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Somebody wishes to create a list of best math speakers and/or popularizers.
There might be need for a meta thread so here it is.
Personally, I am quite strongly against this. As asking for a list of best speakers in my opinion is the archetypal example of something subjective. And, chance are there will be potentially unfriendly discussions.
If somebody meant to create a list of good examples of talks popularizing mathematics that would be something else.
To me this seems on various counts the better question. I do not know what the general opinion is, but I would not vote to close it (at least not right away).
If I were you I would however wait for more feedback. Also the question arises whether you edit your question or create a new one; not sure.
I like the idea of making the question about the content of the talk, rather than the name of the speaker.
Whatever the question, it is exceptionally important for these sorts of questions to have a very clear purpose. What is the intended utility of the question and answers? Is there any sense in which this role is not fulfilled by the google search great math talks or popularization of mathematics? How about searching amazon for popular mathematics and looking at customer reviews? If you do not make it clear what is unsatisfactory about these, the thread will be full of noise which either duplicates that content or points to it.
More generally, the question should make it very clear what constitutes an answer. Suppose somebody answers, "Ravi Vakil's talk about Murphey's Law is excellent." That may be true, but such an answer is likely not what you're looking for. A thread full of such answers would be frustrating for everybody.
Even if the question is made more defined, it seems likely that it would be a poor fit for MO (e.g. if the goal is an extended discussion of opinions about math PR).
@expmat: Google will give you a pretty thorough answer to your question about cancer -- giving much more information than the average doctor would be willing to bring up in a conversation.
It is especially important for "soft" questions and "big list" questions to be precise. Otherwise they'll be boring and useless. "What are the best number theory books" is a bad question. Best for what? Assuming what background? A better version of the question might be "What are the best textbooks for an undergraduate number theory course?" or "After an undergraduate number theory course, what should I learn if I want to study elliptic curve cryptography?" These questions aren't great, but they make it clear what the starting point is and what the goal is.
There are few things worse than a question which is too vague, too broad, or imprecise. Not only is it lazy to ask a vague or imprecise question, it's also rude. You're essentially asking somebody to do the work of figuring out what you want to ask, and then answer it, or to answer several possible interpretations of your question. Suppose somebody asks, "What do you guys think about Foobar's new paper?" Even if this is exactly in my field, and I understand Foobar's paper better than Foobar himself, I have no idea where to start answering a question like that. Compare to, "Does Foobar's regularization construction solve the Baz-Flipt Conjecture?" As an expert, this is something I can actually answer.
Your question fails the above test from the "How to ask" page.
For example, why isn't the list of recipients of the Leroy P. Steele prize the answer to your question?
http://www.ams.org/profession/prizes-awards/ams-prizes/steele-prize
@expmat: there seem to be some misunderstandings.
You say: "I even made it into a community wiki to avoid this kind of problem." However, the appropriateness of a question does not depend on whether it is CW or not. (Some question should be CW some not; if it asks mainly for a list, as does yours, it should be CW; but still the list to be created needs to make a suitable MO question.)
You say: "I was accused of being argumentative [...]" First, I did not accuse you of anything. What I gave was the reason for which I voted to close the question, which is called "subjective and argumentative" (as opposed to, say, "too localized", "not a real question", "spam", and a couple more from a drop down list I can chose from). Now, I would say that the statement that the asnwers and the voting will be highly subjective is not an unfair one. Define "good/best speaker"? Moreover, since the answers are subjective I am worried that people will express their disagreement with some answers and this will lead to discussion/arguments. And, in particular for the original form of the question, these discussion in my opinion cannot be very productive but potentially harmful. While I can imagine a reasonable discussion over whether a given book is good for subject S, it is much harder to imagine a reasonable discussion on whether mathematician M is a good speaker. From experience, even for the former question, sometimes the discussion get heated. And, the latter is in my opinion much more personal relative to the person that is 'discussed'.
Now for the new version. Essentially the only thing you were asked for is to make your question (more) precise.
Finally, there is a popular math books question .
See the subsequent, related effort by the OP.
@expmat, your "Paraphrasing A. Geraschenko ..." remark is misleading; it suggests that Anton hopes your new question is appropriate for MO, which I don't think is the case.
"Blue! No, wait, yell - aargh! ..."
Given how long it took to stomp out the "suggest a math(s) puzzle to talk about at dinner parties, because that's clearly what mathematicians do there" question, I am perhaps quicker to vote to close on Big List That Could Be Interesting questions than when I first joined MO.
There are lots of things that interest me. There is a reasonably large subset, of things which interest me as a mathematician. A smaller but significant subset of that is stuff I might chat with other mathematicians about, as and when the occasion or blogpost arises. The subset of those I think are worth broaching on MathOverflow is much, much smaller. It isn't a chatroom.
What to me is serioulsly unclear is why the OP did not take more of the suggestions made before the second question on board. I assume s/he has a clear idea of what types of talks would interest him/her as answers. I really cannot see why it is such a big deal to spell this out and avoid resorting to supergeneral adjectives like 'soft' and alike. And that the suggestion that others make precise what the OP means seems frankly a strange one to me; I really do not know what the OP is actually looking for.
For example while I like many talks on math that are (in some sense) soft, these talks have very little to do with popularization for the general public. By contrast, I typically personally dislike most talks that are suitable for popularization for the general public (even if I can appreciate abstractly that they are well done for the target audience and useful for the purpose; but I am not the target audience for general popularization). So, meanwhile I really do not know what the OP is actually looking from the desciption given so far. And, to collect whatever math video that somebody likes...we did that already.
Paraphrasing A. Geraschenko: I hope this is appropriate for MO, since I think it is of interest to mathematicians (at least to those who enjoy mathematics also as a form of art and not only as science).
I'll simply duplicate my comment here: I emphatically do not feel this question is appropriate for MO. I am especially disappointed to see you "paraphrasing" me like this since I clearly explained on meta what was lacking about your previous question, and you appear to have completely ignored that explanation.
@Shevak, it is really quite unsurprising that "of interest to mathematicians" is not considered by many here to be enough of a reason for a question to be allowed on Mathoverflow.
I am pretty sure that sex is of interest to a significant part of the mathematical community...
@Anton: Regarding the paraphrasing, I agree it is strange in view of the meta discussion. But I have some explanation where it comes from (though it would still be a misattribution, but this should be an honest mistake). Namely the popular math books question linked above contains a phrase like this at the end, and since you edited that question last one could be mislead to believe that was your question and you said this there.
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