59 votes

Stack Exchange moderation strike

It should be noted that users other than moderators can sign the open letter and likewise refrain from curation activities across the network, including MathOverflow, to the extent they feel ...
David Roberts's user avatar
  • 33.8k
59 votes

Most important results of the year - appropriate or not?

As requested by LSpice, I will attempt to post arguments for and against so that people can vote on them. Yes, the question is appropriate, provided it is reworded to something like "Noteworthy ...
Timothy Chow's user avatar
  • 78.1k
46 votes

At what point should MO recognise it needs to leave Stack Exchange Inc?

In my opinion, if it were easy for MathOverflow to leave, then we should have done it already. There's no bright line, but it's become clear over the last few years that Stack Exchange Inc is not an ...
Toby Bartels's user avatar
  • 2,644
31 votes
Accepted

Are "has this been studied before" questions on topic?

I think that questions of the form "has this been studied before" are generally acceptable. It can be hard to search for this information if you do not know the terminology that has been ...
Neil Strickland's user avatar
29 votes

Policy toward GPT-generated conjectures?

I don't think it is worth having a policy for one post, or even a few. We already have a small, regular stream of elementary number theory questions to which one can provide good heuristics using ...
David E Speyer's user avatar
29 votes

Opt out of the new upvote/downvote buttons?

There is a structural tendency for discussions of this type to underweight the voices of people who think that things are fine. I will therefore state explicitly that I do not care about the shapes ...
Neil Strickland's user avatar
27 votes

At what point should MO recognise it needs to leave Stack Exchange Inc?

For one thing, I would consider SE changing drastically the licensing on MO data, or making restricted commercial profit out of it, to be a red line. In my opinion, MO data should remain free to ...
Loïc Teyssier's user avatar
27 votes

What would be the disadvantages of a (hypothetical) MOexit?

As the founder of one of the sites on this network, who has put an insane amount of time into building that community of 6000+ users, I want to escape from SE just as much as anyone else, but ...
Nike Dattani's user avatar
26 votes

At what point should MO recognise it needs to leave Stack Exchange Inc?

To me, the answer comes down to "what makes life easiest for the mods". I don't feel any loyalty or goodwill to the SE corporation, but I also don't feel goodwill to the deans and provosts ...
David E Speyer's user avatar
24 votes

Revisiting our policies on thank-you comments

I must say that I think having a small amount of "personality" adds value to a community. Giving and receiving acknowledgement is one of the most benign additions to conversation, and it's ...
Ben Burns's user avatar
  • 839
23 votes

What would be the disadvantages of a (hypothetical) MOexit?

In addition to practical issues around making the move and practical issues around whether the new hosts would do as good a job as SE, there's also the major concern of whether the new hosts would ...
Noah Snyder's user avatar
  • 27.8k
22 votes

What would be the disadvantages of a (hypothetical) MOexit?

Answering directly to your questions: Would we retain the same domain name? Yes, because the domain name is property of the Mathoverflow foundation. Source How similar would the user interface be? ...
Federico Poloni's user avatar
22 votes
Accepted

Does anyone remember seeing this answer/comment? (A famous result known earlier than believed)

You are thinking of the question Two-colouring the two-sphere, where a certain problem seemingly in discrete geometry was explained to be related to quantum mechanics.
Sam Hopkins's user avatar
  • 22.7k
21 votes

Request to consider undeleting an answer

My apologies. — The reasons why I mistakenly deleted this answer were the following: The answer got flagged as "not an answer" by a user who usually raises helpful flags. On a first glance,...
Stefan Kohl's user avatar
  • 19.5k
19 votes

At what point should MO recognise it needs to leave Stack Exchange Inc?

I suspect that the only way, in practice, to engineer a "MOexit" is the same way Brexit happened: have a referendum. A MOexit that isn't backed by an election result is surely going to be ...
Timothy Chow's user avatar
  • 78.1k
17 votes
Accepted

Drive-By Deletion of Answer to Own Question by Moderator

My apologies for the mistaken deletion of your answer. — What led to this mistake was a combination of several circumstances: it was a self-answer of an anonymous user which got flagged as "not ...
Stefan Kohl's user avatar
  • 19.5k
14 votes

Is there a software solution if we do cut the cord from SE?

Converted from a comment: Codidact was born of a previous mass exodus from SE and has some experience with migrating data from SE to their software platform, QPixel.
Federico Poloni's user avatar
14 votes
Accepted

Why was my spam flag declined on an answer that does nothing but promote the answerer's book?

The answer under consideration is not spam, because it is a valid answer to the question that was asked (and the question was more or less on-topic for this site). Ideally, we would like some kind of ...
S. Carnahan's user avatar
  • 45k
13 votes

At what point should MO recognise it needs to leave Stack Exchange Inc?

I love MO, and have always been a big fan of 'sticking it to the man' whenever possible. That being said, as I get older I'm beginning to feel the effects of constantly cutting off my nose to spite my ...
Alec Rhea's user avatar
  • 8,977
12 votes

News of potential interest to the MO community

Abel Prize for 2024 awarded to Michel Talagrand Félicitations!
12 votes

Repeated re-open/close votes (Tate conjecture)

As of this writing, the question concludes with the following paragraph: I'd like to conclude by respectfully reiterating that, on one hand, the author seems to be reliable, and on the other, even in ...
Timothy Chow's user avatar
  • 78.1k
12 votes

imgur will remove some content soon. Does MathOverflow need to save images?

Not an answer, but doesn't really fit in a comment. Glorfindel ran a script to find and try to upload linked images to Stack Exchange's Imgur repository (those images won't be removed by Imgur). His ...
12 votes

Stack Exchange moderation strike

Stack Exchange have posted their analysis of the technical background about ChatGPT use etc here. In summary, they believe that there was a surge of ChatGPT-generated answers when ChatGPT first ...
Neil Strickland's user avatar
12 votes

Most important results of the year - appropriate or not?

My opinion is that the rules we make are not a Procrustean bed, but the guidelines for what to encourage and discourage in general, so we have the majority of the posts reasonable from the perspective ...
fedja's user avatar
  • 59.5k
11 votes

At what point should MO recognise it needs to leave Stack Exchange Inc?

Converted from a comment by another user: To me, one of the thresholds triggering the "nuclear option" would be SE firing one or more MO mods (the current agreement between MO and SE does ...
Federico Poloni's user avatar
11 votes

Should there be a banner with some basic info about MO in the right sidebar?

Here is one possible suggestion what the text in the banner could look like - it is based on the first bullet point from the text displayed to the first-time askers. MathOverflow is a site for ...
Martin Sleziak's user avatar
11 votes
Accepted

A MathJax/LaTeX question

You need to vertically center the symbol on the math axis: \mathop{\vcenter{\Huge\times}} $$ [0,2] \times \left[0,4-\sqrt{3}\right] \times \left[0,4-\sqrt{3}\right] ...
Emil Jeřábek's user avatar
10 votes
Accepted

On the tag [bitcoins]

I am in favor of replacing the tag bitcoins or bitcoin with the more appropriate and specific tags proof-of-work and cryptography, but I am currently less in favor of using the tag cryptocurrencies. ...
Joseph Van Name's user avatar
10 votes
Accepted

What is the tag [derivations] for?

I think that indeed: in analytic questions about specific derivatives/ differentiation, the tag should be removed (it is then not very relevant: if it were, it would be relevant for thousands of ...
YCor's user avatar
  • 60.1k
10 votes

Suggestions for the design of a font for math articles/books

Here's an alternative way of gathering feedback. Host your project on a standard project repository (like GitHub or something similar). Gather feedback as feature requests on your project. Spread ...
Willie Wong's user avatar
  • 37.4k

Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible