Tag Archives: mathoverflow

After the common room, how about the seminar room?

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The most impressive community on the (specifically mathematical) intertubes is MathOverflow. Not only because François is one of the moderators and Joel is the #1 power user or because it has introduced many mathematicians to the unexplored possibilities of using the web for mathematics. No, despite it’s many positive influences on mathematics (and despite some negative aspects), MathOverflow’s true strength lies in the fact that its users and moderators have paved the way for a series of similar sites on other topics, both at stackexchange (partly in beta) but also independently — a feat that cannot be overestimated in its long term impact on the way we and other scientists do research on- or off-line.

The 24/7, online, all encompassing common room

The way I understand it (and I’m sure François or somebody else will correct me) MathOverflow had a simple question at heart: can we move the departmental common room to the web, create one great common room open to all mathematicians? The goal is to facilitate the same kind of professional exchanges: asking colleagues for references, insights and general advice in our everyday work as mathematicians, researchers, educators — after all, our toughest problems are often somebody else’s easy exercises.

An interesting project

Last week, I saw an announcement at Low Dimensional Topology that Dror Bar-Natan will host an interesting experiment next term. It’s a great idea: take a paper in progress, turn it into a class, add a seminar for the background and combine everything with video recordings.

Last week I also happened to be in Boston where the Joint Mathematics Meetings were held. Even though I was there by chance, there was plenty of time and opportunity to meet people who were attending (such as François and Felix) which gave me an impression of this (for better or worse) enormous conference. This combination made me think whether it isn’t time to take another step in taking our scientific community online. After the common room, let’s move the seminar room online, making our seminars available to everyone interested!

Video killed the radio star

Here at Michigan, I’ve been recording all seminar talks last term (most already available online) so as to allow students who could not attend to still catch up as much as possible. Since I’ve been doing such recordings on and off for a number of years now, it’s become rather easy, giving me ample opportunity to experiment further and broadcast live.

As a highlight I once managed to broadcast Hugh Woodin’s Ziwet lectures in 2010 (with extremely poor audio), but I also used the experience to connect people to the seminar. As usual, this gets easier with time thanks to the advances in technology.

Broadcasting a seminar in 5 minutes

One of the obvious candidates is Skype which, by now, everybody should’ve used at least once for a collaboration. I’ve used it once or twice for broadcasting a seminar, but Skype turned out to be too limited — at most one person can be connected unless you use Windows and pay extra; besides the video quality isn’t good enough for reading a blackboard (unless, of course, you pay extra for HD services).

So I turned to services such as Justin.tv. It works fine (I used it successfully for the Ziwet lectures). But I always needed a high-quality camcorder to get good results and the whole thing lacks the interactivity of a seminar.

Then a few months ago, Google started its new social network and released an extension of its video chat (horribly called “hangouts”) that offers video conferencing with up to 10 people for free.

After playing around with it for a while, I got my hands on a $40 HD-webcam (even though there’s no HD in g+, the webcam has a much better quality, in particular the audio). Lo and behold, it works reasonably well. Well enough anyway that I felt secure enough to broadcast it all the way to Japan a couple of weeks ago when Sam was in town and Andrew Brooke-Taylor could enjoy his talk (even though it was 6am in Kobe).

Google seems to continue to experiment with their tool, too, and now there’s a beta version you can select upon starting a hangout (“with extras”). This new version adds google docs integration as well as screen sharing. You can write notes collaboratively (even some basic math via their decent equation tool that will accept \alpha etc) and offers a whiteboard. But the screensharing adds a more general way of sharing notes, slides, papers etc (and did I mention a chat and generally the efficient way of switching between speakers? I guess I sound like a fanboy at this point anyway…)

More importantly, the beta hangout can be made public for viewing so that even though only 10 people can participate actively and many more can view it. It’s really quite amazing.

To settheorytalks and beyond!

Before Booles’ Rings, Sam and I had started settheorytalks just after the Young Set Theory Workshop in Bonn last year. By now we have a reasonable amount of regulars that post their announcements efficiently via email with little technical burden on them.

It would be wonderful to extend this idea. The natural candidates are, of course, the departments. If only all departments would offer some kind of syndication that we could aggregate, I’m sure we could set up a decent tool in virtually no time.

Once a decent aggregator is in place, the key would be to get people to take a leap and broadcast their seminars.

So my question to you: would you consider trying this?

The recent publishing debate — a timeline

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In the last 3 weeks I have written a couple of drafts about the debate that finally hit the mathematical blogosphere through Tim Gowers’s blog (I don’t know how much he is aware of similar, ongoing discussions in the scientific blogosphere beyond his Michael Nielsen link but in case my one two readers are not, here are two you should add to your feed reader).

/begin{shamelessplug}
Unfortunately, the mathematical blogosphere is not visible enough to ensure that people actually see this debate — simply because there’s not enough visibility even if mathblogging.org tries to help with this a little.
/end{shamelessplug}

After getting stuck in one draft after another, I would like to try to writing something, rather than nothing: so let me start by giving an overview on all the posts that I have seen since Tim Gowers’s first post on the subject.

Establishing a time line

That’s a lot and one of the reasons why this post was stuck in the draft mode — there was always another post to read (Addendum on Nov 28: Igor Carron pointed out that he hadn’t read Tim Gowers’s posts). The great thing about wordpress is that all my drafts remain in the versioning system, including my rants — who knows if I ever find the time to revisit them…

Since I didn’t read them in chronological order, I won’t write about them in chronological order, but I’ll start with Tim Gowers’s posts.

Gowers’s posts

At first, I was disappointed at Tim Gower’s first post. He describes a Mathoverflow-for-papers idea. That didn’t quite blow me away, to tell the truth, but it’s ok — at least he suggests something and starts a discussion!

What annoyed me slightly more (but again, not greatly) was his list of potential objections. They are all non-points for me — and to Gowers himself if you read his arguments against them. But I felt they changed the discussion into a discussion of these points rather than a the original questions “what could a system look like?” and “how do we get there?”.

What you could take away from Gowers’s first post is the question “Why don’t we try a mathoverflow for papers?”.

The second post is a very different read. My problem with it is mostly the selection of comments he replies to — but I can hardly blame Tim Gowers for discussing only comments from people he takes seriously (well, I will, actually).

The new proposal isn’t really much different from the old one in practice, but it addresses said comments. The main change is to get rid of everything disruptive from the first proposal so that the service might be broadly accepted. The new concept is simply a service to check each others preprints.

For me, the most interesting part of that post is the list of people that Tim Gowers listens to.

Here’s what I found odd (and ultimately disappointing) about the posts.

One

The first post looked like a test balloon. Gowers seemed to say: “I’d love to discuss this topic, here’s an idea, I want to do this here rather than in print, and I want your input”.

But the second post indicates that he only wanted to get some feedback to tweak his specific idea — and he doesn’t want to listen to anyone he doesn’t already trust. If he had said that in the first place, I wouldn’t have been disappointed.

Imagine he would have said: “let’s do a polymath-like project — how many different ways can you think of to reinvent the publishing system?”, now that would have been something!

Two

I wrote that, at first, I was disappointed. The reason was the lack of inspiration — “yet another stackexchange site”, and that’s it.

What had given me hope was the afterthought. In the very last lines Gowers points to the single biggest problem I see in research: “real” research means “new” results in peer-reviewed journals which means that we continue to live in an intellectual mono-culture, valuing only one type of accomplishment.

As simple as his first proposal was, at least it had some disruptive potential! Just imagine if all these “not real research” papers — surveys, expositions etc — would wind up on top of the heap! That could actually question the leadership within our research community, a leadership that is solely decided upon the current publishing system and no other abilities.

But, alas, all the disruptive potential was eliminated in the second post. Instead, we’re left with a project that fixes what peer-review is supposed to accomplish. The community does for free what the publishers should organize and pay for: actual, in-depth peer-review.

Finally, however, I realized that it’s silly of me to expect Timothy Gowers or any other researcher of a similar position to suggest something truly disruptive. After all, the system worked and works for him — and similarly for anybody else he listens to.

Let me end by stressing that despite my criticism, I find it quite wonderful that Tim Gowers has yet again managed to have the mathematical blogosphere catch up with the scientific one on one more important debate.

Since the original post was getting longer and longer, I will post this now and continue later.

Punkmath, annotatr and gender discussions

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So last week was pretty abysmal as I spent most of the time in bed with a cold like I haven’t had in a while. Since this led to a major shutdown of my brain I failed to do anything useful. Whenever it didn’t burn a hole in my brain I did read a few interesting things.

Punkmath

I seem to be both late and early to the party. I cannot quite reconstruct how I ended up reading about Tom Henderson’s projects, so this is rather random. He co-hosts the frakkin’ cool podcast Math for Primates together with Nick Horton, there’s mathpunk.net and punk mathematics and finally he can be found on twitter.

The sad thing is that all of Tom’s projects (apart from his twitter account) seem currently dormant while he writes a book — a book that he financed via kickstarter with an incredible USD28.000+ raised after aiming for a goal of USD2.400! That’s just absolutely mind-boggling to me. You can read an interesting interview with him on technoccult if you don’t have the time to listen to the podcasts (if you find the podcast’s topics all too familiar when it comes to topics for popularizing mathematics I would still argue you should check out their awesome style).

annotatr

So a while ago there was an interesting mathoverflow question on discussing mathematical papers online that was (of course) closed immediately but Ben Webster managed to revive it and it actually got some fascinating answers.

Besides the trouble that mathoverflow still has when it comes to long term development of questions, there were not only the favoured power user answers describing a potential system — there were actual pointers to such projects! What caught my eye immediately was, as you’ll understand, annotatr.

Annotatr is a sleeping beauty of a project. Hosted on the Google App Engine with open sourced code on github it makes you heart delight. Also, the simplicity of the idea is wonderful — combine citeulike with disqus, done.

Alas, it’s not working well so far. On the one hand the code hasn’t seen an update in half a year, on the other, there’s lack of a community. If mathblogging allows for it, I’d love to get acquainted with the code. I think if someone solves issues 2 and 3 it would be easy to get more people engaged.

Gender bias at mathematical conferences

A discussion took place at quomodocumque the other day. I wish I could say I was surprised by the early comments but I was glad to read all the good counter arguments to the displayed ignorance. I haven’t got around posting my 2 cents. I’ll write more here once I get around posting there (which I plan after getting Ivelisse Rubio’s MLK-day talk online on the department’s website). But you should really read it and join the discussion.

Now why did I throw this away?

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I once read the following anecdote about John von Neumann’s housekeeper (the only reference I found was, of course, on mathoverflow). Being asked what her impression of him was she is said to have replied that he is quite a nice man and all, but that she did not understand how he could get any work done; after a long day sitting at the desk writing he would just throw everything he’d done in the garbage. I thought Doron Zeilberger (unfortunately, I cannot find the opinion I was looking for — any help appreciated!) in one of his wonderful opinions pointed out that nothing would be greater bliss than to get our hands on all the failed attempts that von Neumann made. What we could learn from his mistakes!

I spent last weekend in Boston and for a bare half an hour worked on a proof that has consumed most of the last 3 weeks. The proof for the little piece I was wokring on didn’t seem to go anywhere, so I threw it away. Now, having written up what I can prove so far I yearn to read what I read back then — the modifications I made TeXing my progress just now remind me an awful lot of what I wrote on that piece of paper. Now why did I throw that away? Or better yet, why on earth did I write on a piece of paper instead of my moleskine? Damn.

Update Fred was kind enough to find the correct Zeilberger post for me:

BLAST 2010, first impressions

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I am spending this week in Boulder, Colorado, at the BLAST 2010 and it’s off to a great start.

There are many reasons I am enjoying myself. The city’s location is naturally amazing and I look forward to the conference hike on Friday. The town seems very nice as far as I got around and the campus is beautiful. Socially speaking, I thoroughly enjoy meeting familiar faces and friends in numbers I never experienced before. Scientifically speaking, the tutorials are excellent, both Matti Rubin and Andreas Blass are amazing teachers. Also, some personal conversations already led to new (and surprising) results, so that’s quite cool. I keep wondering a little if there could be a better format for talks in mathematics. The usual setup I have encountered so far seems consisting of invited speakers getting around 45 mins, others 30 mins. This mostly leads to invited speakers giving much too broad talks whereas the other speakers start to rush a lot. As much as I love LaTeXs Beamer class, the power point problem of too many and too easily forgotten slides hurts mathematical talks badly since there are no best practices, there is no power point zen for mathematics.

And there is this thought that always overcomes me at some point during conferences. After listening to fascinating and intricate new and old results, after getting a glimpse at so many concepts and techologies that I barely follow, I eventually start to worry about the future of pure mathematics mathematical logic. Why do we do it? Of course, a conference is not the ideal place for this question (but where is it?). Pure mathematicians might agree that mathematics is ‘mostly useless’ — just as art and literature and staring into the sky is mostly useless. Useless in that there are rarely immediate ‘real world’ applications in sight. Of course, history is on our side and there are many examples of extremely pure, mathematical results that came to be applied decades or centuries later.

For day to day lives, teaching seems the natural answer. Any student that is taught a class in a field of mathematical logic has gained an education in abstract thinking on a level that no other field of mathematics offers. But in the current scientific climate, teaching is not an accceptable justification, only research is (or really, publishablity and impact factor, sadly enough). But if reasearch is ‘mostly useless’, where does this leave us?

Tools for your online collaboration

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So the winter school in Hejnice ended two weeks ago is long past — and despite my intentions I did not find the time to blog. This is primarily a sign of the quality of the winter school, both scientifically and socially. I do admit I spent the lunch breaks walking in the beautiful surrounding mountains instead of blogging…

Anyway, on the last evening of the winter school a couple of people gathered together to exchange tools for collaborating via the intertubes. I volunteered — also with the upcoming third Young Set Theorists meeting in mind — to make the discussion available online. Of course, the title refers to this wonderful paper by Goldstern and Judah which taught me the little bit of iterated forcing that I know.

For now I will restrict myself to freemium services. Of course, this is an open list — drop me a comment to add to this list (hm, a google wave would be better, right?).

Phones

A much better tool than a phone is? A videophone! (especially for handwaving arguments). Namely, skype comes to mind, but there are alternatives like tokbox or google talk which are web based. With possibly lower video quality they offer other useful things like actual video conferences (whereas skype restricts you afaik to 1-1 video calls) and invitation by link. There are also numerous true VoIP/SIP clients like Ekiga. But they may have the need for some firewall configuring. For more general information, check out wikipedia.

Whiteboards

But what good is a (video)phone if you cannot write on a blackboard together? In any serious mathematical discussion, notation will become an issue sooner or later. A simple, but bandwidth friendly and flash based whiteboard is scriblink — just go to the site and give your partner the invitation link. An alternative is dabbleboard which offers some shape recognition and also allows multiple pages in the free version and — most importantly — PDFs as background images. However, it is a little heavy on the bandwidth, especially latency which often annoys my voip connection.

Of course, if you want to use an online whiteboard efficiently you need some kind of tablet to write with. I personally have been very happy with a graphics tablet, a Wacom Bamboo to be exact. You can get tablets for 40€ and lower in Germany, but prices will differ regionally. Of course, I also use my Gigabyte M1028T tablet pc — although its tablet functionality is basic (no pressure sensitivity, only moving by clicking) making writing with it less suitable for real note taking — see the PDF section below.

Eierlegende Wollmilchsau Swiss Army Knives

There are of course those services which offer all of the above at once. A prime example would be dimdim which offers a nice, unified service including video conferencing, instant messaging, whiteboard, pdf viewing and collaborative websurfing — all of this available with a free account which is limited only in the number of participants (and there are premium services available, of course).  Additionally dimdim’s server technology is mostly open source, so you can set up your own server if you have the means. Unfortunately, I never got the video conference system to work correctly under linux. Although not quite with collaboration in mind there is also the awesome TeamViewer. It is a great remote assistance tool designed for efficient access to another computer screen. In that sense you could use it to access your home or office machine from anywhere — if your department allows that. But in the latest version (although windows only) Teamviewer also offers Video chat and a whiteboard to communicate. For further tools look here.

Instant Chat, Online Docs and Google Wave

Personally, I have not used instant messaging for mathematics so far — video phones seem better. However, Pidgin has a LaTeX plugin to display basic TeX code. This is of course a useful feature. I’ll come back to the general problem of displaying mathematics on the web later.

I feel I must also mention Google Wave and its competitors. These are powerful tool mixing mail, chat, wikis and collaborative document editing. I have not tried any of these yet but if there’s someone to collaborate with it’s worth a try.

PDFs I — what you can do with them

PDFs is the somewhat dominant standard for (compiled) TeX documents (sorry, dvi and ps fans). Besides the next section there is another aspect which makes them worthwhile — PDF annotation. If you are like me and like to take your notes with you (for all those typos and indices that drive you mad in some papers) there is nothing better than annotating a PDF directly — especially if you invested in a (graphics) tablet.

My favourite is the open source Xournal with excellent tablet support on both linux and windows. Alternatives are Jarnal (which also works as real time whiteboard) and (for Mac users) Skim.

Although it does not quite fit in here (or anywhere): if you feel that PDFs are inadequate to present mathematics, why don’t you take a look at prezi? It offers a different angle on presentations altogether. I sometimes dream of having a prezi like ability to zoom into papers or rather proofs giving me details where I want them and letting me quickly browse through the main ideas dynamically whenever I choose to…

PDFs II — Personal online libraries

It is convenient to store papers and other materials online. If you cannot set up a decent sftp or a version control system on your university’s server, you might want to try dropbox or teamdrive. If you frequently use public computers you might want to use something more web based like google documents or the very pretty isssu that I use from time to time on this blog.

Community Sites

Of course, all science is community driven but I think (pure) mathematics could profit more from an online community than any other science or (liberal) art. The biggest player is certainly facebook — which already has a group for, of course, the winterschool itself. Facebook attracts academia (as opposed to myspace), hence it is the more obvious place to connect — this does not mean that you shouldn’t worry about its privacy settings or rather the partial lack thereof.

On the other hand, there are a couple of science focused community sites, among them researchgate which offer science specific tools like (p)reprint lists, online references, database searches etc. This might be better for purely professional intent but I have no experience using it.

A young and incredibly successful new site is mathoverflow — a mathematical version of the great stackoverflow. You can ask and answer questions of all sorts in a very efficient manner — just don’t get lost in all the fun.

Databases

Of course the mother of all things is the arXiv — do I need to explain it? And then there are Google’s products scholar and book search. A somewhat different database is gigapedia where you can easily search for books and find free ones. In all things beware of legal issues though.

LaTeX or displaying mathematics on the web

Of course mathematicians are used to LaTeX. On the web the best way for displaying mathematics is (from a web standards point of view) mathml. The problem is that mathml is a) too difficult to write as code directly, b) difficult to view since not all browsers view them correctly and from a visually impaired point of view it seems to be a disaster, too (see the discussion on Terry Tao’s blog) and c) it is difficult to convert back to LaTeX.

There are numerous workarounds. On the one hand you can (as I do) use tex4ht to convert LaTeX to mathml. Of course, as my blog shows this is a rather tedious thing if you do not have (or want to have) control over the webserver. Alternatives are jsMath which might be superseded by mathjax. If you have a wordpress blog you can (even on your free account on wordpress.com) use this plugin — which converts basic LaTeX commands into (rather ugly) PNGs.

The winner for best practices with mathml, I think, is the n-Category Cafe. Besides being a very active group blog they have developed impressive technologies such as mathml inclusion, the LaTeX dialect itex, the itex capable instiki with itex2mml to convert tex to mathml on the fly and all of this available in the comments, too.

Blogs, blogs, blogs

Almost last but in no way least, there are blogs.  This would be worth an independent post and there are plenty of examples for this, but here we go.

They come in all colours, for an impressive list go here. Also, go to any of those blogs and check their blogroll to find many more mathematics blogs. If you don’t understand what blogs are good for you might read John Baez’s article. To name a few contenders for ‘most influential mathematical blogs’: What’s new with Terence Tao, the most active single user blog I know, Timothy Gowers’s Weblog and Gil Kallai’s Combinatorics and more.

Of course, they are the ones that got me started with reading math blogs, but it’s the small blogs that got me hooked. The diversity is a challenge (I don’t understand half of what I read) but blogs form the best mathematics newspaper out there.

Polymath

At the moment the most hardcore project when it comes to online collaboration is clearly Polymath. With one paper on the arxiv, two projects finished and three projects going it is the perfect show case. Driven by the “big three” — Tao, Gowers, Kallai — one may argue that their power makes sure that it works (and is protected from theft). Polymath is an exemplary web project. It follows Jeff Jarvis’s rule and shows the synergetic behaviour of web projects — using multiple technologies at once: there’s the blog for the main discussion, but also the authors individual blogs used partly to organize. Finally there’s the wiki for fixing proper definitions and notational issues and finally they frequenly use mathoverflow to recruit new people by e.g. singling out distinct partial or dervitative questions.

But I believe it shows a glimpse of the future of mathematics. On the one hand, many problems have become too complex to be tackled by a single person or research group. On the other hand, although the techology might change considerably in the future, the idea of having researchers on all levels collaborate — with every contribution being valued — could be a prototype that values many soft skills, be it good writing, accessible presentation, social skills for bringing conversations to converge productively, taking a bird’s view of the process to assist or acquiring empirical experimentation and implementation. It is also a very flexible approach where people can help as much or as little as they find the time for while (with proper support like Gower’s current EDP posts) still being able to follow the flow and ideally being able to change their level of involvement as they please.\

That’s all for now. Let me know what I forgot.

Addenda

2010-02-15

Unicode characters

There was also a question regarding unicode characters and the like (instead of mathml). I just found this chart via mathoverflow — maybe it helps.

2010-02-17

Feeds and feed readers

Feeds in either Real simple syndication (RSS) or Atom from are worth mentioning on its own. As a tool for 1-to-infinity communication it’s an important technology for collaboration. You’ll find feeds for all kinds of newssites and blogs, but also for each section of the arxiv. To read feeds you can use lots of different programs and web based services.

Video sites

Videos of research level mathematics are pretty rare. There is the archive of the MSRI and singular popular mathematics gems like Gowers’s talk on multiplication. Also, you should check out MIT’s impressive youtube channel.

To put up a video you don’t need much these days, so it’s strange that there’s not more around — especially since (pure) mathematics seems easier to share than, say, complicated science experiments. There are too many free video sites out there. Next to the already mentioned youtube I would point out the science video site SciVee (with its strong, yet somewhat expensive premium service) and Vimeo with its focus on original content.

Reference management

Thanks to David for reminding me that I forgot one aspect of pdf management — reference management (see the list on wikipedia). Now there are many programs out there to get your citations, i.e., your BibTeX files organized. But there are also programs that connect the citations with the pdf, offer online database searches, tags, pdf annotation and social networking ideas.

A big list can (once again) be found on wikipedia. To present a few. I personally use referencer but David also mentioned Mendeley in his comment which has an impressive list of features including online access and social network aspects and I’ll probably try it out. To give credit where it is due a few of these programs name Papers as inspiration which unfortunately is Mac only. With a different flavour there are the web-only Zotero, a powerful Firefox addon, and I, Librarian, a groupware tool.

Good news, bad news

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Just so that not another week ends without me writing a post. The bad news is that my departure for Michigan gets closer and the technicalities take up more and more time. Therefore I’m not sure I’ll have much time to post in the next couple of weeks. Additionally, I’ll be attending a winter school in Hejnice in the first week of February so I also need to prepare finish preparing my talk.

So what’s the good news? Well, I have been busy on the blog but nothing has come of it yet. On the one hand I have been studying the Google App Engine so as to move the blog there — which should make the work flow much more efficient (and the code better). On the other hand that there are three blog posts I have not finished — so there’s a chance the dry spell will be over sooner than I think. Finally, I hope to write posts during the winter school reflecting on the (possibly daily) experience.

Well, let me at least throw in some nice links worth a read. Gil Kallai turned a mathoverflow question into the kind of blog posts I really like . Over at the n-Category Cafe David Corfield explains muses over the “sacred” and the “profane” in mathematics (or rather for mathematicians) which made me ponder what my own “bottom line” is.