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Policy toward GPT-generated conjectures?

The recent MO post, A number theoretic conjecture by Chat GPT, posed a conjecture that was generated by ChatGPT. In my opinion, it was not a particularly interesting conjecture. For me at least, the ...
Timothy Chow's user avatar
  • 75.8k
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
  • 37.5k
24 votes
4 answers
802 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
  • 56.7k
24 votes
2 answers
689 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
2 answers
1k views

Editing etiquette

What are some general guidelines for editing a MathOverflow post? Are there some "do"s and "don't"s I should know about? (The material that was previously in this question box has been moved to an ...
Todd Trimble's user avatar
  • 51.8k
24 votes
1 answer
1k 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
  • 51.8k
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
4 answers
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 ...
Joseph O'Rourke's user avatar
23 votes
4 answers
997 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
23 votes
1 answer
741 views

Update on "Who owns my MathOverflow posts?"

I saw the question previously asked in: Who owns my MathOverflow posts? Unfortunately, I was not able to get a clear answer by reading the responses to that question, as other people had commented ...
Mahdi Majidi-Zolbanin's user avatar
23 votes
3 answers
1k views

"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 ...
მამუკა ჯიბლაძე's user avatar
23 votes
3 answers
910 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 ...
Joonas Ilmavirta's user avatar
23 votes
2 answers
3k views

Asking a question you know the answer to, but not answering

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 ...
user44191's user avatar
  • 4,901
23 votes
1 answer
3k views

My question was closed on MO because it is not research level. Where should I ask instead?

If a question is closed (put on hold) on MathOverflow as off-topic for not being research level-question, but it is still a question about mathematics. What might be a suitable place for such question?...
23 votes
2 answers
824 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'...
John Bentin's user avatar
  • 2,417
23 votes
2 answers
1k views

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 ...
David E Speyer's user avatar
23 votes
1 answer
488 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 ...
Todd Trimble's user avatar
  • 51.8k
23 votes
3 answers
1k views

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" ...
Brian Rushton's user avatar
23 votes
2 answers
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 ...
Martin Sleziak's user avatar
23 votes
1 answer
656 views

Why are MO accounts not listed among other SE accounts?

When I go look at my accounts in SE network, mathoverflow is not listed there. (You can get to the list of accounts, for example, from your profile page. Other SE accounts are listed on profile page.) ...
Martin Sleziak's user avatar
23 votes
1 answer
535 views

Drive-By Deletion of Answer to Own Question by Moderator

I'm a bit confused by some moderator action. I posted a question asking for a direct proof of a certain fact. A superb answer was provided by Jochen Glueck. (Thanks again!) I came across another proof ...
user24601's user avatar
  • 145
23 votes
2 answers
847 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 ...
Noah Snyder's user avatar
  • 27.5k
23 votes
1 answer
5k views

Why was my dissenting viewpoint in a post about diversity censored?

In a question about special lectures for the ICM, the following answer proposed that a lecture on how to make the mathematical field more diverse be given. The answer contains some rather bold ...
Patriot's user avatar
  • 1,018
23 votes
1 answer
704 views

Tea archive (mathoverflow.tqft.net) seems to be down

It seems that the link http://mathoverflow.tqft.net/ (which, according to this announcement, serves as an archive of the old tea, i.e. the previous incarnation of MathOverflow Meta) no longer works. ...
Martin Sleziak's user avatar
23 votes
2 answers
875 views

Featured MO questions on the hot list: what benefits, if any, do these bring?

“Measures to separate MO from the rest of the stackexchange network”, and various other recent meta questions, have discussed (among other things) opting out of the stackexchange-wide hot list. I’ve ...
Peter LeFanu Lumsdaine's user avatar
23 votes
0 answers
913 views

Upcoming election announcement (2022)

It has been quite some time since the last moderator election, and we decided that it would be a good idea to hold one soon. This is just a preliminary announcement to let you know that this is going ...
Asaf Karagila's user avatar
  • 37.5k
23 votes
0 answers
965 views

Request to keep an eye out for PROMYS admissions problems

Many of you may be familiar with PROMYS, a camp based out of Boston University which teaches number theory to high school students each summer. Students applying to the program are asked to submit ...
David E Speyer's user avatar
23 votes
0 answers
743 views

Should "The probability for a streak when tossing a coin" be reopened?

The question "The probability for a streak when tossing a coin" is on hold. [Edit: It has been reopened.] I disagree with closing the question and voted to reopen. This problem may sound like it is ...
Douglas Zare's user avatar
  • 27.7k
22 votes
13 answers
2k views

2021 Moderator election: suggestions for nominees?

As you may have seen, the nominations for the 2021 moderator election will be open on March 29. Per StackExchange rules, MO users are expected to nominate themselves for the election. For some ...
Lucia's user avatar
  • 43k
22 votes
3 answers
1k views

Measures to separate math overflow from the rest of the stack exchange network

It seems that there is a widespread concern about the influence that in many ways the switch to the stack exchange network has on this site. I infer this from the many questions on meta on this ...
Joël's user avatar
  • 25.5k
22 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
  • 41.8k
22 votes
3 answers
1k views

Answering not research level questions

I just commented the solution to a question that was obviously not research level. Then I deleted the solution again since providing it might encourage people to again asking such questions. ...
Christian Stump's user avatar
22 votes
3 answers
3k views

Question about $i$ versus $-i$

I vaguely recall that some years ago, there was an MO question about how to distinguish between the complex numbers $i$ and $-i$, and in what sense this might be meaningful. I also recall that I ...
Steven Landsburg's user avatar
22 votes
3 answers
911 views

Pronunciation questions

Every so often, I have a question about the correct pronunciation of a math term/name that I’ve only read, and the answer isn’t on Wikipedia. Some examples from my past: “Hartshorne” (I ended up ...
Avi Steiner's user avatar
  • 3,001
22 votes
1 answer
1k views

What is MathOverflow's "agreement" with Stack Exchange?

On June 24, 2013, MathOverflow signed an agreement with Stack Exchange, Inc., to migrate the original site to the newer Stack Exchange 2.0 platform and join the Stack Exchange network. François G. ...
Rebecca J. Stones's user avatar
22 votes
4 answers
755 views

Customize the modal window for the first-time askers [duplicate]

When a user asks their very first question on a Stack Exchange site, they are shown a modal window with a short advice. The content can be either a generic message or it can be customized for a ...
Martin Sleziak's user avatar
22 votes
1 answer
702 views

Why are we now getting 'hot network questions'?

I notice that we are now getting a bar listing hot questions from across the SE network. I thought we'd settled for no cross-site advertising in MO2.0.
David Roberts's user avatar
  • 32.9k
22 votes
1 answer
714 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 ...
Hugo van der Sanden's user avatar
22 votes
4 answers
1k views

Encouraging new users to provide a name or a nickname

After the transition to MO 2.0, I noticed an increased influx of anonymous users, with user names like user####. Of course, people can have all kinds of reasons to ...
Igor Khavkine's user avatar
22 votes
1 answer
1k views

One person creating multiple Riemann Hypothesis-related accounts

I have been flagging these posts individually, but I thought maybe a meta question would be a good follow-up, in case the moderators are not aware of the behaviour. As @YemonChoi points out, the ...
LSpice's user avatar
  • 10.3k
22 votes
2 answers
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 ...
Gerhard Paseman's user avatar
22 votes
1 answer
1k views

Why do we link to Twitter, Facebook or Google+ below every question?

I edit this old feature request of mine, in the hope that mentality have evolved and some consensus can be reached and some action be taken: After each question on MO (with no answers yet), we can ...
Joël's user avatar
  • 25.5k
22 votes
0 answers
211 views

Questions containing my "favorite tags" are barely distinguishable

I liked the fact that in MO v1, any question which contained one of my list of favorite tags was noticably highlighted (a brown-orange color, if I remember correctly). In the new version, such ...
Charles Rezk's user avatar
  • 26.4k
21 votes
5 answers
2k views

What should be the policy on "open problems" on MO?

The subject of this discussion are questions on "open problems" on MO. There is an existing policy on "open problems" reproduced from the (old) FAQs, which involves an open-problem tag. The ...
user avatar
21 votes
1 answer
862 views

Will ads appear on MO?

It looks like the Stack Exchange network is trying to monetize the various stack sites as much as possible, to the dismay of users across the board. Will this affect MO? If I recall correctly we ...
Alec Rhea's user avatar
  • 8,768
21 votes
4 answers
2k 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 "...
Zach Teitler's user avatar
  • 5,732
21 votes
3 answers
904 views

Is there a consensus on whether history of mathematics questions are acceptable on MO?

I recently stumbled across an old meta discussion in which some people suggested that history of mathematics questions were off-topic for MO. This took me by surprise and I would like to ask for ...
Timothy Chow's user avatar
  • 75.8k
21 votes
2 answers
1k views

Ignoring certain users' postings

This old post on meta stackexchange contains a script that hides posts from users of your choice. There were some negative comments there and the script doesn't seem to be working anymore (maybe ...
Felipe Voloch's user avatar

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