
Massively collaborative mathematics - michael_nielsen
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v461/n7266/full/461879a.html
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amichail
It's rather disappointing that mathematicians seem to understand and leverage
social media better than computer scientists.

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MikeCapone
It sounds good, but I'm not quite sure that your statement is true (yet).

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clemesha
The article states "it used blogs and a wiki to mediate a fully open
collaboration", but how about _running_ (not just writing) the algorithms
(code) to test and experiment collaboratively?

This is the goal of open-source projects like <http://codenode.org> and
<http://sagenb.org>.

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hendler
Thanks for those two links. Verified, versioned math is better, and more
sustainable like <http://www.vdash.org/> . How does Vdash differ from sagenb
and codenode?

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clemesha
From what I understand, Vdash does not execute code (actually run it on a
backend process, and return the result) written in a standard programming
language, where as codenode and sagenb do.

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hendler
Vdash executes math using the open source proof theorem prover Isabelle :

<http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/hvg/Isabelle/>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isabelle_%28theorem_prover%29>

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MikeCapone
Very exciting.

It's kind of the anti-Andrew Wiles (who worked alone and in secret for many
years before proving Fermat's last theorem).

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DaniFong
I don't know much more about the history of the proof than this, but in the
following talk, Malcolm Gladwell describes the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem
as the work of 13 smart guys in collaboration, rather than one lone genius.

[http://www.newyorker.com/online/video/conference/2007/gladwe...](http://www.newyorker.com/online/video/conference/2007/gladwell)

From what I know about the problem, his assertion that Ventris worked alone is
not quite right, Alice Kober contributed significantly to the decipherment as
well.

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hendler
There's also <http://www.vdash.org/>. Vdash is verified math with a wiki front
end. Hoping the author will comment here. :)

See also <http://groups.google.com/group/vdash>

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anonymousDan
Interesting. I wonder if a workable rating system for comments could be found.
This might help with the attribution of credit when a significant result is
produced.

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roundsquare
Another article on HN is an interview with Terence Tao. In it, he references
these rules for collaboration:

<http://www.math.ufl.edu/misc/hlrules.html>

Part of it is that one shouldn't worry about how "good" a comment is before
posting. Just post, and if its good, it'll get used.

I admit, this may not be as good an idea when you have a lot of amateaurs, but
I think having a rating system would deter a lot of people.

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gfodor
Sounds like a job for google wave.

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MikeCapone
I haven't read all of it yet, but it seems like this other piece from the same
edition of Nature is saying exactly that:

[http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v461/n7266/full/461881a...](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v461/n7266/full/461881a.html)

