I may not have the right answer to this question, but I do have a suggestion.

This makes me want to ask what it is that the producers of open software do that we did not manage to do. Now it has often struck me that producing an elaborate mathematical proof is rather like producing a complex piece of software (not that I have any experience of the latter): in both cases there is a clearly defined goal (in one case, to prove a theorem, and in the other, to produce a program that will perform a certain task) in both cases this is achieved by means of a sequence of strings written in a formal language (steps of the proof, or lines of code) that have to obey certain rules in both cases the main product often splits into smaller parts (lemmas, subroutines) that can be treated as black boxes, and so on. There, it seems, it is possible to have a large-scale collaboration in which many of the collaborators work on very small bits of code that get absorbed into a much larger piece of software. But was that an essential aspect of any large mathematical collaboration, or was it just a consequence of the particular way that Polymath1 was organized? To make this question more precise, I would like to make a comparison with the production of open-source software (which was of course one of the inspirations for the Polymath idea).

One thing that is undeniable is that it was necessary to have a good grasp of the big picture to contribute to Polymath1. Or so it seems: that is a question I would like to consider here. I had hoped that it would be possible for many people to make small contributions, but what I had not properly thought through was the fact that even to make a small contribution one must understand the big picture. However, I haven’t given up all hope of a much larger collaboration, and in this post I want to think about ways that that might be achieved.įirst, let me say what I think is the main rather general reason for the failure of Polymath1 to be genuinely massive.

» mise à jour thunderbird version 78.As I have already commented, the outcome of the Polymath experiment differed in one important respect from what I had envisaged: though it was larger than most mathematical collaborations, it could not really be described as massive.» adobe acrobat player activex download.

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