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Well, I think it would be unethical of you to take credit for it if you ask it on mathoverflow and receive an answer. You can't "unsee" such an answer. If you still want to ask it here, you should ask your advisor, since he or she will be probably be the one in charge of making sure you followed the rules.
... and when there is a "paper trail" on MO, keeping one's mouth shut is not going to be enough.
@Martin B: asking what is known is certainly OK, but even that is a little dangerous if this is your thesis problem, as Andy pointed out. If my memory is correct, asking who is working on a certain open problem and what the approaches are was discouraged on MO before. Certainly it is a sensitive subject, especially if the open problem is important.
Here is a related question that I have been wanting to ask for a while. The existence of MO raises a new ethical issue which will become more common in my opinion. A lot of people around the world will realize that substantial progress on Master or even PhD thesis can be made just by asking questions on MO. It may have happened already, I have noticed a few users with a lot of related questions without motivations. And most of them are anonymous! What would be our community consensus on this matter?
+1 Cam.
Also, in my naivity, I want to believe two things: (1) If a question, technical and unmotivated, can be solved quickly by MO, then it probably won't qualify as a (good) thesis topic anyway and (2) (especially for the Masters thesis) sometimes even just understanding what the expert told you and writing it down in a sensible way is good training toward research.
So I wouldn't worry too much about this possible abuse.
@Cam, Willie: fair point. I am not worried about the good thesis, by the way. People who are working on deep problems probably already know enough about what to post on MO. However, in countries around the world, a Master or Phd can be obtained with varying standards and protocols (I have certainly seen thesis problems which can be answered on MO), and it is generally harder compared to the US to obtain public records.
Muad- A Diplomarbeit (which I assume Martin is referring to) is a much more serious piece of work than most undergraduates in US or UK do; a Diplom should be compared to something like a research-based Masters in a US context. It's usually something small, but is supposed to be somewhat original.
Most Diploma theses that I have heard of compare rather favorably to the average US Master's thesis (in which there is usually no serious requirement for originality). Now it may well be that I have heard only of the better Diploma theses, but I also assume that there are fewer European Diploma theses produced per year than American master's theses, so knowing about the best may not be too unrepresentative. Anyway, it is often the case that these things result in publications.
Why would you assume that there are fewer European Diploma theses produced per year than American master's thesis. I have no idea, but I would assume it's the other way around since in Europe it is very common to do a masters and then a phd, where as in America you go straight from undergraduate to doing a phd.
@Gretar: Well, I certainly don't know: let's call it a "guess" rather than an assumption. Regarding your last line: first of all, there are many master's students in the US who do not go on to a PhD (for instance, I just directed one such student, who graduated with a master's in 2010. She does not have any current plans to get a PhD). I suspect (or guess, or whatever; again, I don't know) that this phenomenon is more common in the US. As for going straight from undergrad to PhD, I would say that is the most common route but there are plenty of exceptions: my current PhD student is such an exception, and in fact a non-negligible percentage of the PhD students in our program (at the University of Georgia) did separate master's degrees elsewhere.
In some (most?) European countries, there is nothing really comparable to a US bachelor's degree; the standard undergraduate program is more similar to US bachelor's + master's. That is, the "Diploma" is the first university degree. So getting the rough equivalent of a master's without then pursuing a PhD is actually much more common in such countries than in the US.
Of course, the Bologna reforms wants to bring it a lot closer to the UK model, where a Bachelor-equivalent degree is given. (While at the same time, forces in the UK is trying to push for more of a USA model of 4 year PhD with coursework requirement, while not sacrificing the masters/Part III requirement.)
One can waste entirely too much time trying to figure out how to compare degrees across international boundaries.
I don't understand some of the worries in this post. I would have assumed that creating new knowledge by eking it out of experts on MO was no worse than creating new knowledge by eking it out of the aether. What is required is for the writer to correctly attribute and acknowledge others' contributions. But I do think that when writing a thesis, it is highly important to find out and synthesize all other related work, and MO is well-suited to that.
@Theo: the worry is one not "up there" in the planes of greater human understanding, but "down here" in the mud of practical human behaviour. In particular, the practical worry is that if a student posts too much details of his problem on MO, he may (a) soon no longer have a thesis, by virtue of someone else solving it or (b) have his work, especially his contribution to it, questioned by whichever committee.
In particular, the worry beneath Harry and Kevin's observation is: what happens if someone does post an answer on MO that solves said thesis problem? Sure it is unlikely to happen. But is it a good idea to risk it?
If a thesis problem can be solved in the span of one MO answer, then it's probably not a good thesis problem.
@Tom: We have numerous fields medal winners here, and some of the top mathematicians in their fields otherwise. If anyone could answer it in the span of one question, surely the people here have as good a chance as any, no?
I'm sure I told this anecdote in a MO comment once (but we know how hard it is to search for old comments). My wife's grandfather apparently said that a good (mathematics) master's thesis problem was one he could solve in an afternoon, whereas a good PhD thesis problem was one for which he could come up with several good approaches in a week.
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