# All Questions

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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 ...
601 views

### 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 ...
22k 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 ...
3k views

### 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 ...
1k views

### 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 ...
1k views

### 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 ...
869 views

### How can I donate to MathOverflow — if I should?

I understood from this meta question that MathOverflow is a nonprofit nonstock corporation dedicated to keeping this site running and that the nonprofit status allows receiving donations. What is the ...
709 views

### Stack-exchange devoted to research problems, the suggested approaches and updates

The idea is to have a database of open research problems where the answers will be updates or suggested approaches. One research problem per post. This is in the spirit of Polymath. Reasons: ...
2k views

### 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 ...
1k views

### 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 ...
3k views

### 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 ...
2k views

### MathOverflow @ ICM2014 : We Want You!

This post will raise several questions/issues on which I want community feedback. Background: Inspired by Tim Post's offer Mugs, Stickers And Shirts - Now With 100% More MathOverflow! , I++ decided ...
488 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 ...
1k views

### Should this site be “a shortcut to substitute for literature searches”?

On Reference for invariance of essential spectrum under relatively compact perturbations, Michael Renardy voted to close with the comment "This site should not become a shortcut to substitute for ...
925 views

This question boils down to whether an answer to a question should contain sufficiently free and easily accessible detail about the solution to a question. So IMHO it would be perfectly acceptable, ...
623 views

### Should top mathoverflow threads get DOIs and be permanently archived?

Josh from The Winnower (thewinnower.com) here. I wanted to reach out and see if users of mathOverflow would be interested in permanently archiving and assigning DOIs to top threads with The Winnower. ...
936 views

### Is there a software solution if we do cut the cord from SE?

There has been some recent concerns about MathOverflow's relationship with StackExchange: see What is MathOverflow's "agreement" with Stack Exchange? How much is MathOverflow exposed to ...
1k views

### Is MO connected?

Is it the case that MO is actually split into several communities which only communicate with each other through meta-activity but have no actual mathematical interests in common? This is not sheer ...
1k views

### 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 ...
1k views

### 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 ...
2k views

### Should we have new moderator elections?

Mathoverflow has seven moderators, but many of them seem to be inactive (at least from the point of view of an unprivileged user): for instance, they are not active on meta, and they moderated few ...
2k views

### How to handle crankery on MathOverflow 2.0?

On the previous MO we had a thread on Tea called "crank post to flag as spam" in which crank posts were pointed out so people could flag them as spam and have them deleted. Seeing how we are now ...
741 views

### “Is this a known/interesting result?”-type questions

Are questions of the form "Is this a known result?" and "Is this an interesting result?" legitimate for MO? I have sometimes found myself staring at results that were new to me and unsure whether ...
1k views

### Publicizing conjectures on MO

This question Positive integers written as $\binom{w}2+\binom{x}4+\binom{y}6+\binom{z}8$ with $w,x,y,z\in\{2,3,\ldots\}$ is basically just a statement of a few conjectures by the asker. The "...
879 views

### It's been another year…MO exists since six years!

As provable by Question Number 1 the site started to exist almost exactly six years ago. Everybody who feels like saying something on this occasion, feel free to post an answer.
9k views

### KaTeX vs MathJax

According to some benchmarks, it seems that KaTeX renders latex much more faster than Mathjax. Is there any chance to use KaTeX in place of Mathjax?
1k views

### Why can't I accept two answers to the same question simultaneously?

I asked a question in MO and I received two interesting answers with different approaches. Both of them are very interesting. I wish to accept both of them simultaneously, but it is impossible. ...
554 views

### How does MathOverflow deal with the liability for the content of the site?

As can for example be read here and here, creators or webmasters of websites are responsible for the content of their website, even if the material leading to legal issues (for example disputes ...
679 views

### Where/how does one best post “Seeking a collaborator”

I have an idea for an attack on an additive number theory conjecture. My usual collaborator (with whom I have published four papers) is not an ANT specialist, and is not interested in working on this ...
1k views

### 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 ...
2k views

### In writing a research paper, how can I refer to peoples' answers given to a question on MO?

Here is a question that I recently posted on MO. The last paragraph of the description reads: The reason that I am interested in this question is that we are currently working on an assessment ...
445 views

The Facebook page for MathOverflow is currently pulled from the Wikipedia article. The Twitter account has no avatar and only 90 follows. The most active is the Google+ account, which posted about ...
926 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 ...
2k views

### 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. ...
697 views

### 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 ...
1k views

### Why is “MathOverflow” spelled without a space when “Stack Overflow” is spelled with a space?

I assumed the name of our site “MathOverflow” is derived from the name “Stack Overflow” of the first and largest site that used the same base software (Stack Exchange). Is this so? If it is, then ...
872 views

### Statistics showing that more reputation for questions leads to better questions

One of the more controversial aspects of the transition to MO2.0, for myself at least, was the reduction in the reputation added for upvotes on questions asked from +10 to +5, while retaining the ...
828 views

### Crazy idea about soft questions

I was thinking the other day about big list and other soft questions and had the following crazy idea. It seems to me that what we want is to occasionally have good soft questions. The main thing ...
663 views

### Should OEIS links be updated?

Historic links to the OEIS are of the form http://www.research.att.com/~njas/sequences/A097048. These links no longer work: Neil has retired from AT&T, and in the meantime has set up the OEIS ...
712 views

### How can I tell if my question is appropriate to MathOverflow or if I should just put a bounty on it at Math.SE?

I have at least two questions which are about graduate level mathematics on Math.SE, but about which I have serious doubts regarding whether or not they are "research level". In other words, I don't ...
494 views

### Trackbacks are no longer being generated for the arXiv

(Although this is a bug report, I or Anton are likely the people who need to fix it; this post is a bug tracking item, not necessarily a plea for help :-) We previously been scraping the front page ...
373 views

### Area 51 proposal: History of Science And Mathematics

I've created a new proposal on Area 51 for a Stack Exchange focusing on the history of mathematics and science. As a math student, I am constantly studying the history of the subject. I feel that ...
325 views

Often when I start reading comments, it is only when I come to the end that I see a link like "add/see 10 other comments". I can understand that if there is a huge list of comments for the same ...
1k views

### Should there be any concern about the number of questions imported into PhysicsOverflow?

I just happened to note that http://www.physicsoverflow.org/ now exists; this isn't a stackexchange website, but seems to run on similar software, and with similar goals to mathoverflow, which seems ...
315 views

### Will MO have Community Promotion Ads?

Community Promotion Ads seem to be a useful tool for helping spread various links that might be useful for users of the site. I have mostly encountered them at MSE. I have learned several ...
321 views

We've had some discussion of adding an archiving feature to MathOverflow on the private moderators list, and I thought I should report on the current situation. (You might also read earlier threads ...
597 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 ...
342 views

### How to find out what activity activated a favorite?

I have several favorite questions and it is a great feature that every time something happens around them, they are flagged up for me. However, when I turn to them, in most cases I cannot figure out ...