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23 votes
3 answers
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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 ...
მამუკა ჯიბლაძე's user avatar
23 votes
3 answers
906 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
  • 4,736
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
821 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
  • 51.6k
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
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
  • 51.6k
23 votes
1 answer
655 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
2 answers
846 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
  • 27.3k
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
2 answers
864 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
912 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
  • 37.1k
23 votes
0 answers
956 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
738 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
  • 42.9k
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
  • 25.4k
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
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
22 votes
3 answers
909 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
  • 2,991
22 votes
4 answers
747 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
697 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
  • 32.2k
22 votes
1 answer
713 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
  • 9,927
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
671 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
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
  • 25.4k
22 votes
0 answers
210 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
  • 26.2k
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
3 answers
2k 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
21 votes
1 answer
850 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
  • 8,294
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
  • 5,450
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
21 votes
2 answers
625 views

Data on voting by 'association bonus only' users

There's recently been some discussion of the potential impact on voting of users whose only MathOverflow reputation comes from the network association bonus. I asked the SE team about this, and ...
Scott Morrison's user avatar
21 votes
2 answers
782 views

How do off-topic question askers find MO?

Apologies if this has been addressed on Meta before (it's a little hard to know the right keywords to search for Meta questions with). Question: Has there been any systematic attempt to try to figure ...
Sam Hopkins's user avatar
  • 20.6k
21 votes
1 answer
796 views

Mathoverflow lecture series using chat

This was something that came up recently in the homotopy theory chat room. Even if it wasn't to homotopy theory, has MO ever considered asking active users with interesting research to host lectures ...
Jonathan Beardsley's user avatar
21 votes
2 answers
749 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: ...
Thomas Kojar's user avatar
  • 2,770
20 votes
7 answers
2k views

Can MO go back to +5 rep for questions? Should it?

In case you missed the news, upvotes on questions now grant +10 reputation instead of +5, and the change has been implemented retroactively (most if not all users have already had their reputation ...
Wojowu's user avatar
  • 25.9k
20 votes
7 answers
2k views

What is needed to succeed in keeping up the level of the site and retaining the good contributors?

MathOverflow is a nice high-level communitiy with a good collegial academic atmosphere. I'd like to know about how this can be achieved; for example how does MathOverflow keep up the good qualitiy of ...
Dilaton's user avatar
  • 408
20 votes
3 answers
894 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
  • 72.5k
20 votes
1 answer
973 views

What to do with links to arXiv front end?

There are quite a few posts which link to some paper at http://front.math.ucdavis.edu/ rather than directly at https://arxiv.org/ The front for arXiv at UC Davis seems to be down for some time. (I ...
Martin Sleziak's user avatar
20 votes
2 answers
879 views

Questions on Coq

Now I'm awake again, I can raise this here in meta, as per quid's request. I commented on the question How do I verify the Coq proof of Feit-Thompson? I like this question, and would defend it ...
David Roberts's user avatar
  • 32.2k
20 votes
1 answer
863 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
20 votes
3 answers
3k views

Formatting a citation to a MathOverflow answer

What's a good way to format a citation to a MathOverflow post in a paper? Here is a first draft (with hyperlink, and assuming it's reference number 16, say), but maybe people can think of ...
Bjørn Kjos-Hanssen's user avatar
20 votes
2 answers
882 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.
user avatar
20 votes
2 answers
935 views

Can (and should) Project Euclid links be replaced in bulk?

In February 2021, Project Euclid made some changes on their website: Project Euclid Platform Migration FAQs. It is probably a consequence of this that the links starting with ...
Martin Sleziak's user avatar
20 votes
1 answer
677 views

How to respond to premature crossposts from Math.SE?

There seems to be a general feeling (if not policy) to the effect that questions should not be simultaneously posted to MathOverflow and Math StackExchange (Math.SE). (I think there may have been a ...
Nate Eldredge's user avatar

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