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I am new to MathOverflow and I am trying to understand how a new user is supposed to ask a legitimate research-level mathematics question here. My first attempt was a self-contained question about a discrete dynamical system on the positive integers. Within a few minutes, the system identified the post as possible spam, hid it, deleted it through the Community Bot, and locked it. I understand why…
If a question concerns, say, a recent proof obtained with AI tools, proposing generalizations or requiring clarifications, then sure it belongs to MO. On the other hand, I wonder whether questions asking about "AI-aided big results" (no other thematic specification), "AI impact on [subfield/career]", "Advantages and disadvantages of [specific AI tools comparison]" should perhaps be moved to…
I have recently been quite confused about how to deal with questions asking for a copy of a specific published paper. These questions are usually tagged reference-request or paper-request (the latter apparently being the more appropriate tag). In some cases, such as here and here , an answer provides a Dropbox link to a digital copy of the paper, and that answer is later accepted. I see two…
I recently noticed a problem: many people casually give others downvotes. I think casually voting can lead to a mob effect, where everyone downvotes together, which might cause the poster to give up or even experience psychological harm. I believe that if you want to give a downvote, you should first explain why, so that the poster knows how to improve.
I personally prefer some speaking description for links so that I can decide whether is worth clicking, so I am not so happy with the "generic" link texts but I also understand that it is faster to use such names. So what is the general feeling about naming links?
Post 1 is a question about whether a result is known or if it appears in the literature. Post 2 is a question about whether a result is known or if it appears in the literature. The immediate tangible differences that come to mind are that (a) post 1 mentions a claim related to an infamous open problem (but also emphasizes that it is not claiming to have a solution or even progress on that…
Update It appears that, due to some site search shenanigans, there are far fewer posts needing edited than initially anticipated. As a result, the only posts needing attention are those within this search for archive.is . We’ve complied with the request to blocklist archive.today . This means that links to archive.today and its other domains are no longer permitted to be posted or edited into…
A few days ago I took some time and trouble to edit this question about semiprimes that was asked by a new user clearly not proficient in math formatting and math phrasing. I did this because I feel the question intended is of sufficient quality and interest to post on MO. Also I feel that such questions by relative outsiders should be encouraged, because they often enough carry some fresh…
Many years ago, I came close to solving an open problem that I would characterize as well-known among the small group of researchers working in a certain area. However, I was stuck on one point, so I posted a question about it to Mathoverflow. The problem was solved, I published my result, and fame and fortune followed, or at least the paper has been cited many times. Last week I learned that a…
This chart shows two years of posts. Visually there is a decline in the last year. Might it be the influence of AI?
Forums like MO depend on a balance of helping professional mathematicians that have research level questions, but IMO also on the input of mathematically inclined people that bring interesting observations to the attention of the research community. Now I myself find me often asking an AI about observations I have made and fairly often get an answer that suffices my needs. However I also ask…
While casually browsing user profiles, I noticed a bug in the Top network posts widget. The score is visible, but the title is missing. This issue can be seen on the page https://web.archive.org/web/20260610234247/https://mathoverflow.net/users/11919/gh-from-mo Steps to Reproduce: Navigate to the profile page https://mathoverflow.net/users/11919/gh-from-mo Scroll down to the Top network posts…
Recently, a user posted the following question on MO: Claude solved this functional minimization problem over 2D probability distributions for us; how difficult was it? asking about the difficulty of a mathematical result obtained by Claude. I foreseeing that, due to the increasing use of AI (truly, LLMs), more and more questions of this type will be posted on MO: "ChatGPT proved this theorem, is…
I have spent the last several years working on a proof of a longstanding mathematical problem from number theory. I made a groundbreaking breakthrough, and the last puzzle missing for the completion of my paper is the verification of a lemma. I personally checked it countless times, but perhaps I just cannot see some possible error that might be there. The paper does not contain any surrealistic…
Why did my reputation go down 100 points while my rep plots remains 100 points higher AND i see no recent downvotes ?? I also got no messages of downvotes or anything and no questions removed.
I recently experienced a significant drop in reputation (-100 points) triggered by a Community Bot action on one of my answers. The answer in question provided a mathematically precise equivalence of the Riemann Hypothesis based on my recent research published on Zenodo. I formulated this equivalence specifically to be accessible to a general audience using only elementary arithmetic operations…
This is the number of questions asked each month on StackOverflow, the most active site of the StackExchange network. The data is directly sourced from StackExchange, which helpfully provides a service to run SQL queries on their databases. Note that the Y-axis is not truncated, it really starts at 0. That's right, the number of questions decreased more than tenfold between September 2024 and…
I’m reporting a minor technical issue with the tracking for the Curious badge on my profile. The progress bar currently shows 6/5 , indicating that I have met and exceeded the requirement of 5 well-received questions (positive score, no deleted/closed status). However, the badge hasn't been awarded yet, and the counter seems to be stuck at this "6/5" state. I understand that badge scripts run…
Questions can be closed and reopened by the votes of a handful of users. Although a single user cannot exercise such a vote more than once, the number of oscillations that can occur is potentially unbounded, if the population of users with sufficient reputation grows. Close/open battles have gone on for several rounds (at least 4 on a recent question, and maybe a 5th is coming soon). In a related…
I am working to answer or improve answers to some recent questions: and since I customarily try to add to my post as many (pertaining) references as possible, I noticed that the citation helper , possibly one of the most useful tools on the MathOverflow, seems broken. Is it so? And in case of an affirmative answer, when will it be fixed?
Why was this question (on ICM 2026) closed when this (on ICM 2022) was not?
It is becoming increasingly clear that artificial intelligence tools can be useful for math research; see for example recent projects led by mathematicians like the First Proof project. As the capabilities of AI evolve, we are considering revisions to MathOverflow's official policy on AI generated content. While the current official policy does not outright say that AI generated content is banned,…
I don't know if this applies to only me but consider a possibility where your topics/questions are too advanced or obscure for Mathematics Stack Exchange but not advanced enough or interesting enough for MathOverflow. So, there is a middle ground where you're beyond undergrad but not quite research level, or on the cutting edge of research, or your research topic is not trendy enough or you make…
I have a question about using the [well-known/classical] method of rational parameterization of curves to generate “complete solutions” (a.k.a. “parameterizations”) of Diophantine equations. Good examples of what I’m talking about are given here (for equal sums of cubes) and here (for equal sums of squares) . My question is whether or not these solutions fall prey to the “fallacies” outlined by…
As an independent researcher working on the deterministic distribution of primes (achieving (10^{-3}) precision at (10^{12})), I have attempted to contribute both answers and questions to this community. However, my contributions are consistently met with downvotes, closures, and total deletion without substantive mathematical critique. My question to the moderators and the community: Does…
What if anything has been done, or is being done, to make MathOverflow more welcoming to women - or at least less unwelcoming to women?
This recent question received a comment "See this response by ChatGPT ", linking to a conversation which asked ChatGPT the question. The comment attracted some criticism, leading to a discussion which probably belongs here instead - both because it's not really related to the original question, and because the subject seems likely to come up again sooner or later. Beyond the sense that the…
For Category theory there is a well known and quite active research mailing list https://www.mta.ca/~cat-dist/ Do similar mailing lists or usenet groups exist for other branches of mathematics? For example in metric geometry, conformal geometry,... Or do most research related discussions now take place on MO?
Occasionally, there has been a suggestion to start a meta question to collect information that might be of interest to the MO community. This is an attempt to start such a thread. Is there any news that you think would be of wide interest to the MO community? Please exercise your discretion in any answers, and your judgement on the appropriateness or significance of any event.
I came across this question recently and asked the OP to explain some notation (see my comment below the question). As the OP was addressing my concerns, there was suddenly a down-vote (along with the resulting $-1$). Now, this is awful for at least two reasons: there is absolutely no feedback for the OP as to why a fellow MO-user had a negative perception of his question, and it now looks like I…
Since I expect this may prove rather useful, I'm blatantly purloining Asaf's question from meta.math.se. Please post general requests for reopen votes as answers below. Beware that "short" requests such as "request reopening of < link >" may be automatically converted to comments by the SE software, so you will need to say more, such as why you think that the question should be reopened. Please do…
