{"id":555,"date":"2009-02-09T01:00:56","date_gmt":"2009-02-09T05:00:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/?p=555"},"modified":"2009-02-09T01:05:17","modified_gmt":"2009-02-09T05:05:17","slug":"update-on-the-polymath-project","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/update-on-the-polymath-project\/","title":{"rendered":"Update on the polymath project"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A few brief comments on the first iteration of the <a href=\"http:\/\/gowers.wordpress.com\/2009\/01\/27\/is-massively-collaborative-mathematics-possible\/\">polymath   project<\/a>, Tim Gowers&#8217; ongoing experiment in collaborative mathematics: <\/p>\n<ul>\n<li> The project is remarkably active, with nearly 300 substantive   mathematical comments in just the first week.  It shows few signs   of slowing down.\n<li> It&#8217;s perhaps not (yet) a &#8220;massively&#8221; collaborative project,   but many mathematicians are contributing &#8211; a quick pass over the   comments suggests that so far 14 or so people have made   substantive mathematical contributions, and it seems likely that   number will rise further.  Unsurprisingly, that number already rises   considerably if you include people who have made comments on the   collaborative process.\n<li> Regardless of the outcome of the project, I expect that many   beginning research students in mathematics will find this a great   resource for understanding what research is about.  It&#8217;s a way of   seeing research mathematicians as they work &#8211; trying ideas out,   making occcasional errors, backtracking, and so on.  I suspect many   students will find this incredibly enlightening.  To pick just one   example of why this may be, my experience is that many beginning   students assume that the key to research success lies in having   great leaps of insight to solve difficult problems.  The discussion   shows something quite different: you see excellent mathematicians   following up every little lead, trying out many different approaches   to problems, seeing many, many ideas fail, and gradually aggregating   small insights, as a bigger picture only very slowly emerges.\n<li> The discussion so far has been courteous and professional in the   highest degree.  I suspect such courteous and professional behaviour   greatly increases the chances of success in such a collaboration.   I&#8217;m reminded of the famous   <a href=\"http:\/\/www.math.ufl.edu\/misc\/hlrules.html\">Hardy-Littlewood<\/a>   rules for collaboration.  Tim Gowers&#8217;   <a href=\"http:\/\/gowers.wordpress.com\/2009\/02\/01\/questions-of-procedure\/\">rules     of collaboration<\/a> have something of the same flavour.\n<li> One might say that this courtesy and professionalism is only to   be expected, given the many professional mathematicians   participating.  Unfortunately, it&#8217;s not difficult to find excellent   blogs run by professional scientists where the comment sections are   notably less courteous and professional.  I&#8217;ll omit examples.\n<li> Initially, I wasn&#8217;t so sure about the idea of using the linear   medium of blog comments to run such a project.  It seemed   restrictive to use anything less than a multi-threaded forum, if   forum software could be found that was geared towards mathematics.   (Something like Google Groups would be good, but it doesn&#8217;t provide   any way to display mathematics, so far as I&#8217;m aware.) The linear   format has worked much better than I thought it would.  Although at   times it makes the discussion difficult to follow, the linear format   has the benefit of preventing the conversation (and the   collaborative community) from fracturing too much.  This may be   something to think about for future projects.\n<li> Many large-scale collaborative projects make it easy for late   entrants to make a contribution. For example, in the   <a href=\"http:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/?p=267\">Kasparov versus the     World<\/a> chess game, new participants could enter late in the game   and come up to speed quickly.  This was in part because of the   nature of chess (only the current board matters, not past   positions), but it was also partially because of the public analysis   tree maintained for much of the game by Irina Krush.  This acted as   a key reference point for World Team decisions, and summarized much   of the then-current best thinking about the game.  In a similar way,   many open source projects encourage late entry, with new   participants able to jump in after looking at the existing code base   (analogous to the state of the chess board), and the project wiki   (analogous to the analysis tree).  As the polymath project   continues, I hope similar points of entry will enable outsiders to   follow what is happening, and to contribute, without necessarily   having to follow the entire discussion to that point.\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A few brief comments on the first iteration of the polymath project, Tim Gowers&#8217; ongoing experiment in collaborative mathematics: The project is remarkably active, with nearly 300 substantive mathematical comments in just the first week. It shows few signs of slowing down. It&#8217;s perhaps not (yet) a &#8220;massively&#8221; collaborative project, but many mathematicians are contributing&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/update-on-the-polymath-project\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Update on the polymath project<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[62,49],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-555","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-polymath1","category-the-future-of-science-2","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/555","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=555"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/555\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=555"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=555"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=555"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}