27 votes

Before MathOverflow

Before MathOverflow, the culture of mathematics question-and-answers was quite primitive. I remember the days when a student would impress their mathematics questions, expressed in cuneiform, by ...
Joel David Hamkins's user avatar
17 votes
Accepted

Before MathOverflow

Usenet For example, these newsgroups: sci.math sci.math.research sci.math.num-analysis sci.math.symbolic See back in time to them HERE
Gerald Edgar's user avatar
  • 40.2k
12 votes

Examples of mathematical exposition arising from MO answers

This paper resulted from a question on mathoverflow. This monograph on properties of 3-manifold groups has now appeared in print.
Ian Agol's user avatar
  • 66.8k
9 votes

Examples of mathematical exposition arising from MO answers

The note "Did a 1-dimensional magnet detect a 248-dimensional Lie algebra?" by David Borthwick and Skip Garibaldi mentioned in this MO answer by Garibaldi was published here in the Notices of the AMS.
j.c.'s user avatar
  • 13.5k
9 votes

Examples of mathematical exposition arising from MO answers

My preprint arXiv:1609.01160 was written in response to Question 248665.
Chandan Singh Dalawat's user avatar
8 votes

Before MathOverflow

IRC (Internet Relay Chat) had #math channels where people discussed concepts using an obscure dialect called ASCII. There were moderated and unmoderated forums with thread based email discussions ...
Gerhard Paseman's user avatar
6 votes

Requests for reopen and undelete votes for closed and deleted questions

[REOPENED] The question Center of a monoid ring asks two questions, one of which can be found in standard texts and the other which is essentially an open question but which appears to be a harmless ...
6 votes

Requests for reopen and undelete votes for closed and deleted questions

[REOPENED] The question Has Perelman's proof been accepted or are there still unresolved issues? has been closed as of this writing. At first glance, this question seems to be of the genre, "Is ...
6 votes

What MO is for and what is *your* aim in participation?

First let me say that these are very good questions. My answer to the second one would be similar to many others, let me just add that MO has immensely enhanced my feeling of being a member of one of ...
მამუკა ჯიბლაძე's user avatar
6 votes

Requests for reopen and undelete votes for closed and deleted questions

[UNDELETED] This is an undelete request for an answer on meta: namely, quid's answer to my question Some proposals for modifications of the process of closing/reopening questions . The answer was ...
5 votes

Requests for reopen and undelete votes for closed and deleted questions

[REOPENED] The OP of this question Connected sum is well-defined for surfaces, proof? requests reconsideration to reopen. It was closed as a duplicate, but OP says that what is asked for was not ...
5 votes

What MO is for and what is *your* aim in participation?

I use it to find out what questions people find interesting in order to gear my studies towards them. I search around for questions in things I am interested in and if no one is answering these ...
Chris Rackauckas's user avatar
5 votes

Interesting (and not sufficiently answered) questions on math.SE

Would someone who knows cyclotomic fields, or algebraic number theory more generally, please take a look at $A_4$ extension of $\mathbb{Q}$ ramified at one prime? The question asserts that an $A_4$ ...
David E Speyer's user avatar
5 votes

Interesting (and not sufficiently answered) questions on math.SE

Another user suggested that I should advertise this question in MO also, so here comes. It is just a number theoretic curiosity spawned by an earlier question where small cases were handled by a ...
Jyrki Lahtonen's user avatar
4 votes

Requests for reopen and undelete votes for closed and deleted questions

[Undeleted; Reopened] If normal with respect to prime base then normal for all bases was closed as not being research math. I nominated it for reopening, after leaving a comment establishing its ...
4 votes

Requests for reopen and undelete votes for closed and deleted questions

[REOPENED] I'd like to suggest reopening Covering systems. As I wrote in a comment, Why is this closed? Covering systems are a recognized area of research in Number Theory. It's known that in an ...
4 votes

Before MathOverflow

The Categories mailing list has been already mentioned in comments, I just want to add one detail, I think a significant one. Mac Lane almost never posted there. I know several people that were sort ...
მამუკა ჯიბლაძე's user avatar
4 votes

Before MathOverflow

The Secret Blogging Seminar used to have a Requests thread, where people could suggest topics for us to write about.
David E Speyer's user avatar
3 votes

Requests for reopen and undelete votes for closed and deleted questions

[REOPENED] The question Identify one group of linear transformations was closed as "unclear what you're asking". Afterwards it has been edited and clarified. I don't see what is still "unclear" in ...
3 votes

Requests for reopen and undelete votes for closed and deleted questions

https://mathoverflow.net/questions/379145/geometric-combinatorial-problem-in-the-euclidean-space This question was deleted by nobody less than @ToddTrimble just 10 days ago after having 9 upvotes and ...
3 votes

Requests for reopen and undelete votes for closed and deleted questions

A chess question of W.T. Tutte has been closed for at least 5 years. The only argument given for its closure at the time was that a moderator saw it as a question of chess strategy. I think the first ...
3 votes

Requests for reopen and undelete votes for closed and deleted questions

Status: [REOPENED] Thank you! Request to reopen How to obtain the rational solution of a linear system efficiently?. In light of recent discussions about being more welcoming to good faith questions ...
3 votes

Requests for reopen and undelete votes for closed and deleted questions

[UNDELETED] I propose to undelete my question: Something like mathoverflow in other sciences It was asked in the early days of MO and has some useful links and information. I Have no idea why some ...
3 votes

Requests for reopen and undelete votes for closed and deleted questions

[REOPENED] Why did Bourbaki ignore the theory of categories? only survived 25 hours in 2013, collecting 5 answers; it has been closed ever since. The reason given (“not constructive”, “will likely ...
3 votes

Requests for reopen and undelete votes for closed and deleted questions

[REOPENED] This cw question (on the spelling of Chebyshev and Cholesky) has good answers and I think it deserves to be reopened. (The sole Chebyshev case was worth a specific discussion, and for this ...
3 votes

Requests for reopen and undelete votes for closed and deleted questions

[UNDELETED] [REOPENED] [CLOSED] I would suggest to undelete/reopen https://mathoverflow.net/q/328312, as a courtesy and sign of respect, and then hopefully one of our experts can answer it. I know, ...
3 votes

Requests for reopen and undelete votes for closed and deleted questions

[UNDELETED] I propose that this question should be undeleted: Reduced ring with all non-prime ideals finitely generated It was deleted by the OP despite having a substantial answer by Keith Kearnes. ...
3 votes

Requests for reopen and undelete votes for closed and deleted questions

[REOPENED] Boundary conditions for Klein-Gordon equation The author has responded to comments and edited the question into a form that is much clearer, and in fact bringing it into the realm of ...
3 votes

Examples of mathematical exposition arising from MO answers

Many answers by Joel David Hamkins have been the inspiration behind later papers, for example "Is the twin prime conjecture independent of Peano arithmetic?" is an arXiv submission that is ...
C7X's user avatar
  • 1,186
2 votes

Requests for reopen and undelete votes for closed and deleted questions

[UNDELETED] The question On isolated points of the approximate point spectrum of a bounded operator looks reasonable and did not attract any negative comments or downvotes. I propose that it should ...

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