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I suspect this is someone who is angry with the way this meta thread is going.
http://mathoverflow.net/questions/74312/choice-of-color
Seems deliberately trollish.
Ryan, that's my feeling too, but I didn't want to draw notice to the trollery.
What question 74312? I don't see it; likely a moderator has deleted it. Hopefully the troll or sock puppet is being properly whacked too.
Gerhard "Ask Me About System Design" Paseman, 2011.09.01
It was deleted as spam. Here was the original text:
I have a thesis defense in a month. I heard it important for my career in math to make a good impression on the committee. What color dress should I ware: red or green? What if my eyes are brown? What if my area of research is algebraic topology?
The author was Elsa Pferd.
grp: It's gone now. In any case (except in the highly unlikely event it was a serious question), I think it was a joke in very bad taste.
Ryan: why do you think meta specifically? (I'd rather guess the person was not following meta.)
General: But, since the questioner said, one should close the question, one could simply follow this request.
@quid: Mostly because of how large this meta thread has become. But you're right, it's possible they were only responding to the MO thread.
Ryan, thanks, I thought there was something specific. The question got bumped recently because of the badge edit; this might too be it. But, I will shut-up now, not to make the thread even longer.
@ESQG: At first I wanted to write a detailed response, but having just type a page with no end in sight, I thought noone will care about a 5+ pages essay on this from me so only briefly (some more details can be obtained from what I already wrote on this, though sometimes in a bit of an unstructured and scattered form):
First, a technical remark, you can access versions of the question by clicking on the date (Presently Sept 1, in the middle below the question).
In my opinion, this debate, and your comment explicitly or implicitly mixes two issues.
The main 'problem' with this question is, in my opinion, what I wrote in my (and globbaly the) first comment on this question:
I quote it for convenincence:
I vote to close this question, as I think it has nothing to do with mathematics. While you ask about mathematicians, I strongly believe that in this regard there is nothing specific to mathematics relative to other scientific disciplines (or perhaps even other professional activities).
In slightly more detail. I consider an advice question on MO as (potentially) appropriate if the situation is directly related to and specific to (research/academic) mathematics. To make the 'specific to' more explicit, if for such a question I believe that the answers would be the same or very similar if it was asked for experimental physics, life sciences, philosophy, history,... (or a significant subset thereof) then I think it is off-topic for MO. As said, I think this question is not specific to mathematics and as such off-topic. As a first approximation, this is all there is to it.
Now, the main part of this discussion is on something quite different and I contributed to it, but somehow this discussion was forced upon me. Due to the fact that various people explictly or implicitly claimed that the question was closed / people request its closure because it is 'for women' or something along these lines. Having my user-name prominently in the case for closure this indirectly, but then quite directly, accuses me of some sort of misogynism (perhaps this word is too strong, but I do not know a weaker as precise one). Pseudonymus or not, I could not let this stand.
I really did not want to start such a debate, and so at first tried to avoid it by saying the following:
If this question and discussion stays active, I would suggest it is changed to a gender-neutral one. I do not think that the differences between such a situation for a male and a female mathematician are sufficiently different to requier carrying out such a discussion in a gender-specific way.
Which in retrospect was too cryptical, as people understood this as some form of complaint that male mathematicians are left out; it seems to me that your comment also goes in this direction. Yet the point of this comment to me was something else: to leave 'gender' out of this debate as to me this was irrelevant for the closure and also to point out something I found unfortunate. I will discuss your disclaimer. But there is something else, and I'd say one can also challenge that the disclaimer applies in this case.
In the original version the second paragraph is missing. So that
Is there a set convention for which name (maiden name or married name) a female married mathematician should use?
clearly suggest that every married woman changed here name upon marriage, and that this is the norm, and that every woman should change her name upon marriage. I do find such a formulation unfortunate.
Now, regarding your disclaimer. But, who is the minority in this context? (Also cf. my response to Yemon on the heavily downvoted answer.) Let us try a slight modification of the first sentence:
Is there a set convention for which name (birth name or married name) a married mathematician should use?
I guess if somebody has a gender-association in this context then it would be 'female person' anyway; the number of people for whom 'mathematician' is so strongly and purely a male notion that even in the context of name-change-on-marriage (which I assume for a person with such a mind-set typically would have strongly female connotations) should meanwhile be quite small, at least so I strongly hope.
Thus, it seems to me not at all clear whether the first part of your disclaimer applies in the present situation. So, that according to your assertion, one could interpret the formulation as unfortunate for this reason. (As I said this was not my issue with the formulation.)
To put it differently, I do think that making minorities visible can be valuable, but the context has to be apt. Otherwise this 'making visible', turns into reinforcing or creating stereotypes.
Yet, none of this all is the reason why I think the question is off-topic and as such should have been closed. If it is not specific to mathematics it is off-topic whether it applies to all, a majority, or a minority of mathematicians.
@ESQG: I agree with you that there is nothing wrong with career-related questions which apply mostly to women, or indeed with questions which apply exclusively to women. My impression is that most people who objected to the question did so for other reasons. (I could be wrong about this -- the objections don't make much sense to me, so I might be ill-eqipped to look at things from the objectors' point of view.) In any case, there are already plenty of questions which apply mainly to US mathematicians, or to graduate students, or to post-docs, or to people with spouses facing two-body problems, etc.
Just a reminder what OP of the question said in this thread (Sep 1st):
Anyway, I think the answers provided thus far have provided enough of a basis for future askers of this question to find their own solutions. How do I say this? "I vote to close"? I don't want this question (or its meta-questions) to keep us from our research any longer.
Gil Kalai: I should have added that me quoting was not meant so much as an endorsement for closure but mainly as information. (In particualr, in its edited form personally I have not much problem with the question; I think it is off-topic, as not math related enough, though then not extremly so, if some find it useful to keep it open I certainly won't 'fight' for it being closed.) For purely practical reasons I might find it unfortunate to close the meta thread separately. As we saw in this case, once a new answer is added and the question thus resurfaces questions related to it arise.