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Polymath4: Referee report obtained

Terence Tao — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 11:34:26 +0000

An update on the status of the Polymath4 paper on finding primes. I’ve received a referee report from Mathematics of Computation on the submission, which can be found here. The referee liked the result but wanted a fair number of expository changes before he or she was willing to recommend acceptance, so the editor has asked for a revision. I will be happy to make the relevant changes, but if there are any other changes that other participants would like to make, now would be a good time to suggest them. (The most recent version of the paper can be found at the Subversion repository or at this link; see also the arXiv version.)

One change requested is to add a list of participants to the project. In analogy with what we did for Polymath1, I therefore started a “signup sheet” on the wiki at

http://michaelnielsen.org/polymath1/index.php?title=Polymath4_grant_acknowledgments

for people to self-report their participation, contact information, and grant information for the project. There is the usual problem of trying to decide who is a “main participant” of the project, and who is a “contributor” (though I think I can safely add Ernie, Harald, and myself as participants); as with Polymath1, I will leave it to each of you to self-report what level of participation you feel is appropriate.

Filed under: finding primes, news

Polymath3 (polynomial Hirsch conjecture) now officially open

Terence Tao — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 16:38:53 +0000

After some discussion and a lengthy hiatus, the Polymath3 project (on attacking the polynomial Hirsch conjecture via combinatorial means) has officially started with a new research thread on Gil Kalai’s blog (which, for now, can also double as the discussion thread, given that the activity level is still quite low), and a Polymath wiki page.

Filed under: news

Mini-polymath proposal: IMO 2010 Q6

Terence Tao — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 23:16:44 +0000

I am proposing the sixth question for the 2010 International Mathematical Olympiad (traditionally, the trickiest of the six problems) as a mini-polymath project for next month. Details and discussions are in this post on my other blog.

[Update, June 27: the project is scheduled to start on Thursday, July 8 16:00 UTC.]

Filed under: news, planning, polymath proposals

Nature article on Polymath

Terence Tao — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 16:25:53 +0000

Timothy Gowers and Michael Nielsen have written an article “Massively collaborative mathematics“, focusing primarily on the first Polymath project, for the October issue of Nature.

Posted in news