# All Questions

1,706 questions
Filter by
Sorted by
Tagged with
570 views

### MathOverflow conferences

What would the appropriate initial steps be to host a MathOverflow conference? Back in 2019 I hosted a party for the 10th anniversary of MathOverflow, and it was a blast.$^*$ Since then I've ...
93 views

### Which questions should be tagged “reference-request”?

The reference-request tag is currently described as: “this tag is used if a reference is needed in a paper or textbook on a specific result.” I have found current ...
65 views

### Edit history lost on migration

According to a comment, @Marco's answer to Notation about n choose k permutations was edited before migration. However, nothing displays in the edit history. (This seems appropriate to ask here since ...
12k views

### Requests for reopen and undelete votes for closed and deleted questions

Since I expect this may prove rather useful, I'm blatantly purloining Asaf's question from meta.math.se. Please post general requests for reopen votes as answers below. Beware that "short" ...
881 views

### Nominating other community members

Is there no mechanism to suggest other community members for nomination? If I remember correctly, last election there was some mechanism in place to suggest community members other than ourselves who ...
118 views

### Weird site URLs

If I go to MathOverflow from another SE site by clicking on the link in “Your Communities” under the right-most menu on the top-bar, I do not end up with the usual ...
504 views

### Why my nomination for 2022 Community Moderator Election withdrawn without convincing reason?

I was honored to participate in the elections for moderation in MO 2022 , but I am sorry to say that my candidacy was withdrawn today without any convincing reason, frankly, I did not find it ...
158 views

### Why was my question on a simple example illustrating the usefulness of HoTT closed?

Why was a simple, short and straightforward question asking for a simple illustrative example of the usefulness of HoTT closed?
188 views

### Can I ask this question on Math Overflow? (Advice on how to get started)

I am thinking of applying for a maths PhD programme. I have more or less an idea of the subfield I'd like to research, but not much more than that. I'm looking for suggestions on how to properly ...
828 views

### 2022 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, 2022-09-19. In ...
1k views

### Examples of mathematical exposition arising from MO answers

I could imagine that several very long Mathoverflow answers have eventually turned into expository papers. For example, I have posted this (unpublished) expository paper on the arxiv about various ...
319 views

### 2022 Community Moderator Election

The 2022 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, ...
130 views

### Why did my question about Fibonacci Sequence get closed in spite of having 10 more upvotes than downvotes? Don't upvotes mean it is on-topic?

Why did my question about Fibonacci Sequence get closed in spite of having 10 more upvotes than downvotes? Don't those upvotes mean the vast majority of users think that question is on-topic?
155 views

### What is wrong with this question on PDEs

So I asked this question today: Has anyone studied the PDE generalization of Teichmuller Space? If I could criticize it probably is too general of a question and would benefit from restricted scope (...
179 views

### Should we allow link-only answers that point to stable, well known and respectable sites?

I have just been presented with an answer in the VLQ queue that consisted essentially in a link to a preprint on arXiv. The user having posted it is a high reputation user, so he definitely knows the ...
200 views

### Partial answer accepted, thinking it could have been easily extended and provided enough insights

Some days ago I posted a question and I accepted an answer, "although it’s only a very partial answer," as the answer author wrote in a comment. I accepted it because I thought that it ...
647 views

### Triangle commutative diagram does not work here at MO

I frequently tried to draw a triangle commutative diagram similar to the definition of projective modules for this question. A module associated to an endomorphism of a vector bundle so I ...
142 views

### Asking if a post about a mathematical characterization of gravitational geons can be potentially interesting for the main site MathOverflow

I would like to ask about if a question about the following subject can be potentially interesting and on topic on MathOverflow. I would like to ask on the main site of MathOverflow about the ...
766 views

### What is the deal with changes to the front page?

It appears that today Stack Exchange has changed the appearance of the MathOverflow front page. It now looks more similar to Stack Overflow. The most noticeable change is that the counts of answers, ...
1 vote
78 views

803 views

### Should moderators in some cases remove a question from the network-wide hot questions list?

Not too long ago - in March 2019 - some changes have been made to the Hot Network Questions (HNQ). Some of the new features are the limit on the number of hot questions from a single site, or limit on ...
214 views

### Is there a way to @ exactly one of two users whose names differ, if at all, only by whitespace?

I recently approved an edit to Zeroes of characters of general linear group induced from certain characters of parabolic subgroups by user @math seeker. I approved the edit, which was otherwise ...
139 views

### When, precisely, should history of math questions be CW?

I don't have much experience with "history of math" questions or the ho.history-overview tag. I tried to distill an answer to my question from looking at existing questions, but failed to ...
18k views

### Best of MathOverflow, or papers inspired by MathOverflow

This is a place to collect MathOverflow success stories! Was some of your research inspired by something on MathOverflow? Do you know questions & answers that led to interesting research? ...
196 views

### Reputation number not visible on main page

This is a very minor bug, but the reputation number seems not to be visible on the main site: Interestingly, it is visible in meta:
328 views

### What about talking about life? How to work, manage, organize, and so forth?

My question comes from a general an recurrent observation on MO (and more generally in the real academic life): doing research (in mathematics) is a whole ecosystem, full of different tasks and ...
66 views

### Occasionally reproducible bug with macro definitions in a draft post affecting macro use in comments

In the course of a discussion involving using MathJax to re-define macros, I couldn't recall if MathJax obeys a \newcommand for an already-defined macro, and so ...
1k views

### Formatting Sandbox

The purpose of this thread is to enable people to check if their formatting works and to play around with their MathJax code. Quoting from Bill Dubuque's Formatting Sandbox on meta.math.SE: To use ...
194 views

How do I add a link to an external published article in a comment? I don't see the edit frame with the link button. What is the syntax I can use? (I did search Meta but did not see ...!)
824 views

### Hiding reputation

In MathOverflow 1.0 we had the ability to hide other users' reputations. Can we get that again? (Also, I had to rewrite this question several times to get past an annoying box that said my question ...
133 views

### Planar geometry on MO

"Planar geometry" here is 2-dimensional Euclidean geometry, usually used as Olympiad geometry problem, its objects just be a bunch of lines and circles, it has no Combinatoric aspect and not ...
338 views

### To which extent should spam posts on meta be considered a problem?

MathOverflow is one of the few sites in the Stack Exchange network where users with reputation 1 can post on meta.1 Clearly, this has some advantages2 and some disadvantages. Probably one of the ...
314 views

### Comment / Down-vote / Vote to close -- in what order, with what delay?

If I see a post that I think belongs on MathStackExchange, what should be my first response? a) Comment to the user b) Down-vote c) Vote to close with suggestion of migration And how long should I ...
352 views

### Is asking for good review papers a good question?

I think that generally speaking asking for papers might be a non-research issue. If it's merely a google issue, then it shouldn't be in MO. What about Survey/Review papers? Obviously those are hard ...
102 views

### Why is there unexpected space at the beginning of a paragraph in an answer?

In @GabeK's nice answer to @JonBannon's question Each mathematician has only a few tricks, there is unexpected space at the beginning of the third paragraph: My first thought was that there might be ...
264 views

### Is it possible to see the source for a comment?

Although this question seems to be new to M.MO, @MartinSleziak points out several related posts on Meta.MSE. I was curious about the diagrammatic magic of @YaakovBaruch's recent comment, and so ...
862 views

### Revamping the closure reasons in 2022

Prompted by Gro-Tsen's recent meta question, it appears that now may be a good time to rethink our site-specific close reasons here on MathOverflow. Background: If you have sufficient rep, you can ...
460 views

### Are there policies to respect in order for MathOverflow Q&As to be tracked back in relevant zbMATH Open reviews?

Are there policies to respect in order for MathOverflow Q&As to be tracked back in relevant zbMATH Open reviews? I am asking this since I noticed that all questions and answers to which I ...
532 views

### Questions about correctness of published papers

A recent thread brought up the issue of the appropriateness of discussing correctness of a published paper on MO. Correctness of Thierry Aubin's argument about positive Ricci curvature I did a ...
633 views

### Local vs. Global MO in relation to "Polymath" efforts

Certain polymath-flavor questions appear on MO, and are not really appropriate for the forum. Such questions are probably posted (I can only be sure for my own such posts) because MO captures a huge "...
26k views

### 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 ...
1 vote
90 views

### Icons for MO/metaMO in community list changed?

I notice that in the community list under the SE hamburger in the top right, the icons for MO and for meta have changed: clearly having the MO logo attached to meta.math.SE is an issue, but we are ...
144 views

### Serial voting was reversed

I was recently noticed "serial voting was reversed" on MO. I am curious about how this works, and what this exactly means (I don't have the feeling that I did something wrong). Note that I ...
535 views

### Was the custom close reason mentioning Math.SE removed?

For a long time, these two custom close reasons used to be available: This question does not appear to be about research level mathematics within the scope defined in the help center. MathOverflow ...