tea.mathoverflow.net - Discussion Feed (About whether a certain kind of question is suitable)

Harry Gindi comments on "About whether a certain kind of question is suitable" (13787)

Harry Gindi — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 05:18:25 -0700

The only problem with questions like this is that they tend to be very technical and often will not receive any answers for a long time, but that's only really a problem for you, not the site itself, so feel free to do it =).

vinoth comments on "About whether a certain kind of question is suitable" (13783)

vinoth — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 20:19:39 -0700

Ok I'll start asking a couple of such questions.

Yes certainly very few people in the world would consider BD easy, and I certainly think it is very hard. What I meant was, each of my questions would be asking to decipher a line from BD that I don't understand, and that probably won't take much space, though the material is quite hard. (Whereas most questions on MO, the answer is "read this paper" or something like that).

Pete L. Clark comments on "About whether a certain kind of question is suitable" (13782)

Pete L. Clark — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 20:00:25 -0700

In my opinion it is absolutely okay to ask such questions on MO. Your idea of bundling together related smallish questions is probably a good one.

By the way, "easy" is certainly a subjective term, but I have yet to hear it used to describe any of the work of Beilinson and/or Drinfeld. I for one look forward to the possibility of learning something about this topic by sheer osmosis.

vinoth comments on "About whether a certain kind of question is suitable" (13781)

vinoth — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 19:57:48 -0700

I'm currently working through Beilinson-Drinfeldt's "Quantization of Hitchin's integrable system & Hecke eigensheaves", and Dennis's seminar (http://www.math.harvard.edu/~gaitsgde/grad_2009/) which focuses this book.

Is it suitable for me to ask questions from this book? Sometimes when I try digesting a certain section from BD, I usually have several small & related questions to ask about it, I was wondering if I could post a question about it when this happens. Each of the "questions" is too small/uneconomic to ask in itself, but together after I accumulate a few of these questions there is something substantial.

The reason I'm asking is usually questions on Overflow are specific and usually non-easy, here I'd be asking a few questions together (each of them probably considered easy to an expert).