All Questions

1,324 questions
Filter by
Sorted by
Tagged with
98 views

What should I do if I want to ask an almost duplicate question?

There already exists a question very like the one I want to ask, with a very partial answer by the OP. I want to ask the same question but restricted to a special case, for which I hope more can be ...
106 views

Where is the link to Meta from Mathoverflow?

When I go to mathoverflow.net, I don't see any indication on the page about how to get to MathOverflow Meta. (I think it is supposed to be accessible from the "StackExchange" pulldown on the left of ...
366 views

What is the copyright of the MathOverflow logo? Is it in the public domain? In this site they say that "most simple logos simply do not have the required level of creativity to be considered ...
100 views

How about a way to flag a question for migration to another site without down voting it

If the question is valid, it seems churlish to down-vote it, especially since doing so affects the user's reputation adversely. Sure, it's a mistake to ask a question on the wrong SE site, but I don't ...
63 views

Doubled backslashes in old posts [duplicate]

There is a post from 2013 addressing what appears to be a similar issue, but it is reported as fixed, so I guess it's not exactly the same. I have noticed a few posts recently in which backslashes ...
86 views

I'm so sorry, but I got logged out of my account: https://mathoverflow.net/users/10290/erin-carmody I tried to log back in but have changed my email several times... It might be an impossible task. ...
444 views

Editing a question admitting a trivial example

In this question I forgot to add that I want the space to be sufficiently large. One user wrote a (correct) answer pointing out a trivial example on $2$ points, answering the question. It was my ...
226 views

How to contact a MathOverflow user?

Occasionally it might happen that I want to contact some user, although the thing I want to say is not directly relevant to one of their posts - which makes me think that this would be not really ...
379 views

MathOverflow logo and icon for icon font

I would like to add the MathOverflow icon to Academicons together with some other mathematical research related icons. Does anyone know where I could get/request a vector version of the MathOverflow ...
483 views

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 ...
263 views

Is it possible to know the list of removed users?

Today morning I learned that I have +4 reputation with notification "User was removed". I calculated that probably this removed user posted me two downvotes. Simultaneously my (not very pleasant) ...
486 views

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", in its various ...
114 views

LaTeX display of exponential pushed down with respect to baseline

This is hardly important, but ... In an answer, I used the LaTeX O(n \epsilon^{1-d}) to display $O(n \epsilon^{1-d})$, but this is what it looks like to me (in ...
245 views

Is 10% with accepted answers typical?

At the current moment posting this, 5 out of the 50 front-page postings (that I see) are are accepted answers. My question is: Q. Is this typical, about $10$% accepted answers at any one time?
1k views

What do you want to do in Rio?

Four weeks from tomorrow (at this writing) is March 5, the deadline for submitting abstracts for Short Communications for the ICM 2018 (International Congress of Mathematicians) happening In the first ...
114 views

“Singular Perturbation” is not among tags

Can I ask MO to define a new tag "Singular perturbation". I did not find this tag among the tag list. Thank you
110 views

The meaning of “The number of Followers of a tag”

My apology if my question is elementary: One can find the number of followers of a given tag. What is the meaning of this number? Is it the number of participant who are (reading ?)or ...
398 views

I like to hang out in the homotopy theory chatroom. I used to navigate to this and other chatrooms using a link on the main site. This seems to have disappeared. Is there a reason for this change? I ...
98 views

What is a 'question record', in particular a positive one?

The description of the `curious' badge reads: "Ask a well-received question on 5 separate days, and maintain a positive question record". What does the last part mean?
609 views

Should I give a link to my recent published paper to an old question of mine on MO?

4 years and 6 months ago I asked on MO: "Who introduced the terms “equivalence relation” and “equivalence class”?" It was somehow a resting stone of a long journey that started 13 years ago from today ...
54 views

Help Center “On Topic” first section's header doesn't match the text below it

Current Issue: I was glancing through the help center's articles, and the article's structure on the What topics can I ask about here? page doesn't really make sense and confused me a bit. The first ...
520 views

Undelete request, Question 290941

Could I request that Question 290941 be undeleted? It is a sensible question, and I spent some time finding a reference for the answer. It was then deleted by the poster - I have no idea why.
417 views

What happened to Stackedit?

I'm not sure if this question is appropriate for MOmeta, but as the tool had been suggested for offline editing, I'll give it a try (please vote to close if not appropriate). Stackedit got updated in ...
331 views

What I can do if my questions limit had been reached in MO from long time?

Really, I'm interested in posting new questions in MathOverflow such that I have some unanswered questions in S.E which I want to post them in MO, but my questions limit had been reached for some ...
456 views

Should MO perhaps give numerological abductive questions a little more benefit of the doubt

Background: This question is a much more specific version of a metaMO question which was deleted for some odd reason after one poster said in a comment that he agreed with everything said in the post....
304 views

Could there be a warning when a new tag is created?

It is rather easy to make a typo and create a new tag by mistake without even noticing it.1 Could we have a warning saying that the user is creating a new tag so that users can notice such mistakes ...
159 views

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, ...
189 views

Why was my question closed while it looks like similar questions are still open?

Recently, my question regarding a good introductory book on mathematical risk theory was closed because it was deemed off-topic and not research-level mathematics. However, I think that multiple ...
235 views

Why is a question asking for powerful arguments for intuitionism not a research level question?

I'd like to read some well-vetted and modern pieces arguing for intuitionism (the "intuitionist stance"?), which I take to be: As the intuitionist sees it, the rules of logic used by mathematicians ...
287 views

Policy for Naming of Tags

I just saw that the Reedy cofibrancy of the bar construction for algebras question is tagged with "simplicial-stuff" and I wonder if such "sloppy" tag-naming is considered acceptable/appropriate. ...
95 views

Another close reason: “subsumed”?

This happened few hours ago: the question Series involving gamma function about the sum of a specific series, probably not research level, was followed by another one, Series involving factorials ...
617 views

Why did flagging a comment for deletion made it disappear immediately?

I wrote a comment under an answer, claiming that the answer was wrong. The poster replied to me in another comment, showing that my argument was wrong. Acknowledging this, I deleted my comment and ...
239 views

What to do when it seems that downvotes are not justified (for example, when they are directed “against” the person and not “against” the question)?

This question now has a score of $-2$ and it could be that it will be lowered still. It is an elementary attempt to resolve an open problem. I shared it with you because I am an amateur and almost ...
239 views

Should tag-wiki include a source where it is taken from?

The main purpose of the tag-info (and especially the tag-excerpt) is to help with tagging. This is especially important for the tags with ambiguous name. But usually tag-info also contains some brief ...
170 views

How should questions about (various meanings of) coverings be tagged?

The word covering has various meanings in mathematics. Quite often choosing a tag-name which has several unrelated meanings can lead to problems - typically bunch of rather unrelated questions end up ...
453 views

What would be good place to list unresolved bounties?

Probably at least some MathOverflow users have been in a situation like this. I have placed a bounty on some question in hope to get an answer (or a better answer or a specific type of answer, for ...
81 views

Did few of my questions disappear without notification or trace?

I strongly suspect one or two of my questions disappeared without notification or trace on my user page in the last month. Is this true? Is there efficient algorithm to find links to the missing ...
72 views

On several occasions I have sent by email links to MO questions or answers. They appear just like this - say, https://mathoverflow.net/a/287214/41291 Is it difficult to achieve that such links in ...
572 views

Why is it not possible to offer a bounty for longer than 7 days?

I had offered a bounty for the following question that expires in 7 hours: What did Gelfand mean by suggesting to study "Heredity Principle" structures instead of categories? The results ...
443 views

I recently gave a simple counter example to a question posed (I'm sure the mods can see the question). Probably the user was embarrassed by this. The question was promptly deleted and with that my ...
303 views

Should metaMO allow actual requests for mathematical consulting services to be remunerated either by honoraria or by “usual and customary” fees?

Should metaMO allow actual requests for mathematical consulting services to be remunerated either by honoraria or by "usual and customary" fees? If so, should MO receive reasonable "broker" fees for ...
2k views

Should we exercise a bit more tolerance towards newcomers?

What bothers me quite a bit is that many people come to MO to get some help with their mathematical problems and are met with nothing but our standard "closed as not research level" verdict and a few ...
316 views

Can anyone learn anything from a downvote without an accompanying rationale in a comment?

I have been on enough web boards in both the arts and sciences that I have learned not to be bothered by downvotes in and of themselves. What does bother me is a downvote without an accompanying ...
231 views

Is there a clear rule against “check this proof” type questions?

I discovered that the meta question "Questions" of the type "I have written something, please give me feedback" from more than three years ago still does not have any answer, while ...
209 views

Reviewing questions outside one's expertise

The review system is rigged to nudge users into action rather than non-action. This means that when someone opens a review, if they want to review, there is a good chance that they will act on a low ...
182 views

Would this question be appropriate for (main) MO?

Note #1: title of this post was modified as per a great suggestion from Todd Trimble Note #2 ( to site moderators): I truly consider this question to be a legit "meta" question about the MathOverflow ...
536 views

What's the point of having an *MO* chat without LaTeX enabled?

The title says it all. :-) In response to the automatic disapproval of the question body: I tried to edit the chat messages after submitting but couldn't figure out how to do that either. (And I ...
193 views

My question looks like spam

I'm trying not to be offended, I know how spam filters work and sometimes someone gets wrongly accused and it just happens to be me. I'm just a little frustrated because I carefully craft this ...