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Community: Writing a book, polymath style!

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    • CommentAuthorDougy
    • CommentTimeSep 13th 2010
     
    I've admired for a while the polymath style of research. Just throwing an idea out there (it might be a bad one, tell me your thoughts). What if the community wrote a book, polymath style?

    Some advantages I see at this point:
    - a worldwide community would be good at tracking down obscure references in multiple languages
    - even fairly modest-level mathematicians can make genuine contributions
    - errors would be particularly rare!

    Some disadvantages:
    - consistency -- notation, layout, etc.
    • CommentAuthorCSiegel
    • CommentTimeSep 13th 2010
     
    Is something like this what you have in mind? http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Subject:Mathematics
    • CommentAuthorDougy
    • CommentTimeSep 13th 2010
     
    Somewhat... although these books seem to be somewhat introductory courses. I guess I'm thinking more of along the lines of an extended survey paper on a specific research topic, where there would be a benefit from the community's involvement.
  4.  
    The stacks project http://math.columbia.edu/algebraic_geometry/stacks-git/ is structured roughly along the lines you suggest. You might want to read up on their methods to get ideas.
    • CommentAuthorDougy
    • CommentTimeSep 13th 2010
     
    Wow! That thing is a beast! 2000+ pages. That's pretty much what I had in mind... hmmm...
  6.  
    The trick is convincing people to be involved. The stacks project is successful because of de Jong's leadership. I suspect that this would be hard to replicate elsewhere, but who knows?
  7.  

    The idea of community book-writing is an interesting one...but what does it have to do with MO?

    • CommentAuthorDougy
    • CommentTimeSep 13th 2010
     
    Well... I had a fairly ill-posed maths-related question. I guess this would be more suited for the once-suggested forum.mathoverflow.net (but that website doesn't exist). Anyway, does every question at the meta have to be about MO?
  9.  

    @Dougy, no, not every question on meta has to be about MO, but it's still the intent that most do. MathOverflow is about research mathematics, meta.MO is about MathOverflow. We're just more relaxed about it here.

  10.  

    Unless it becomes a problem, I think that meta is an acceptable place for community-related "stuff" explicitly MO-related or not.

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