Biweekly links for 03/13/2009

  • Polymath1 and open collaborative mathematics « Gowers’s Weblog
    • “… for me personally this has been one of the most exciting six weeks of my mathematical life. That is partly because it is always exciting to solve a problem, but a much more important reason is the way this problem was solved, with people chipping in with their thoughts, provoking other people to have other thoughts (sometimes almost accidentally, and sometimes more logically), and ideas gradually emerging as a result. Incidentally, many of these ideas are still to be properly explored: at some point the main collaboration will probably be declared to be over (though I suppose in theory it could just go on and on, since its seems almost impossible to clear up every interesting question that emerges) and then I hope that the comments will be a useful resource…

      The sheer speed at which all this happened contributed to the excitement. In my own case it led to my becoming fairly obsessed with the project and working on it to the exclusion of almost everything else… “

  • Twenty years of the world wide web | The Economist
    • “Science inspired the world wide web. Two decades on, the web has repaid the compliment by changing science”
  • Get our full university data | guardian.co.uk
  • Paul Graham: Be Relentlessly Resourceful
    • One of my favourites of pg’s essays: “A couple days ago I finally got being a good startup founder down to two words: relentlessly resourceful.”

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