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October 19, 2009

Math Overflow

Posted by David Corfield

The math-blogosphere is abuzz with interest in the new Math Overflow, a mathematics questions and answers site. Already we at the Café have been helped with the answer to a query on the Fourier transform of a certain kernel, and there are some juicy questions for us to answer there too, including

You can read a discussion on Math Overflow, and a debate concerning its advantages relative to nLab.

Posted at October 19, 2009 9:01 AM UTC

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3 Comments & 0 Trackbacks

Re: Math Overflow

I looked at this because it seemed interesting. I found that the text is a bit too hard, too faint, to read. Maybe this is set by default and my eyes are too old. The solution to making the contrast more readable can be found at nLab.

“This nifty script fixes the eyestrain caused by poorly designed blog contrasts. 15 seconds to install, works for Firefox only.”

Posted by: Stephen Harris on October 19, 2009 9:15 PM | Permalink | Reply to this

Re: Math Overflow

On the subject of matrix mechanics, Zoran asks what rig is involved in the Matsubara formalism. Has this something to do with John’s gnomic utterance that ‘temperature lives on the Riemann sphere’?

Following the link to the sci.math discussion, though, I see John alludes to KMS states, which Wikipedia has as an alternative approach to thermal quantum field theoty.

Posted by: David Corfield on October 20, 2009 12:10 PM | Permalink | Reply to this

Re: Math Overflow

I’m very enthusiastic about Math Overflow right now. There are at least four excellent things about it:

  1. The administrators are keeping the level of the questions very high: it’s all research-level stuff
  2. There are some seriously intelligent people playing an active part there
  3. People are asking really interesting questions
  4. People are giving really interesting answers!

If it can keep up the momentum, it’s going to be a magnificent thing.

Posted by: Tom Leinster on October 21, 2009 3:59 AM | Permalink | Reply to this

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