What is math blogging?
Felix Breuer
28.1.2011
Social Media and Mathematics
- Social media
- "a blending of technology and social interaction for the co-creation of value" (wikipedia)
- examples: Wikipedia, Blogs, Facebook, Twitter, etc.
- role in math? wide open!
- What's new?
- Communication is
- focused on dialogue
- informal
- distributed
- open
Outline
What is out there?
- wikis (briefly)
- mathoverflow
- blogging in other sciences
- blogging in math
- mathblogging.org
- a few examples
- polymath
Wikis
- encyclopedias
- libraries/databases
- collaboration
Blogging in other sciences
- very large community
- a few examples
- large blogging networks
- useful aggregators
Blogging in mathematics
- comparatively small community (~150 blogs)
- who?
- what?
- group blogs
- two examples
- members take turns writing posts
- read and comment on each other's blogs
Mathblogging.org
- where to start exploring?
- www.mathblogging.org
- features
- index of 149 math blogs
- posts listed by date
- blogs listed by category
- a selection of favourites
- open source project
- beta started January 1st
- by Peter Krautzberger, Fred von Heymann and myself
- tell us about your blog!
- feedback about our site is welcome!
Writing blogs
- motivations for blogging see scienceofblogging.com
- present your work
- network
- learn about math
- keep a journal of your work
- experiment with writing styles or media
- reach the general public
- stimulate discussion (see group blogs)
- issues
- math blogosphere still too small?
- how to find blogs that interest you?
- how to attract readers to your blog?
- writing about ongoing work? credit for ideas?
Polymath project
- "crowd-sourcing" proofs
- principles
- develop a proof collaboratively
- everyone shares their ideas
- ...in short, readable comments
- ...even if they are undeveloped or likely "wrong"
- publicity against plagiarism
- organization
- discussion takes place in blogs
- wiki used for summarizing discussion
- prominent role in checking Deolalikar's P/=NP proof attempt
- discussion via blogs 1 2 and wiki pages 3 4
Conclusion
- online math is still developing
- math blogging has a lot of potential
- to really take off, the math blogosphere has to grow
- so start reading and writing blogs!
www.mathblogging.org
PS: A Note on Technology
- reading blogs
- writing blogs
- some commercial blogging networks such as wordpress support LaTeX markup
- you can also roll your own, as described here
- to experiment with writing LaTeX markup for use in webbrowsers, try TiddlyWiki with a suiteable plugin