# All Questions

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Here I only ask questions and do not (can not answer for lack of knowledge) answer any of the questions. Sometimes I feel it is bad. Some questions that I know answer to are either closed as not ...
1k views

A majority of the changes are not be visible; these tweaks go along with recent updates that were made to Stack Overflow: We have updated the site's CSS to a newly refactored LESS system, so that it'...
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### 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 ...
566 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 ...
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### 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.
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### 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 ...
712 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 ...
849 views

### Using MO as a platform to discuss papers in math?

A use case scenario: I am reading a paper and I get stuck on some point. It is obvious to me that everyone else who tried to understand this point would get stuck. I ask around, people either haven't ...
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### 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 ...
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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, ...
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### 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 ...
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### 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 ...
611 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 ...
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 ...
718 views

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 ...
806 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 ...
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### 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 ...
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### Viewing reputation and badges is now opt-in

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, ...
600 views

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 ...
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 ...
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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 ...
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### 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).
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### 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 ...
965 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 ...
6k 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 ...
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### 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 ...
935 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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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### 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 ...
877 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 ...
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 ...
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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 ...
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 ...
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### Questions which are research level but where the OP is unlikely to have the background to follow the research

There is a type of question which gets closed a lot which I find frustrating. An example is How to compute the volume of a region transformed by a matrix? , which I recently took the liberty of ...
633 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 ...
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### 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 ...
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, ...
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....
2k views

### Editing titles to include $\mathfrak{LaTeX \; Math}$

Should question titles, which sometimes intentionally avoid LaTeX math for those who choose faster rendering, be edited to insist upon LaTeX math? A recent instance that prompted my question is "two ...
971 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 ...
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### "Newbie-style" questions: is there an "official" viewpoint of MO?

(Neil Strickland provided a link to early graduate level questions: MO or Math.SE? which more or less answers this, so I have marked it as a duplicate) Every now and then I encounter questions which ...
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### 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 ...
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 ...
816 views

### Can the clutter of obviously off-topic questions be removed faster?

I have noticed a number of blatantly off-topic questions that hang around for a long time despite heavy down-voting and calls for removal by senior users. I found somewhere on the site (although I can'...
485 views

### If I see spam together with mathematical content in an answer, should I edit out the spam?

The title almost says it all, except that I should say that 'spam' here has the strict meaning where a vendor inserts a unsolicited link to a page that advertises or sells a product. There may be ...
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### Does Mathoverflow really want the 'Publicist' badge?

I enjoy the rewards system on the Stack exchange network. I learned some time ago that you can easily earn gold badges on all sites by picking the most interesting questions and using the "Share" ...
1k views

### Should MathOverflow require registration to ask a question?

Probably anybody visiting this site regularly noticed that quite often there are posts which are not at MO-level and quite frequently also of very low quality. (Many of them are simply copy-paste of ...