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The author of this question has just emailed those of us who voted to close, with the following:
Hello,
Would you be so kind as to specify your reasons for closing my question. I have read the MO info on how to ask a question and thought I had conformed. In my opinion this question is as hard to answer as the Riemann hypothesis. If I am mistaken in my evaluation I would appreciate it if you would inform me. I have never seen an equation of this type for n>2. If you you know of the existance of such equations for n>2 I would be very grateful if you could direct me to them.
Respectfully yours, Vassilis Parassidis
I am posting the text here to avoid unnecessary duplication, but also to try and provide the OP with a more cogent response than would be obtained by separate email exchanges.
For some extra context, 9 out of Vassilis Parassidis' 11 questions have been closed. I'm pretty happy to volunteer to write a heavy-handed moderator email, asking him to take his business elsewhere, if no one has a better solution.
I am hoping that the moderators have a collection of templates to use, and that one of them will be appropriate to use for Vassilis Parassidis. I can imagine such a response being:
"You have asked several questions, many of which have been closed for similar reasons. A moderator review of some of these questions notes that they run counter to the policies of MathOverflow in the following ways: - being unclear - inviting discussion as opposed to direct answers - not being a good fit with the interests of any substantial part of the MathOverflow community
There have been several recommendations in the comments about how to improve the questions, and not enough response from you regarding such improvement.
The moderators are now getting several requests concerning your behaviour. If you are not able to receive and implement the suggestions you were given to make questions more acceptable for this forum, we may have to suspend your ability to post questions or answers on MathOverflow. "
However, there should probably at least two moderators who agree on the content of such a response. Another user, Asterios Gantzounis, asked variations on the same theme which might be tiring to some but helped me in understanding some results in prime gaps. If there is a similar supporter of Vassilis Parassidis, I encourage them to speak up before a moderator email is sent.
Gerhard "Ask Me About System Design" Paseman, 2011.10.11
As I said in another thread it is my impression that the user in question truly tries to use the site in good faith. However, it is also my impression that the user is in some sense too far away from the main-stream of the MO community.
Some questions are not clear to me. Yemon's example is one of them. (The request for applications to information technology seems particularly surprising, but might actually be an, albeit unfortunate, atempt to comply to the rules of giving context and motivation.)
Yet, for the one mentioned in voloch's post the situation is a bit different. As commented by Gerry Myerson it is vague. But reasonably interpretable. For example, if one takes it as asking for simple/natural examples of infinite families of naturals such that x + 1, x + 2, x + 3 are all composite, then one could give an answer by exhibiting an appropriate residue class such as 1 modulo 6. And explain a bit around this.
Now, neither to work with users on the formulation of their question, nor to answer a question of the above level is in the scope of MO. Yet if one continues on this theme a bit one arrives at interesting and hard questions. In this sense one could give an interesting answer.
My suggestion to the user would only be to try to use math.SE instead of MO and in adiition (that is there) to make the questions more clear. To me a main rational for suggesting not to use MO is that the 'language' of MO is that of research mathematicians, while math.SE in my observation is more willing to also accept contributions in the language of an interested and informed person that does not express him/herself in the standard-jargon of the former group. (To avoid a misconception I do not wish to criticise that the sitiation on MO is like this, actually I am in favor of it being like this; all I want to say is that if one does not write like a research mathmatcian on MO, one is at a very serious disadvantage and this is to some extent independent of the content of the question. To avoid another misconception, I do not want to claim that the content of the questions is such that they are good MO questions but at least some are reasonable mathematical questions.)
Regarding making the questions more clear, I would add that more clear does not mean more terse or more formal. So that in that regard a more practical/useful suggestion could be to make the questions longer and so that they contain a certain level of repetition to make it easier to infer what is actually meant, including examples and alike. (Not for MO but for math.SE this might help.)
As far as I'm aware, there's been no private communication between this user and the moderators.
Dear Vassilis Parassidis,
Your response to my request for more context in this question was to add the single sentence: "This problem arose from the solution of the Diofantine equation $x^2 = dy^2 + 1$." I didn't reopen the question, because I did not find the additional context satisfactory. As the timestamps show, I did respond to your edit with a second comment, but you did nothing after that.
If you look at other number theory questions on this site, you will notice that they almost always contain much more than 2 sentences of content. Usually, they have a reasonably thorough discussion of background suitable for specialists, and may include some description of what has been tried.
Vassilis Parassidis:
For the moment just some technical remarks, in view of what you said.
It is possible to comment on closed questions.
In general please do not reask a question if it is just a minor modification of a closed question. Instead edit the existing question. This too is possible for a closed question. If the edit is good, it will be reopened, if not the repost will be closed too. So their is no reason for doing this.
Reasking a question, and to a lesser extent asking a great number of questions in a short time (one a day is already a lot), is harmful for your questions and overall reputation on the site. People will just stop paying attention, or start closing and downvoting your questions essentially automatically.
For completeness, I'll note I also sent Vassilis an email, suggesting he post on meta about how to improve his questions, rather than ask the moderators directly.
Dear Vassilis Parassidis,
If you would like to ask further questions on MathOverflow, please post them here on meta first, asking "Is this a good MathOveflow question?". Post it on the main site only if you receive a positive response. I understand that this is imposing unusual and onerous conditions on your use of the site. Unfortunately we have limited moderating capacity, and once you've arrived in your present situation (the owner of ~10 closed questions) we have to take some shortcuts.
I'd encourage you to consider which of your recently closed questions is the most appropriate to try through this channel. Make the appropriate changes, based on the feedback you've already received, and then post here. Now be warned --- sometimes meta can be a bit of an echo chamber, and you might not receive any reply at all. On the other hand, with a bit of luck you'll get the feedback you need, and perhaps after several rounds of improvements, be ready to return the question to the main site. If you have access to any local mathematicians, you could further improve the process by discussing a proposed question first offline, before even bringing it to meta.
yours sincerely, Scott Morrison
None of the prior posts in your thread contains (at this writing) a good MathOverflow question. An analogous question that is also unsuitable is: I've heard that the sequence 2,1,5,7,17,31,65 starts a longer sequence of numbers used in number theory. How do I generate it, and what applications does it have?
The question I wrote above is unsuitable because the question is not very specific, it should suggest some obvious avenues to try for extension, and there are some online resources where you can find out more. (The longer sequence is called a Jacobsthal-Lucas sequence, and I think it has some bearing on primality testing; I have not spent the extra ten minutes yet to search and find out more about it.) A better version of the question replaces the last sentence with "I want to learn more about such sequences; how do I find out more?" . It's not much better, and still not suitable for MathOverflow, but one can now give the answer "Try Wikipedia and the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences (OEIS)." , and hope that that will help you enough to learn and formulate a better question.
Here is a question that is related to yours and may be suitable for MathOverflow: "I am reading about Pell equations and elliptic equations in <put name of appropriate book here>. One of the problems in the book mentions parameterization of primitive pythagorean triples (certain solutions to (x^2 + y^2 = z^2). This suggests to me that there might be an extension: is there a similar parameterization to solutions of x^4 + y^4 + (Dxy)^2 = z^4 where D is neither 2 nor -2? I have for some values of D a single solution, e.g. (1,2,4=D,3),(2,3,8=D,7); can I use those to make more?"
What would make this a better question is a motivation that would be of interest to mathematical researchers, such as "I found a description in Harold Edward's book about an Indian method for solving Pell equations; I think it could be tweaked work here if I knew how to <put clear description of difficult part here>; I hope solving the example above will make things clear." This motivation indicates that you are trying to generalize something and what work you have done and still need to do in order to make it work.
Your present question at best asks us to find a parameterization for you, without telling us enough of why you want it or why we should want to do it for you. We would react better if you described the work you did in researching and solving the problem yourself, and what challenges and obstacles you have encountered on which you want help. To improve your question, it is not enough to add phrases like "elliptic equation" if such phrases are not relevant or sensibly used; I do not see that elliptic equations have anything to do with what you are asking.
Gerhard "Ask Me About System Design" Paseman, 2011.10.13
@Vassilis: I think Gerhard did a very good job of describing what types of questions would be appropriate on MathOverflow. Please keep in mind that the primary goal of MO is to support mathematics research by providing a venue in which researches can ask experts about questions they don't know how to answer. If, as @Joel understands, you already know the "answers" to your questions, then please take your "challenges" elsewhere. There are many venues on the internet that welcome and encourage mathematics challenges. One place to look might be ArtOfProblemSolving.com.
If you are indeed researching diophantine equations, then you must provide more content in your questions. I highly recommend that you spend one to two weeks reading and answering mathoverflow questions, and then post some questions of your own. You will find that successful mathoverflow questions provide a fair amount of background --- certainly enough that experts can understand precisely what you are asking and what you have already tried, but even better is when interested graduate students also can learn something from reading your questions.
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