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Ok. Here I come. Assume I am working on a paper, and I have a small side problem X related to a conjecture Y. Solving that side problem X will of course help my work as it will allow me to solve the bigger problem Y. Further, assume I cannot solve X myself and post its problem on MO. Even Further, assume it gets resolved satisfactorily within a few hours on MO. Should I cite MO's site in my paper or how should I go about it ? Has it happened before to anyone else ?

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 There has been some discussion of this on meta.mathoverflow.net: meta.mathoverflow.net/discussion/7/… meta.mathoverflow.net/discussion/64/… – Reid Barton Dec 28 2009 at 20:05
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 Yeah, and please reserve talk about mathoverflow for meta. – Harry Gindi Dec 28 2009 at 20:29
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 I'm closing this question, but I would like to see the discussion continue at meta.mathoverflow.net/discussion/7. In particular, post there if you have ideas for what we can do to make it easy and intuitive for people to cite Math Overflow. – Anton Geraschenko♦ Dec 28 2009 at 20:59
@reid, thanks but maybe something more conclusive can be said. What if the contributer remains anon ? for instance, should i be citing kittykat at mathoverflow provided the solution to xxx in claim Y ? Or simply, the problem was mentioned and resolved at MO [see site ...]. In case that the person has a name and identity and which happens to be in one to one correspondence with real life, shouldnt i not just mention person blahblahblah helped me on this. See the point here again is a different one. It's somewhat analogues to me using Sage in my paper unless my computation heavily relies on it,. – anyone Dec 28 2009 at 21:02
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 Again, please continue the discussion on meta and not in the comments. – Qiaochu Yuan Dec 28 2009 at 21:34

closed as off topic by Anton Geraschenko♦♦ Dec 28 2009 at 20:57

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