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Thursday, March 19, 2009

Open notebook mathematics

The Polymath1 project is an open collaborative mathematics project initiated on Timothy Gowers's blog and continued in further blog posts and comments and on a wiki. See also the project timeline. (Thanks to Entertaining Research.) See also this later post from Gowers:
Without anyone being particularly aware of it, a race has been taking place. Which would happen first: the comment count reaching 1000, or the discovery of a new proof of the density Hales-Jewett theorem for lines of length 3? Very satisfyingly, it appears that DHJ(3) has won. If this were a conventional way of producing mathematics, then it would be premature to make such an announcement — one would wait until the proof was completely written up with every single i dotted and every t crossed — but this is blog maths and we’re free to make up conventions as we go along. So I hereby state that I am basically sure that the problem is solved (though not in the way originally envisaged). ...