Suppose most mathematical research papers were freely accessible online. Suppose a well-organized platform existed where responsible users could write comments on any paper (link …

Last summer, there were several excellent summer schools in my field that I learned of only after the application date. The events I did attend were chosen without too much care. I …

Once again I come to MO for help with something I'm writing for the public. Which habits of mathematicians -- aspects of the way we approach problems, the way we argue, the way we …

The history of mathematics over the last 200 years has many occasions when the fundamental assumptions of an area have been shown to be flawed, or even wrong. Yet I cannot think of …

"Ramanujan credited his acumen to his family Goddess, Namagiri of Namakkal. He looked to her for inspiration in his work,[84] and claimed to dream of blood drops that symbolised he …

This question is anonymous for the obvious reason. I wrote to a journal asking about the status of a paper I had submitted. In his reply the editor inadvertently included informat …

Almost all journals ask for keywords and most authors comply. Does any math researcher out there actually use them to search? Are there mechanisms to do that? I just wrote to so …

This question is quite unimportant, so feel free to close if you think it is inappropriate. I've been thinking about how mathematicians come up with names for the ideas/objects th …

First, my apology for this soft question. My excuse was that I really think this may be of interest to the community. I would understand if it gets closed (I have advocated closing …

I was searching on MathSciNet recently for a certain paper by two mathematicians. As I often do, I just typed in the names of the two authors, figuring that would give me a short …

In Question 74707, we ask what mathematical habits of thoughts are useful in other areas. It seems only fair to ask also what we can learn from them. It is also fair to ask what th …

Here is a question in the intersection of mathematics and sociology. There is a standard way to encode a Sudoku puzzle as an integer programming problem. The problem has a 0-1-va …

Why, at least as it seems to me, in past centuries mathematicians worked alone, while currently most of them work in pairs/groups? Reasons might be rooted in Mathematics, or Sociol …

I often see in papers something like: 1) This is in general not true or 2) This is not true in general Which I personally would consider to be written formally as something …

I apologize if this question seems frivolous, but the motivation for it is quite serious. When I encounter the endless topic of the 'relevance' of mathematics, I am rather fond o …