mathblogging and poll-results

Mathblogging.org is a recent initiative and may well become the default starting place to check on the status of the mathematical blogosphere.

Handy, if you want to (re)populate your RSS-aggregator with interesting mathematical blogs, is their graphical presentation of (nearly) all math-blogs ordered by type : group blogs, individual researchers, teachers and educators, journalistic writers, communities, institutions and microblogging (twitter). Links to the last 7 posts are given so you can easily determine whether that particular blog is of interest to you.

The three people behind the project, Felix Breuer, Frederik von Heymann and Peter Krautzberger, welcome you to send them links to (micro)blogs they've missed. Surely, there must be a lot more mathematicians with a twitter-account than the few ones listed so far...

Even more convenient is their list of latest posts from their collection, ordered by date. I've put that page in my Bookmarks Bar the moment I discovered it! It would be nice, if they could provide an RSS-feed of this list, so that people could place it in their sidebar, replacing old-fashioned and useless blogrolls. The site does provide two feeds, but they are completely useless as they click through to empty pages...

While we're on the topic of math-blogging, the results of the 'What should we write about next?'-poll that ran the previous two days on the entry page. Of all people visiting that page, 2.6% left suggestions.

The vast majority (67%) wants more posts on noncommutative geometry. Most of you are craving for introductions (and motivation) accessible to undergraduates (as 'it's hard to find quality, updated information on this'). In particular, you want posts giving applications in mathematics (especially number theory), or explaining relationships between different approaches. One person knew exactly how I should go about to achieve the hoped-for accessibility : "As a rule, I'd take what you think would be just right for undergrads, and then trim it down a little more."

Others want rather specialized posts, such as on 'connection and parallel transport in noncommutative geometry' or on 'trees (per J-L. Loday, M. Aguiar, Connes/Kreimer renormalization (aka Butcher group)), or something completely other tree-related'.

Fortunately, some of you told me it was fine to write about 'combinatorial games and cool nim stuff, finite simple groups, mathematical history, number theory, arithmetic geometry', pushed me to go for 'anything monstrous and moonshiney' (as if I would know the secrets of the 'connection between the Mathieu group M24 and the elliptic genus of K3'...) or wrote that 'various algebraic geometry related posts are always welcome: posts like Mumford's treasure map'.

Comments

Thank you for mentioning our little project! We had some downtime yesterday after getting publicity via twitter and ycombinator, but things should be stable from now on.

We hope the project can be helpful especially for people who don't know much about the mathematical blogs out there (or don't have the time to hunt down the one's of interest and frequenting posting)

PS: my name is spelled differently -- but I have seen much worse ;)

I think trying to pick what to write about based on what you think somebody else might be interested in, rather than on what you're interested in yourself, is probably a mistake.

Lieven, thanks for the feedback. It's good that it works now. We'll check out that safari bug.

Lieven, I only just noticed that you described a problem with our feeds at mathblogging.org!

Do you still have that problem? Could you maybe describe it in detail (as in, what kind of "white pages"? Do the links not work, do they not get you where you expect to go? I don't quite know what you mean).

Peter,

probably it's a Safari and/or Mac-problem : programs requiring feeds in a feed://... format (rather than http://...) get the wrong links, viewing your feeds with Firefox works perfectly for me.

Ive added your small feed to the sidecolumn (bottom) and that also appear to work fine.

Add new comment