The proposed general mathematics SE site (a.k.a. MathUnderflow) is now in beta.

It's a private beta, by the way, for the first week, so unless you "committed" at Area51 you won't be able to see it until next week.

First impressions, however, are very poor. The question "Why is 0.999... = 1" has 14 answers so far, 10 of them variations of: "1/3 = 0.333..., 1/3 * 3 = 1, therefore 0.999... = 1".

I imagined this would be like MathOverflow, only at a lower level, say for maths, physics or engineering undergraduates. I did not commit, so I cannot see the answers now, but I can see some samples from the StackExchange front page for this site, and it seems it is definitely not so. :-(

I actually kind of enjoy explaining why the reals are uncountable or something like that to someone who's never seen any mathematics, but it seems like the more serious questions (e.g. the one on differential Galois theory) are getting overrun by the less serious ones. This is actually doing a very effective job of convincing me of the appropriateness of MO's strict closing policy.

@Harry: Could you please slow down a bit? The site is not even a day old and you are stomping all over the site. Thanks

Harry, remember: if you break it, you own it.

Can I make a suggestion to people here? Namely, that we (=MOwers) don't try to take over this new site. The level is very different from we're used to on MathOverflow, and most of us can easily answer a substantial proportion of the questions there, certainly much higher than on MO.

But this site has just started. There's no need to impose our preferences and views on it (and yes, I feel the temptation myself). We do have a reputation of being somewhat unfriendly on this site, and I don't see why we need to spread it elsewhere. This new site is intended largely as an outlet for the kinds of things we'd close.

In particular, I'm echoing the request made by the anonymous poster here to Harry: voicing your views on meta(.math.stackexchange.com!) would be, I think, more productive now than editing everything. The culture at this new site is likely to be very different than here; it probably makes sense to wait for that to crystallize somewhat.

Recall also that the current community consensus about running MO took quite a while to build. There's every reason to think that math.stackexchange.com will take a while to find its niche and purpose. The people in it now are likely to be an unrepresentative sample of the eventual participants.

Incidentally, if you look at (for instance) Noah Snyder's responses, they're very friendly and helpful, without being threatening at all.

Yeah, I'd actually suggest the same as Akhil proposes.

I snarkily interfered with the 0.999... = 1 question, but have since realised that this site is probably better off without all of us.

Since MU doesn't have a strong centralized leadership to guide it, I think it's very important that we from MO help shape it. All I'm saying is that it could easily become something pointless and stupid that nobody visits.

I agree. I think that the problem at the moment is that there is nobody steering the ship.

@Harry : I'm going to be a little blunt, and I hope you won't be offended. You're one of the more polarizing figures on MO (though your behavior has improved a lot, and I have been very impressed by this). Moreover, the qualities about you that rub people the wrong way are precisely the qualities that will drive away beginners. If I were you, I would not try to be the one to "steer the ship", at least not if you want it to succeed.

I can't even get into the beta site yet (apparently I registered but did not commit, or some such thing) so I can't see yet exactly what's going on. I am certainly curious about the "MU" site, but as a research mathematician I am hesitant to have substantial interactions with MU. MO is close to my platonic ideal of a math website, and it is virtually optimally tailored for me. The MU site is clearly intended for different purposes, and I don't want to splash around in their pool. I think that probably a lot of MO users will feel the same way (especially those who are near or past their PhD), and I agree that there is a danger in generating a backlash against MO by having MO people contribute too stridently to MU.

On the other hand, I really do want to see what is going on with MU! Especially, its intended purpose and clientele is not yet clear to me. As an MO user, what I am hoping for is that it will fit in snugly underneath MO: that is, I hope that a math question that we feel is of too low a level for MO will not be regarded as too advanced for MU (and moreover, will get a competent answer). What I would most like to see, I suppose, is a site where beginning graduate students and undergraduate math majors who are serious -- but not prodigiously precocious like Qiaochu Yuan and a few other distinguished members of MO -- can go to ask and answer questions. At the moment, the meager evidence I have seen indicates that most of the questions so far are not at that level, and I think I probably would not have been attracted to this site as an undergraduate (which, although not so long ago, was a quite different era vis a vis the internet -- but sci.math existed then and I tried it out for a little while but decided it was not for me).

I suppose if MU finds a niche which is useful to people but too far below MO, there's always room for "Math Flow".

MathExchange.com has a whopping two votes right now - and is in a dead tie with MathUnderflow. It's been neck and neck for an hour! (The MU name will probably not make it based on the comments pointing out that it as too much of an inside joke.) I vote +1 that it remains the unofficial name when being referred to on this site.

@No one in particular: I also wonder how much of the initial bad questions flood is due to the fact that a committed user has "promised" to seed the website with a certain number of questions during the closed beta?

Does MU have its own meta site? Is it private as well? I'd like to have a look.

I cannot participate in the private beta, even though I committed long ago. Attempts to commit again failed. This is not an MO issue,
and I've written to team@stackexchange.com, but just to inform you that there may be some problems of interested users participating during this initial phase.

Joseph - thank you, noted. I, for one, would love to have you around "MU" to whatever extent you are interested.

Everyone who's sad that they can't play with math.SE during its first week should consider "committing" to the TeX, LaTeX and friends site, which I think might be interesting and useful, and will likely go into private beta in the next few days.

@Jon Bannon: this is always an issue. For example, it happens a lot on artofproblemsolving.com. The policy I adopted there was to encourage people to ask conceptual questions about their homework instead of just asking for a solution, and to ask a lot of Socratic questions.

I checked out AoPS. so I should modify my previous post to only include open problems of undergraduate background alone. Or perhaps this could be made a tag in MO? (Somehow, the latter option is unappealing to me...although it may be more practical.)

@VP: This new site will probably direct the homework attention away from MO.

For anyone on MO with an account on MU, please give your opinions in this thread:

What kind of site should MU be

There are currently two factions on MU. One aims to turn it into a lower-level MO (with a higher tolerance for soft questions), and the other aims to turn it into a general mathematics site. It seems rather clear to me that the first type of site will be more useful for us (MO users) to redirect people to a place where their questions might actually be answered.

@Andrew: very interesting. And, yes, the question about 0.99999... = 1 shows that they need to take a clear direction from the start, if they want to mantain a certain level of reliability.

Remark that there are plenty of MO users that could provide very useful advice from their prior experiences in forums at this level, e.g. sci.math. Surely MU will encounter analogous problems. For example, moderation is much trickier at this lower level since it attracts questions from all sorts of fringes of the mathematical community, e.g all sorts of crackpot theories, numerology, and other pseudo-mathematical topics. One has to be very careful to design a policy that makes precisely clear what is on-topic in order to avoid attracting such cancerous discussions. Such factors played a large role in the demise of sci.math after it got much wider exposure due to various factors (endless September; usenet web interfaces: mathforum, Google Groups, etc). Sci.math still manages to limp along only because many usenet newsreaders provide strong filtering capabilities that allow one to easily ignore most of the garbage. But MU will have no such feature, right?

That said, I think it would be wise to create a widely-advertised meta MU thread to solicit advice from users of such similar forums.

@Harry: Please feel welcome to do so.