# All Questions

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### Bringing back the old front page with custom CSS: a guide

As mentioned in a recent meta question, the Stack Exchange development team pushed changes to the front page affecting how views, vote counts, and answer counts are displayed. A few hours ago, these ...
• 614
266 views

This question, while somewhat old, recently had a 250 point bounty placed upon it by David E. Speyer. However, as I remarked in the comments, it has already been answered by Harry West, but in the ...
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99 views

### How to formulate a question for a Mathoverflow forum?

Can the following question be posted? “Where could an error be in the proposed proof of Fermat Last Theorem? Info about the author, proof and preliminary validation is at (link)”. How should the ...
1 vote
292 views

### Why has my question on Aristotelian Spaces been closed for being 'insufficiently focused'?

My question on Aristotelian spaces begins with a motivating preamble and ends with a specific and focused request as to a property which I say would help characterise these spaces. I've bolded this ...
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59 views

### Badges appear to have disappeared [duplicate]

It looks like badges are no longer showing on users when browsing questions/answers: The badges appear while the pages loads, but as soon as the mathjax fully loads, they disappear. Checking other SE ...
59 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 ...
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669 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, ...
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159 views

### Reputation displays after an edit even if opted out

I mentioned this in a comment on the main announcement regarding not automatically displaying reputation, but perhaps it is worth making into a formal bug report. After I edit a post, reputation is ...
• 8,059
465 views

### New Stack Exchange site for proof assistants and automatic theorem provers

Stack Exchange will soon create the Private Beta site for Proof Assistants and Automatic Theorem Provers. If you want to see what a Stack Exchange site is like in its initial beginnings, want to help ...
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2k views

### Viewing reputation and badges is now opt-in and compatible with the new front page

This announcement is a little late (see the discussion here), but in response to discussions over many years, we (the moderators and board) have implemented a change to the site where by default, ...
• 41.6k
137 views

### How does one check progress towards a (second) Socratic badge?

Not to take anything too seriously, but how does one check progress towards a (second) Socratic badge? I've seen a script for another Overflow site, but it doesn't seem to work here.
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322 views

### 2021: a year in moderation

As we say goodbye to the old year and welcome the new one, we have a tradition of sharing moderation stats for the preceding calendar year. As most of you here are aware, sites on the Stack Exchange ...
• 101
157 views

### Asking the same (subjective) question on Math.SE and MO

I asked a question a couple of years ago on MathStackexchange which was quite popular. I would like to ask it on MathOverflow as well, since I'd be interested in the answers there. But I'm never ...
• 748
850 views

### Reputation and badges are no longer visible next to the users' names

Right now it seems that a bug is affecting MO: reputation and badges are no longer displayed next to the users' names. This happens both on the front page: as well as on pages of individual questions:...
• 4,730
91 views

### On a MathOverflow post, the members' reputation for a question & answer shows briefly but then disappears [duplicate]

When I was just viewing the MathOverflow Improving Cauchy estimates?, this is what I see for the question & answer members' "flair" sections: Doing a refresh causes the reputations to ...
• 377
327 views

### Top-voted questions for the year?

This link shows the top-voted questions:       https://mathoverflow.net/questions?tab=Votes In a New Year's spirit, how can I restrict this query to top-voted ...
• 145k
1 vote
135 views

### How can I contact a specific user

I'm new here and it was suggested to me to ask this here. There was a particular user who's answers and questions came up more than once when researching a couple math related topics and I was hoping ...
• 101
707 views

### How to make welcoming comments on "homework-like" posts that will be closed?

We get posts here that are phrased as if from a textbook or homework; the one I have in mind is Find the recurrence relation, but my question is more general. Such posts will certainly be closed. A ...
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139 views

### Is it possible to find out why a comment was deleted?

I had a comment at How do you generate math figures for academic papers? asking whether the question was a duplicate. (Carlo Beenakker is responding to it in this comment.) Since the comment is no ...
• 8,059
96 views

### Hinting votes for CW contributions

I would like to learn about opinions about visually indicating votes for contributions to community wiki; what I have in mind is something analogous to the green button in the "menue-line" ...
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115 views

My activity page in particular contains "All actions" tab; all my comments are there. Can I search for, say, a specific word there? A wonderful answer by Martin Sleziak to my question Is it ...
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1k views

### Welcoming new user: on a recent question about connections

I think that the history of this question about connections is unfortunate. I would like to discuss (respectfully, without throwing blame around) whether/how a better outcome might have been achieved....
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57 views

### Don't know the details to my old account, how can I find them?

My question is pretty much as in the title. I have an old account but no longer know which e-mail I used to set it up (never mind the password xD). Is there any way I can get the e-mail? I'm ...
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296 views

### What if I'm not sure about what area of math a problem lies?

One student asked me how to solve a problem and the only way of solving it that came to me seems hopeless to find an answers. It occurred to me that I may using a wrong approach to it. How could I ask ...
• 403
122 views

### Is this partial differential equation on topic for Mathoverflow?

I came across this differential equation. I'm not sure if it's research level, but I think it might be: u\frac{\partial}{\partial u}\left(u\frac{\partial f}{\partial u}\right) + v\frac{\partial}{\...
• 157
1k views

### Why is the question about SO(4) embedding into SU(3) attracting so many troll answers

This question: Is SO(4) a subgroup of SU(3)? has already attracted 5 rude spam answers (most of which have been deleted by the time I posted this, but if you have enough reputation you can see them). ...
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220 views

### How do I recover my MathOverflow account?

I've been inactive for close to a year due to illness--and want to resume my activity as in Euclidean volume of the unit ball of matrices under the matrix norm but when I try to do so, I get treated ...
397 views

### Two traffic observations and questions

The MathOverflow traffic (page views, visits, new visits) shows steady and possibly increasing activity over the last $2+$ yrs. The chart below runs from 2019-Jul-07 on the left and 2021-Nov-04 on the ...
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87 views

### Braces are not rendered in MathJax in the preview of a question

I am using Firefox 94.0.1, with no user scripts. I have a few add-ons, which I can list if needed, but, since the behaviour does not always occur, they cannot always be interfering. My renderer is <...
• 8,059
232 views

### "overestimates topoi" and research level

I wonder now and then, why this question is still open Did Grothendieck overestimate topoi? Usually, MO's members tend to be very strict about what is and what isn't a good question. But why is this ...
337 views

I found a very neat way to speed up MathJax execution times and I thought about sharing it with everyone here. Typically whenever I start my browser I have to load up all of these MathJax resources ...
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1 vote
194 views

### Why I am not allowed to answer protected questions?

I'm a new user of MathOverflow. In the privileges section, it says that I can now answer protected question. But in reality, when I visited this protected question, it says: I'm not counting the ...
588 views

### To which extent can one modify another's question?

One highly off-topic question of real analysis was asked in the main site by a new user. One user sent, 1 hour later, a long answer going far beyond the the question, and then, 12 hours later, edited ...
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162 views

I had already asked a question as follows: "Is there a one dimensional foliation of a two dimensional manifold whose foliation groupoid is diffeomorphic to a 3 sphere with two north pole. The ...
224 views

### Finding previously highly active deleted users

I was fairly active on MO at the start. Then, as is the case with some early users, my participation became much more sporadic over the years. Recently, I realized that quite a few of the old accounts ...
• 29.8k
291 views

### Criteria for Top question?

I posed a question on Mathoverflow which got no votes, but it made it to Top question. I supplied an answer, while nobody else proposed an answer. How come it made it to Top question?
• 2,842
179 views

### How to find out why a post was deleted

It would help to know why a post was deleted, I believe in this case automatically by a MO monitoring robot. I am not judging the decision, but would like to know why, to avoid asking such questions ...
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125 views

### Unable to delete this post

I have been wanting to delete this post for quite sometime. Unfortunately a user already answered and my reputation is so low that I can’t accept or delete it. Note my original question is nothing ...
166 views

Earlier today, this answer to this question was converted to a comment by a moderator. The same moderator subsequently reconverted the comment back into an answer an hour or so later. One of the ...
125 views

### Request: Add the option to close to review tasks from the "first questions" queue

Reviewing something in the "First questions" queue, I currently have only three options: Leave it (i.e. approve it as is) Edit it Share feedback, i.e. either Leave a comment asking for ...
• 9,303
2k views

### Updated: Is it time to replace links to the UCDavis arXiv frontend?

This question from March 2020 points out that many questions/answers link to papers at the http://front.math.ucdavis.edu/ frontend instead of at the arXiv itself, but that the frontend had been down a ...
449 views

### Why was my probability question closed?

Why was my question closed here? Probability every team successfully presents a solution At a summer math program a contest is held for $n$ teams. Each team, composed of $n$ individuals, is given the ...
140 views

### How can I see the line length available for long mathematical expressions in posting on MO?

In typing up a question (or answer) on MO, I try to format a long mathematical expression so that it fits in one line. When I meet with apparent success, as shown in the wysiwyg box underneath the box ...
• 2,427
736 views

### Why is the "last seen 96 years ago" feature gone?

User homepages used to display the information "last seen ... (min/days/...) ago". It appears this feature is gone now. I found it useful, and while it does divulge some otherwise ...
• 16.7k
378 views

### Questions on the mathoverflow newsletter

Good morning, everyone... I have a little question about the mathoverflow newsletter. Ever since I subscribed to it, I used to find it every Tuesday in my gmail inbox, but I have not received the ...
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3k views

There has been an apparent case where the question poster asked a question that had been answered in their own paper from about 10 years before the question. This would not be a problem if the ...
• 4,671
195 views

### A case when the closure reason might be unclear to the OP (and possibly others)

There is this question I have read about the 3x+1 conjecture so I am thinking of 3x-1 instead closed as not research level. It is about replacing $3n+1$ with $3n-1$ in the Collatz conjecture. OP shows ...
• 16.3k
319 views

### Why was this math puzzle question migrated to Science Fiction & Fantasy?

There was a recent question on MathOverflow which was just incorrectly migrated to Science Fiction & Fantasy (where it has been promptly deleted). I suspect the reason the question was migrated ...
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264 views

### Help center text references a thread but doesn't indicate which one

In the "What about open problems?" section of https://mathoverflow.net/help, the last line says "To join the discussion about how MathOverflow should deal with open problems, go to this ...
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