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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Should posts sitting in the "First posts of new users" review queue be hidden from view until they have been approved?
Presently, questions from new users are shown and can be answered immediately, although they also go into a dedicated review queue (https://mathoverflow.net/review/first-posts).
Since a significant ...
Stefan KohlMod
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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 ...
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Spelling conventions
After the recent discussion on LaTeX style accents, I have been reminded of this old discussion at tea regarding the appropriate spelling convention for some German names, such as Kähler. At the time, ...
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`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 ...
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Who owns the content of MO, and why migrating a question is legal?
There is a long list of comments in Migrating a question which is already posted on the other site, and an important question is deep in that list, so I repost it here.
Where in the legal agreement, ...
user6976
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1
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Would it be appropriate to ask why a new user chose MO over MSE?
With the move to Stack Exchange 2.0, some people feel that there will be (have been?) many more first time users asking questions on MO which should instead be asked on MSE. Presumably, such a user ...
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Hard to notice links in comments
This is a conscious duplicate :D
There are at least two more questions about it (The color of links in comments, On the current color scheme, and why it sucks - by the way, when trying to share them ...
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Who decides on a community policy?
Approximately one month ago, I asked whether pronunciation questions should be allowed. The responses I received seemed to suggest that they should, albeit possibly in the form of a handful of ...
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Nominate bountied question for closure
Bountied questions cannot be closed: this prompted this meta-MO question. In the answer to that question, the reasons for this feature are explained (closure would shorten the bounty period, possibly ...
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Swinnerton-Dyer passed away?
His wiki article has been updated to say that he passed away recently. Are there any other sources confirming that? Thanks.
If it is more appropriate for another stackexchange site, please feel free ...
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Should meta be Q&A?
Should the meta-MathOverflow have the Q&A format? I don't see any rationale for this. After all, meta is just an auxiliary sub-forum which should help running the main forum. Collecting the ...
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Should I edit this question or make a new question?
Should the Grothendieck ring of varieties be K_0 of numerical motives?
I want to change it to:
1) Asking about after tensoring with $\Qb$
2) Asking if there is a map in some direction and if ...
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Repeated TeXifying of question titles
A specific user has recently edited a lot of years-old posts in which, as far as I can tell, he is just TeXifying titles. While I assume that this is being done with good intentions, it seems likely ...
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Appropriateness of intuition pump question
Before I begin, please note that I am not troubled by the votes to close of my question here, but I'm somewhat puzzled about them. The purpose of this meta thread is for someone to explain why the ...
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Would this M.SE question that has received no answers be appropriate for MO? (or could it be tweaked into being appropriate?)
https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/667830/modern-research-into-grassmans-theory-of-forms
When I first posted it on MO, it received a downvote, so I figured there might be something wrong with ...
user45695
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5
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Two tags for partially ordered sets
There are currently two tags for partially ordered sets: posets and order-theory. In my opinion, they mean the same thing. I see three posibilities.
Merge the tags.
Make them synonymous.
Keep them as ...
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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 ...
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Problematic wording of the TOS, take two
The Stack exchange terms of service have been recently changed since a sentence in them was perceived as too strict by many users.
The change was in this paragraph:
In the event that You post or ...
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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 ...
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What are our copyright policies?
Interesting questions, answers and ideas overflow everywhere in MathOverflow. Users can use them in their lectures, papers, teachings, etc. Of course it is the main propose of this free math ...
user42090
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moving questions between MO and math.SE
How does one decide if a question is good for MathOverflow or Math.StackExchange?
I've been using the criterion of being "research-level" but that can be subjective. An expert may consider a ...
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Rules for deleting one's own question
Today (2019 July 6) a new user had posted a question that received some upvotes The problem is from contest.Please flag it for removing it and I had provided an answer that didn't solve the problem.
...
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Would this question be appropriate on the main site?
I would like to ask a "big list" style question on the main site.
The question would be "How do we pronounce the names of famous mathematicians?".
Each answer would be an audio ...
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Are all terms clearly defined in Help fragments? If not, who can contribute?
I could be hypocritical and not specify the specific case that induced this question. But actually I am after a golden badge :D
Its description says this:
Ask a well-received question on 100 ...
- 16.2k
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What is the procedure to initiate merging of questions?
My previous question What to do with useful answers to questions closed as duplicates (or by some other reasons)? got an answer which satisfied me entirely: if a duplicate question has got a nice ...
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What subject specific tags could replace the tag 'divisors'?
A few names are used in different subjects in mathematics with completely distinct meanings. A couple of common examples are "spectrum" and "regular". Sometimes, this creates ...
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2
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538
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Should we start a "PolyMathOverflow" project?
Recently polymath projects seems to have stopped.
One reason for this could be that running such a project requires a lot of effort from at least one person running it.
I was thinking if it were ...
- 17.1k
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Are users pingable from questions/answers?
There is this extremely handy feature - you can ping any user participating in a comment discussion with @. In my recent question A "prequestion" about meromorphic representations of ...
- 16.2k
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1
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Why downvote on meta?
I only posted two questions on meta, both fact based and both about the way MO is supposed to work. Today, I realized that I have received three down-votes. I have a feeling about down-votes (and up-...
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Down vote without comment
I received a down vote on this question without any comment.
Can one help me to understand how this question could be improved?
I think that a moral and implicit policy of MO is that a comment ...
- 215
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Paper request(s)
Can we have a thread here where one might ask for help accessing to some papers ?
E.g. If someone has access to
https://projecteuclid.org/euclid.dmj/1077468920
Pairs of commuting matrices over a ...
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Winter Bash on MO?
I noticed that the Stackexchange sites are having a Winter Bash, and one of my friends recieved 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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1
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Cancel command in MO post
Why the \cancel command does not work in the last part of the following post:
A cohomology associated to a Riemannian manifold
I would like to strike through the last part of the ...
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Does it make sense to have both "surfaces" and "curves-and-surfaces" tags?
I have noticed that there currently exist tags surfaces (with description "A surface is a two-dimensional topological manifold. The term can also be used to describe a smooth surface, depending on the ...
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Why was this question made community wiki?
Yesterday I asked a question seeking published references studying popular games, to start building up an undergraduate research program. Today I woke up to find it had been made community wiki. Now, ...
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Is it appropriate to ask for references and point to a blog with the same question
I wonder if the community would find it appropriate if I ask a question like
"
Is this or that known? It would be interesting for this and that reason. For details see our blog "blah" where we ask ...
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The tags (transcendence) and (transcendental-number-theory)
There exist tags transcendence and transcend.-number-theory (probably shortened from transcendental number theory to fit 25 characters limit for the tag name). At the moment, the tag-info is empty ...
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Preferred Conciseness of Contributions
This is a followup question to Appropriate Reaction to a Failed Reference Request on MO related to Reference Request for Integer factorization with LP/ILP
I'm about to prepare an answer that ...
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What happens to reputation when I get merged?
A while ago I sent an email to the stackexchange team on recovering my account https://mathoverflow.net/users/21278/ben-lim. They said I should create a new account and merge it with the old one. This ...
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Why do we need the general-mathematics tag?
I recently came across the general-mathematics tag. It has no usage guidelines, nor do I think it should exist. Do any of you know the historic reasons for its existence, or think it should stay as it ...
- 3,200
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Should I rewrite my question, or create a new one
I posed this question two days ago, which effectively asks "Has X hard-to-describe special case on Barnette's Conjecture been proven?". In retrospect, I believe it was a poor question.
What I now ...
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How can I convince mathematicians that my question on Fourier transforms and singularities is very important to be solved and it is worth their time
How can I convince mathematicians that this question is very important to be solved and it is worth their time. This question has practical applications, but I don't know the right procedure/forum to ...
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Can we change the reference to "professional mathematicians" on the main page?
I'm personally quite bothered by the statement on the MathOverflow main page (when not logged in) that "MathOverflow is a question and answer site for professional mathematicians." It seems both false ...
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Change a question after counter example
This following question was motivated by this question, though many of similar nature can be found throughout MO.
The Problem: The question asks whether any bound exist on an expression, and ...
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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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How do people determine if other people's questions are research level or not?
I post a question here:
https://mathoverflow.net/questions/159016/on-convexity-of-function-in-c10-infty
(now deleted).
Obviously, those who closed it think it is too elementary.
But how do they know ...
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Migrating a question which is already posted on the other site [closed]
When a question begins by saying "This question appeared earlier on math.stackexchange.com" and links to that earlier posting, how does it make sense to migrate it to math.stackexchange.com (thereby ...
- 10.2k
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Protest for my account suspension [closed]
I posted this question about two month ago. Shortly after this, I got a moderator private message.
It says:
We've noticed that you have a pattern of engaging in lengthy discussions in comments, ...
- 1,139
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More precisely defining the scope of mathoverflow's subject matter
A few months back someone asked about the difference between questions appropriate for mathoverflow.net and those appropriate for math.stackexchange.com. And someone answered, saying something along ...
- 10.2k
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adding n cat lab tag
I propose adding n cat lab tag with an intention to discuss mathematics that is written in https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/HomePage.
As https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/HomePage has large amount of ...
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