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.
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Merging old duplicates?
New to meta, so apologies for any breaches of etiquette.
I've just noticed that these two old questions are duplicates:
Smallest permutation representation of a finite group?
Smallest n for which G ...
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On the top-level tag ra.rings-and-algebras
I'm confused about the scope of the ra.rings-and-algebras
The problem is related to the ambiguity of the word "algebra", which essentially has two (rough) meanings
the meaning "ring&...
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What does research-level mathematics mean?
My understanding of this is that mathematics is research-level if:
you could conceivably write a paper on some aspect of it;
it could be taught in a grad-level course;
it is not widely known ...
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Undelete request, question 23943
NEVER MIND --- the same moderator who suggested I post here has solved the problem by deleting my copy-paste job and undeleting the answer we wanted undeleted. [or maybe it got undeleted by some other ...
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Should we have standing bounties?
There have been proposals to stop the bounties from expiring. On meta.SE these have been received rather badly, but would be most likely welcome here, as offering rewards for unsolved problems has a ...
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Mailing lists / Usenet groups for research math
For Category theory there is a well known and quite active research mailing list https://www.mta.ca/~cat-dist/ Do similar mailing lists or usenet groups exist for other branches of mathematics? For ...
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Some proposals for modifications of the process of closing/reopening questions
I wish to make a modest proposal on closing/reopening questions. Let me begin by noting that by far the most frequent reviews are Close votes -- almost 37,000, and looking quickly most of the close ...
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Bounty policies
When you propose a bounty, these points are immediately subtracted from your score,
and can never return, even if there is no satisfactory answer.
I think this is unfair; can someone explain the ...
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Winter Bash on MO?
I noticed that the Stack Exchange sites are having a Winter Bash, and one of my friends received a hat on MSE. Why isn't this on MO? It'll be fun to have something like that here, wouldn't it? (I ...
user62675
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Garbled MathJax in some old questions [duplicate]
In several old questions/answers I have seen in MathJax the combination \\, where it obviously should be \, and also ...
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Migration site list lacks entries
The question What is the integral of temperature over space called? obviously belongs elsewhere. Most probably the proper place is physics.SE, but in any case not here on meta, not on math.SE, and not ...
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Reference Requests: Good Ways and Bad Ways
I would like to know of types of bad examples of MathOverflow questions that are tantamount to reference requests. I can think of two:
a) A reference request for something that is properly outside ...
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Restriction on editing closed questions
Guidelines to prove that $2^{\sqrt{2}}$ is a transcendental number? question bumped into https://mathoverflow.net/ after making an edit.
I am not sure if that adds anything to the question.
Should ...
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Should we create an Erdős tag?
I was thinking about creating tags for some famous or important people, like Erdős (that already exists, as pointed out by Joonas: erdos), that could be used for questions related to their work.
...
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Area 51 Mathematics Open Community Reviews
Following the discussions in
Area 51 community peer review
and links therein, I have created the following proposal
Mathematics Open Community Reviews
hoping to get things started. The proposal ...
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Restriction on Number of edits
Book about fluid dynamics asked Apr 13 '10 edited 1 hour ago
Are there examples of conjectures supported by heuristic arguments that have been finally disproved? asked 21 hours ago edited 2 hours ...
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MathOverflow user jailed
I know this is off-topic, not even being a question.
MathOverflow user Kıvanç Ersoy has been jailed, apparently for signing a petition.
Edit: As mentioned in comments, there is a petition about ...
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Why all the negativity?
I've been on this site for several years and I appreciate the site a lot but I don't like to post here anymore because no matter what I write I get some kind of sarcastic comment, or put-down, or ...
user10290
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Happy 5th anniversary, MathOverflow!
MathOverflow first came online on September 28, 2009!
Let's celebrate five years of MO!
I bought a delicious cake from the best bakery in the area to have with dinner tonight. I'm sure you will also ...
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ChatGPT strikes MathOverflow
The user (or a bot) https://mathoverflow.net/users/496085/canvas123 appears to be posting ChatGPT-generated text on MathOverflow.
Two “answers” by this user already got accepted (!):
When is a ...
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We have our first user with more than 200K reputation!
Congratulations to Joel David Hamkins who on (I think!) the 27th November 2022, was the first MathOverflow user to pass 200k reputation! Since Joel joined on the 19th November 2009, he has supplied ...
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News of potential interest to the MO community
Occasionally, there has been a suggestion to start a meta question to collect information that might be of interest to the MO community. This is an attempt to start such a thread.
Is there any news ...
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On discussion of published papers at MO
There is an interesting discussion taking place at MO over the suitability of this question: Complex structure on $S^6$ gets published in Journ. Math. Phys. The question is about the correctness of a ...
Todd TrimbleMod
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Moderation strike update 1
As announced a little while back, MathOverflow moderators are participating in a network-wide moderation strike (currently at 121 moderators striking; see the background post for more details). The ...
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Should graduate students be encouraged to participate in MO? If so, at what stage?
When I started graduate school ten (!) years ago, a more senior Ph.D student at the time told me about MathOverflow and encouraged me to participate. Ever since then I have found it immensely useful. ...
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2022 Election results: Congratulations to our new moderator!
The election is over, the votes have been counted, and on behalf of the current team and board, I'd like to welcome David Roberts to the moderators team!
I'd like to thank Carl-Fredrik Nyberg-Brodda ...
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Restoring Bill Thurston's figures in an answer
The question Floating polyhedra with fair equilibria was answered by
Bill Thurston, but his (typically amazing) answer contains links to 7 figures,
all now broken. I don't know how to retrieve those ...
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How to cite comment by unknown user disproving Erdős conjecture?
I believe that fedja has disproved a conjecture of Erdős et al. when commenting on my question Almost monochromatic point sets, but I'm unable to contact fedja regarding this. What shall I do? Shall I ...
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An interactive graph of MathOverflow tags
I created a graph of tags from Stack Exchange sites (including MathOverflow), TagOverflow.
It is a continuation on my previous project - plots with static graphs and (sadly) without MO (due to API ...
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Catering to professional appearance a bit much?
[In case of hurry, please scroll down to the suggestions at the very end.]
The deletion of the Math Jokes thread (mirrors: html or pdf), most likely provoked by the meta.MO debate about some specific ...
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Deleting others' work
Recently a question was posted on MathOverflow, which received (I think) more than an average number of upvotes. There was an answer to the question, by someone other than the OP. Next day, the ...
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Grothendieck's passing
I think it would be a healing ritual
for the MO community for someone of appropriate stature (which excludes me)
posting an inviting cwiki question that elicits responses from the users
to this ...
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Discreet editing
After I edited someone's Question or Answer, it feels real awkward to see my name mentioned in front of the author of the respective Q. or A. I feel that instead of displaying editor's name there ...
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How is it off-topic to ask whether the normalization of a local complete intersection is Gorenstein?
This question (which I did not ask) is whether the normalization of a local complete intersection domain is Gorenstein. Why was this closed as "off-topic"? Especially when this one, which asks ...
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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 ...
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Easy research-related questions, and closure reasons again
I am a bit confused by the close reason for https://mathoverflow.net/questions/154235/minimum-l1-norm-may-not-obtain-the-sparsest-solution?noredirect=1#comment395410_154235.
It is an easy question ...
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Moderation strike update 4
This update is to point to two posts by the company on the platform-wide meta site, Meta Stack Exchange.
The post (Historical) Policy on the use of GPT Generators is a copy of the private policy on ...
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Moderation strike update 5 : the results of negotiations
The negotiations over the strike have ended with agreement addressing all the issues raised by the striking moderators. The post on meta.StackExchange was vetted and agreed to by both sets of ...
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Can I see who voted for what after I die?
I would like to know who has up- and (most importantly!) downvoted my questions. Will I find out after I die? What do different religions/beliefs say about this? I would happily convert to see the ...
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How does one cite a MO post with an anonymous author?
I asked the question "Averaging $2^{\omega(n)}$ over a region" because this is a necessary step in a research paper I am writing. The answer is detailed and does exactly what I need, and it would be ...
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2013 Election Results
The election process is over, and now it is time to declare the winners:
Good luck in the new position, I'm sure that you'll prove to be a great addition to the community and its moderators!
On ...
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Moderation strike update 3
There was a lull in the negotiations, for various innocuous reasons that are not relevant. But on 20th July 2023, the following update was posted to Discord by negotiator Mithical, and reposted at the ...
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When asking a question on MO it seems there's far too little information on what MO is about
When we switched from the old format to the MSE 2.0 format, almost all the information about what MO is about, and what is expected from a good question was been stripped from the site. I mean, one ...
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Do your own homework
Occasionally, we get questions on main taken from old contests, such as Olympiads and Putnam exams. These questions are inappropriate for MO, and they get closed, which is as it should be. However, ...
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Site updates are live
A majority of the changes are not be visible; these tweaks go along with recent updates that were made to Stack Overflow:
We have updated the site's CSS to a newly refactored LESS system, so that it'...
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Drastic locking of the question "Examples of common false beliefs in mathematics"
The question Examples of common false beliefs in mathematics, was one of the best and most successful questions in the history of MO. When we discussed closing it, it was argued that after 164 answers ...
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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 ...
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MO policy regarding pseudonyms that are other people's real name
I have noticed just now that a user has chosen as pseudonym "Alexander Grothendieck", which I'm a bit unconfortable with (the probability that it is also that user's name is extremely low, hence my ...
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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 ...
Tim CampionMod
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Request from PRIMES to keep an eye out for their problems
On m.SE last year there was a problem with someone cheating on the entrance problem set for the PRIMES high school research program at MIT. Selection for PRIMES for this year has begun, and they're ...
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