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28 votes
8 answers
1k views

New feature - citation helper

At the request of the moderators, we have added a citation helper (based on the citation helper user script by Scott Morrison). If you are familiar with the original script, you will note a few ...
Oded's user avatar
  • 101
28 votes
4 answers
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 ...
Gerhard Paseman's user avatar
28 votes
1 answer
968 views

Prosus' acquisition and its effect on MathOverflow

Just saw the PROSUS acquisition news of StackOverflow. Does it have any effect on MathOverflow? In what way would it help or not help MO? Thanks beforehand.
vidyarthi's user avatar
  • 1,823
28 votes
2 answers
657 views

Migrating to Math.SE: too many close reasons [duplicate]

As everyone knows, we get a fair number of questions on this site that are not research level, but would be appropriate for http://math.stackexchange.com. As a frequent Math.SE user, I have an ...
Nate Eldredge's user avatar
28 votes
2 answers
747 views

Reference to Mathoverflow

I feel a bit awkward, but my question is this: Someone asked questions on Mathoverflow and I gave answers. The whole thing was not very deep and I could provide rather standard examples to show ...
András Bátkai's user avatar
28 votes
3 answers
1k views

Do your own homework

Occasionally, we get questions on main taken from old contests, such as Olympiads and Putnam exams. These questions are inappropriate for MO, and they get closed, which is as it should be. However, ...
Gerry Myerson's user avatar
28 votes
1 answer
882 views

MO in the Notices of the AMS

On page 333 of the March 2010 issue, John Baez wrote that "MathOverflow has become a universal clearinghouse for math questions." The March 2017 issue features an interview with Prof. Ken Ribet--the ...
José Hdz. Stgo.'s user avatar
28 votes
3 answers
712 views

When asking a question on MO it seems there's far too little information on what MO is about

When we switched from the old format to the MSE 2.0 format, almost all the information about what MO is about, and what is expected from a good question was been stripped from the site. I mean, one ...
Ryan Budney's user avatar
  • 41.9k
27 votes
3 answers
2k views

What are our procedures if a user complains about harassment or abuse?

Context for this question: I am writing an article on MathOverflow for the Notices of the AMS. One thing I try to address is the apparent gender skew of our website. One of the readers of my draft ...
David E Speyer's user avatar
27 votes
2 answers
648 views

Would newly elected moderators join the board of MathOverflow Inc.?

MathOverflow is a bit different from most of the sites in the network in that it is not operated only by Stack Exchange, but it "belongs" also to the nonprofit MathOverflow corporation. If I ...
Martin Sleziak's user avatar
27 votes
1 answer
1k views

Is it okay to put on your profile that you're looking for a job?

The title says it all. I do not see why it should be a problem, but I realize I have never seen anyone doing that here (or I forgot), so I ask.
Joël's user avatar
  • 25.4k
27 votes
2 answers
1k views

Using MathOverflow to get new results in your research and publish them afterwards

So, MathOverflow is mainly used for posting research problems. Assume I have a research idea on which I want to write a paper. I developed it to some extent, but I am stuck somewhere and I post the ...
sdd's user avatar
  • 99
27 votes
2 answers
862 views

Concern about sending to academia.stackexchange

There have been two questions today with suggestions (one acted on, at time of writing) to close, with the question being better asked at academia.stackexchange: Referee reports and Covid lessons. In ...
Matthew Daws's user avatar
27 votes
2 answers
2k views

Explicitly pointing out math.stackexchange when (new?) users ask a question

I have recently flagged several questions for migration to math.stackexchange which were fairly clearly not about mathematics research and related topics. It was clear that in some cases these new ...
Ricardo Andrade's user avatar
26 votes
6 answers
2k views

Anonymity Policy

In view of recent events, we've been reconsidering having some policy against anonymous users. We've always encouraged users to use real names though we have been tolerant of pseudonymous and ...
François G. Dorais's user avatar
26 votes
7 answers
3k 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 ...
Federico Poloni's user avatar
26 votes
3 answers
1k views

Has the switch to SE 2.0 increased the rate of low-level / inappropriate questions?

I would be curious to know whether, now that links to MO appear in the footer of every SE 2.0 site, and in the "hot questions" list of the Stack Exchange button, the rate of inappropriate questions ...
Zev Chonoles's user avatar
  • 6,692
26 votes
4 answers
776 views

Which Latex / MathJax features do we need or want to have supported on the site?

As we've started discussing, Stack Exchange is planning to redo the editor for all questions and answers across all their sites. As articulated by Emilio Pisanty, these changes will have significant ...
Tim Campion's user avatar
  • 55.4k
26 votes
4 answers
7k views

On using MathJax to create 'white space'

The purpose of this post is, first, to raise awareness (as this, reasonably, might not be clear) that the way some (and it seems to me the number is growing) use MathJax to create 'white space' (or to ...
user avatar
26 votes
1 answer
829 views

Should I start posting my questions on MO?

I have been a member of MO and of math.SE for a long time now. My participation in MO has been mainly lurking because I am not a researcher but a student who aims to become one. So, logically, I have ...
Bruno Stonek's user avatar
  • 2,854
26 votes
4 answers
1k views

Should users be shown some basic information before posting the first question? [duplicate]

In an answer to another question discussing possibilities how to decrease the number of off-topic questions1 it was mentioned that: Perhaps we should force a person to read the rules before posting ...
Martin Sleziak's user avatar
26 votes
1 answer
369 views

Opt out of the new upvote/downvote buttons?

I guess most of you have noticed by now the new upvote/downvote buttons. This seems to be in line with all the other SE sites (though I admit I haven't checked each and every one of them). Does MO ...
M.G.'s user avatar
  • 6,469
26 votes
0 answers
607 views

The color of links in comments

In the following image, depicting a piece of a comment on MO.se the words «this link» are a link to some URL, yet the styling makes it quite not apparent; the only styling I can see is a ...
Mariano Suárez-Álvarez's user avatar
25 votes
25 answers
3k views

Help cleanup tags!

This is meant to agglomerate tags that need (occasional or regular) cleanup. That is tags that mean multiple unrelated things and need to be separated into more specific tags. Please follow the ...
25 votes
2 answers
1k views

My question has already been asked, but not really answered? What should I do?

I have a question I am curious about: call it $Q$. There exists a posted question $P$ on MO which asks my question $Q$. More precisely, $P$ states a series of (slightly vague) questions, one of ...
Charles Rezk's user avatar
  • 26.2k
25 votes
5 answers
1k views

Community Peer-Review in Mathoverflow

I was recently surfing around the Physicsoverflow and I have to admit I was impressed by their Review section. I could not help myself from thinking how -and if- such a feature could also be ...
Konstantinos Kanakoglou's user avatar
25 votes
1 answer
826 views

Why is the update so awesome?

I mean, we really don't deserve it. It's awesome. Good work everyone, high-fives all around. Cheers (for those of you from across the pond, so-to-speak).
Jonathan Beardsley's user avatar
25 votes
5 answers
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 ...
Peter LeFanu Lumsdaine's user avatar
25 votes
1 answer
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 ...
Zsbán Ambrus's user avatar
25 votes
4 answers
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 ...
Joseph Van Name's user avatar
25 votes
1 answer
1k views

Using Math Overflow to check whether or not a proof is correct

A user named Jürgen Böhm recently posted two questions which boiled down to checking whether or not his proof is correct. I left a comment on the second one saying that I don't think this is ...
David White's user avatar
  • 24.7k
25 votes
2 answers
816 views

Kitty can’t fix it — Old questions inaccessible for logged-in users, giving “unexpected error”

For the past few days, any attempt to access the question Collecting proofs that finite multiplicative subgroups of fields are cyclic results in an internal server error: It seems the poor kitten ...
Emil Jeřábek's user avatar
25 votes
2 answers
1k views

Slight downward trend in Q & A

I thought MO users might be interested in this graph constructed by Neal Young in a discussion at meta.cstheory about the more pronounced downward trend in cstheory. It shows MO Q&A activity ...
Joseph O'Rourke's user avatar
25 votes
1 answer
808 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 ...
mweiss's user avatar
  • 525
25 votes
1 answer
3k views

Jean-Christophe Yoccoz

I've heard today that Jean-Christophe Yoccoz passed two days ago: Le mathématicien français Jean-Christophe Yoccoz, médaille Fields, est mort [archived], Libération, 05.09.2016. I think people would ...
DamienC's user avatar
  • 7,913
25 votes
2 answers
968 views

Request from PRIMES to keep an eye out for their problems

On m.SE last year there was a problem with someone cheating on the entrance problem set for the PRIMES high school research program at MIT. Selection for PRIMES for this year has begun, and they're ...
Noah Snyder's user avatar
  • 27.3k
25 votes
0 answers
1k views

Unregistered Users (in Theory and in Practice)

There's been past discussion (e.g. here) about whether MathOverflow should allow posts from unregistered users. I am fully on board with the apparent consensus that the answer is yes, because of the ...
Steven Landsburg's user avatar
24 votes
5 answers
2k views

How should we react to the existence of Math Educators SE?

As was previously announced at meta, there is now an SE site for mathematics education (MESE). My broad questions is this: Should we react to this somehow? (More specific questions are below.) Does ...
Joonas Ilmavirta's user avatar
24 votes
2 answers
883 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 ...
Daniel Moskovich's user avatar
24 votes
2 answers
1k views

MO policy regarding pseudonyms that are other people's real name

I have noticed just now that a user has chosen as pseudonym "Alexander Grothendieck", which I'm a bit unconfortable with (the probability that it is also that user's name is extremely low, hence my ...
Thomas Sauvaget's user avatar
24 votes
2 answers
758 views

Revisiting our policies on thank-you comments

Despite the little notice in the comments section telling us that comments along the lines of 'thank you' aren't welcome because they don't move the discussion forward mathematically, I have always ...
Alec Rhea's user avatar
  • 8,294
24 votes
4 answers
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 ...
Asaf Karagila's user avatar
  • 37.1k
24 votes
4 answers
796 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, ...
Tim Campion's user avatar
  • 55.4k
24 votes
2 answers
680 views

How can I customize site in my browser to get "old feel" look of MathOverflow?

It seems that some of the users are not too happy with the new design and prefer the old look. I will admit that I have not much experience with this stuff, but from I've read on various meta sites ...
Martin Sleziak's user avatar
24 votes
1 answer
998 views

I can't understand the answers

I found myself in a slightly awkward situation. "Working" (hobby) on group conjugation I learnt about quandles and I finally managed to formulate some questions of some of the issues that interest me ...
MphLee's user avatar
  • 233
24 votes
1 answer
1k views

"A year in moderation" post on MathOverflow?

You might have noticed than many Stack Exchange sites have some statistics about both community moderation and moderators' activity posted on meta under the title "2018: a year in moderation". Here is ...
Martin Sleziak's user avatar
23 votes
4 answers
2k views

Appropriateness of recent LIGO question for MO

There had been numerous comments under the question Recent observation of gravitational waves that discuss whether it is appropriate for MathOverflow. That discussion is properly a concern of MO meta, ...
Todd Trimble's user avatar
  • 51.6k
23 votes
4 answers
2k views

Are professional Physicists, Computer Scientists, Engineers, Economists... not allowed to ask questions at MO?

"MathOverflow is a question and answer site for professional mathematicians." May other professional researchers ask questions at MO? Should they check their credentials at the door? If not, and ...
André Levy's user avatar
23 votes
6 answers
2k views

Homework and migrating to math.se

As many people have noticed, one of the main functions of math.se is to be a place for students to get other people to do their homework for them. Obviously we do not want to facilitate such cheating....
Andy Putman's user avatar
  • 41.2k
23 votes
4 answers
993 views

What makes you vote to close a question?

Some recent exchanges and observations suggest to me that users not only have different thresholds for voting to close a question yet still applying the same criteria, but that they even apply so ...
user avatar

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