nice mathematician who ...
4
votes
0answers
334 views
Question on topic for Mathoverflow?
My question, asked months ago, was well received. Now...
I'm wondering if this question is on-topic for MathOverflow:
Consider a semi-Riemannian manifold $\zeta^{2,2}$ with metric, $g=\frac{dxdy}{xy}+...
