On Mon­day night I attended a lec­ture by Terry Tao on “Math­e­mat­i­cal research and the inter­net”. Terry is Australia’s most famous math­e­mati­cian, our only Field’s medal­ist, and one of the most active math­e­mat­i­cal blog­gers in the world. He has been described as the “Mozart of math­e­mat­ics” for his remark­able pre­coc­ity and pro­lific out­put. The slides of his talk are avail­able on his blog site.

It was an inter­est­ing talk, with excel­lent slides, marred only by the poor sound sys­tem and his bad habit of mum­bling. I keep a pretty close eye on inter­net devel­op­ments that affect research in my field, so there wasn’t a lot new for me, but the fol­low­ing obser­va­tions may be of interest.

• Math­e­mat­i­cal blogs are pro­vid­ing a means for record­ing the infor­mal chats that are an invalu­able part of research but were never pre­vi­ously writ­ten down. These are the sorts of things that hap­pen at con­fer­ences, in tea­rooms and hall­ways, or over din­ner. The advent of infor­mal blogs allows these chats to be online, with inter­ac­tion via com­ment­ing, and fully searchable.
• There is a list of math­e­mat­i­cal blogs on the Aca­d­e­mic Blog Por­tal although the sta­tis­tics list is incom­plete — it omits Chris Lloyd’s excel­lent Fish­ing in the Bay blog.
• The qual­ity of math­e­mat­ics on Wikipedia is slowly improv­ing (although it has a long way to go in sta­tis­ti­cal mod­el­ling, and espe­cially in forecasting).
• The Tricki is a use­ful resource for math­e­mat­i­cal tricks.
• The advent of pre-print repos­i­to­ries (notably arXiv for math­e­mat­ics, but RePEc for econo­met­rics) has changed the way new results are dis­trib­uted and how we stay in touch with cur­rent research.
• There are now a hand­ful of high qual­ity math­e­mat­i­cal pre­sen­ta­tions on YouTube. e.g., this one on Moe­bius trans­for­ma­tions.
• Sin­gle authored papers are becom­ing less com­mon due to increased inter­net inter­ac­tion and the rise of more cross-disciplinary research.
• Open online col­lab­o­ra­tive research is an emerg­ing pos­si­bil­ity. The first (math­e­mat­ics) exper­i­ment in this direc­tion has been Poly­math which has been a huge suc­cess so far. The first prob­lem was solved (although the results are not yet writ­ten up). Pre­sum­ably this could work for sta­tis­tics too, although the num­ber of poten­tial par­tic­i­pants is much smaller.

Terry con­cluded by saying

In some ways, there are too many such tech­nolo­gies. And they don’t always work well with each other. But these issues should fade with time as later gen­er­a­tions of tools become eas­ier to use, more inte­grated, and more main­stream. Even­tu­ally, some ver­sion of these tools will be as uni­ver­sally adopted among math­e­mati­cians as email and LaTeX are today.

Tags: computing, technology