Meta thread for

What everybody must/should know achievements in 2010 and around

Quick facts: Closed yesterday without much discussion. Now 3 votes to reopen.

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Personal opinion: On the minus side it is really subjective and possibly argumentative. IMO, in case it is reopened people should at least please refrain from expressing their disagreement with nominations verbally. On the plus side it could be interesting.

I suppose I find these kinds of questions just part of the hype echo-chamber. If you're interested in a subject you have other avenues to find out about recent developments. So it's not clear what kind of special role this thread plays, aside from reinforcing already-existing mechanisms for getting news out.

I didn't vote on this thread as I have "soft question" and "big list" blocked. I suppose that's a pretty clear indication of what I think of these types of threads.

If it had been CW to start with I think the question would have been fine. I would reopen if the existing answers became CW.

@Gerry: answers are not turned into CW if the thread was converted to CW after the answers were posted. I think maybe Anton can convert everything to CW but otherwise it has to be done by the authors of the answers.

I think the topic is very, very interesting and I would like to read what the big shots at MO have to say. But on grounds of principle: I don't know any topic where the "This really belongs on a blog."-argument has more bite.

I agree with Gjergji on everything.

Just to summarize the CW issue, which confused me myself for a while (I only recently learned this thanks to David White).

1. As soon as the question is CW all new answers will be automatically CW (in particular if it is so from the start all answers are CW).

2. An OP turning a question into CW does not affect existing answers (as can be seen from the one answer to said question); of course each answerer can individually from the start or also afterwards turn the answer into CW (so one could leave a comment on the answer to request this, this happens sometimes).

3. A moderator turning a question into CW can make it so that the existing answers are also turned into CW, I believe they can do this more efficiently than turning each answer individually into CW (which I think they also could).

For the existing question I already flagged for moderator attention with the request of turning into CW some time ago (when I wrote my comment). As commented on the question in particular due to this answer issue it seems to me that the 'flagging for moderator' is the way to go for CW (if it is not 'on' right away); I already did this succesfully a couple fo times, yet some moderator please correct me if this is not a good practise. [When we switch to SE 2.0 this will always be like this as there only mods can turn questions into CW or the softaware after many edits or answers I beleive but in any case not OPs right away; to some extent this this also explains that some people do not turn there questions into CW themselves, they are not used to having this abilty].

@Zeeshan Mahmud: below your answer you have a small button 'edit' (assuming you are logged in, else log in). Click on it. Then you get a window just like the one you had when answering orginally (where you could also chnage the answer if you wanted to). Below this window, there is a small box and to its right it says 'community wiki'. You just need to tick this box and then press the large button 'save your edits' at the very end.

I think this question sets a dangerous precedent. Questions like this are always very popular (see, for example this one) but they are not quite appropriate for MO.

In addition, the MO population is quite skewed towards certain subfields, so I am not sure the answers (and their ranking by votes) will paint a very accurate picture.

Also, +1 to what Scott Carnahan just wrote.

For those who like this question (personally I have no enthusiasm for it) could one of you please rewrite the question? The incorrect English makes me cringe, esp. in the title and introductory paragraph.

@Keith: Am I right and there were no major achievements in number theory/algebraic geometry in 2010-2011?

What harm this question makes ?

1) "Influence of hiring decisions" - see Mark's comment above

Nothing except this sounded.

What is use of this question ?
Obviously we get more educated. The answers seems to be quite interesting - since people upvoted them.

"the MO population is quite skewed towards certain subfields" - I think people know it and correct it in their mind, but I do not see any harm from this.

"If you're interested in a subject you have other avenues to find out about recent developments" - I think it is NOT true for many people,
1) people working for industry, but willing to keep some relation with "previous life" - like me (I cannot go for conference, seminars and etc and not much time for digesting the journals - it is much more easy to look at MO ...)
2) Students - they just do NOT know the "other avenues" ...
3) people from "not rich" countries are also restricted in rolling the conferences which is obviously one these "other avenues"

"Noteworthy achievements in and around 2010" - good idea you are welcome to change. As for me - gist the same - words are not important, but I admit other people may "cringe" ...

About the language of the question: English does not seem to be the native language of the OP. So all these "should" and "must" are just literate translations of Russian words which do not have as much "force" as their English analogs. As a result what a native English speaker would consider rude is actually a not quite adequate translation of a benign Russian text. Asking everybody on MO to use proper English is in fact quite (and intentionally) rude, IMHO.

@Alexander Cherov: OP means Original Poster, that is in this case you.

Todd, I just retagged it to include big-list.

Thanks, Benjamin. It's all clear now.

I like this question, but I also see the force of the argument that it is subjective and argumentative and that we do not want to influence hiring decisions.

I would like to echo the comment of markvs that this information is not easy to come by otherwise. Math Reviews once experimented with "Featured Reviews," which were longer reviews of certain papers that were considered by the editors to be interesting enough to highlight. The editors knew that they were being subjective (e.g., the subject matter of Featured Reviews was skewed towards the areas of interest of the most prolific and articulate reviewers), but did not see this as a deal-breaker at first. However, MR soon discontinued Featured Reviews, and I heard through the grapevine that it was precisely for the same reasons that are being articulated here; they were being unwittingly thrust into the role of adjudicating which publications were "the best," and thereby influencing decisions about hiring and promotion.

It seems to me that the mathematical research community could benefit from more knowledge of what is going on in areas other than one's own narrow research area. Admittedly, MO may not be the right venue, but I'm at a loss to suggest a better one. The Cipra/Mackenzie series of What's Happening in the Mathematical Sciences is excellent, but there's only so much one writer can cover, no matter how talented and energetic. The only other alternative at present is to look at winners of various prizes. This again is a very short list, and will miss a lot of very interesting stuff that doesn't necessarily have the flashiness to win a prize.

Some of you may remember that I once asked an MO question, "How do you find out the latest news in fields other than your own?" At the risk of sounding overly cynical, my summary of the answers would be, "You can't." This is a shame.

Dear Keith: wow! A minor correction: "мне казались (или лучше показались) неуклюжими".

While I understand why some users are critical of this type of questions (especially as the original question had a somewhat sensational tone), I wholeheartedly agree with Timothy Chow and the sentiment expressed in his comment:

"Some of you may remember that I once asked an MO question, "How do you find out the latest news in fields other than your own?" At the risk of sounding overly cynical, my summary of the answers would be, "You can't." This is a shame."

As similar "very soft" questions, concerning career advice and other rather subjective meta-mathematical topics, pop up regularly on MO and invariably result in arguments, this IMHO clearly shows that some forum for general discussion about scientific system and similar topics is badly needed. Maybe MO is not the best place for this, but currently there is no prospect of any such venue appearing any time soon. Regarding another comment:

"In fact, recently Tim Gowers has proposed a new MO-like system, where papers can be voted on (the follow-up discussion and post are very interesting too). So things are changing fast, and may be the day your question would be the norm is not too far away."

Unfortunately, many people positive about Gowers' (or similar) ideas limit their commitment to lip service only. This kind of support is of course important, but such a system will never appear out of the blue - there has to be an active, committed group of users willing to actually implement this idea, otherwise for the next few years everybody will say that "This is a good idea" or "the day your question would be the norm is not too far away" and questions like this will still get rejected from MO.

My reading of michalkotowski's comment is that using/allowing to use MO for such things (at least temporarily) would help get the ball rolling. And thus there seems to be an implict suggestion of allowing more on MO. Not to take this thread too much off-topic, at least I will mention something specific to the question too:

While I am in favor of this particular question, I am in general against opening up MO too much. The software is really designed for a highly specific purpose, (ab)using it for other things is just not a good idea.

Yet there are some other activities complementing MO, for example http://www.mathblogging.org/ besides other things makes it easier to follow discussion happening on different blogs. And, they also have a feature to make what Gil Kalai just did for that question (opening a blog post) more efficient by aggregating all such posts on PlanetMO.

Also there is/was (?) an offer by Andrew Stacey to set up a discussion board if and only if somebody volunteers to moderate it. It seems noone ever followed up on this offer.

@michalkotowski, A rather extreme way of putting what you're saying into words would be: there's a group of people unwilling to put the effort into creating the forum they want, so we should allow them to do whatever they like with MO, regardless of how far off MO's mandate that would take the forum.

The reason MO is a success is in part because it has a narrow mission. It isn't plugged-up with opinion pieces, pleas for funding, conference announcements, award announcements, sob stories, CV polishing and such. Because people don't want to read that stuff when they come here. They want actual mathematics.

@Yemon +Graham's number (to the power of A(G,G)) :P

Michal Kotowski: Quite the opposite! It makes perfect sense. If this type of question were common on MO, then those who wanted to set up an alternative forum would have a struggle because everyone would say, "Oh, but we can post those on MO". By closing them and saying "Take them elsewhere" we're helping build up the momentum for the "elsewhere" to exist.

Quid's quite right. I've said many times, and so has Scott Morrison, that I'd be happy to set up such a forum - it would take me about 5 minutes to do - I just don't want to moderate it. So far, no-one has even shown the slightest bit of interest in the idea so my conclusion is that all the people who shout loudly for such a place don't really want it.

The link to Gowers' posts is apt. It's very easy to have ideas, and very good ideas, but not so easy to put them into place. MO is a realisation of a good idea, I think that the nLab/nForum is as well. But I spent a fair amount of time and effort with others thinking about a review site before concluding that it was beyond me (and them) so talk is cheap, as you say.

This particular question matches just about every single one of my "Bad MO Question" signs. What is the point of it? What are people going to do with this information? Are people really going to read those articles (or whatevers) and conclude "This is what 2010 will be remembered for" (why 2010, by the way?). Or is it just a nice warm fuzzy list that's a bit different from the usual lists one gets at this time of year?

The link to Gowers' post is doubly apt because this sort of information is really what journals should be providing. The Journal of K-Theory really should list those articles that the editorial board feels that everyone worker in K-Theory should read, regardless of whether they've been published elsewhere.

So I'm voting to close. I agree with Vladimir that as this type of question becomes more prevalent then my motivation for participating in MO lessens.

@quid: I object to this sort of attack, especially from anonymous contributors.

I see that there have not been any recent achievements in any area outside group theory, combinatorics and theoretical computer science. I guess if everybody agrees with that statement, the question can indeed be closed and we can return to the productive discussions about raising mathematician and cocktail parties.