The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society
The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society
Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet
Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet
The polymath project: lessons from a successful online collaboration in mathematics
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Authoring and publishing units and quantities in semantic documents
ESWC'11 Proceedings of the 8th international conference on The Semantic Web
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In February, 2009, an international group comprising mathematicians ranging from amateurs to elite professionals converged on the WordPress blog of Cambridge mathematician Timothy Gowers in order to attempt to prove a mathematical theorem---a project Gowers called Polymath1. Their results surprised even the project's most optimistic participants. In six weeks, the group had managed to combinatorially prove the density Hales-Jewett theorem, yielding in the process a host of new mathematical insights. This paper explores how the mathematicians of Polymath1 worked within and adapted the WordPress blog environment to their uses. I examine from a qualitative sociological perspective how procedural and technical questions interacted in a mathematics research setting as the project moved from its nebulous beginnings toward completion. The paper thus indirectly considers the ways in which such meta-mathematical questions are inscribed in research environments, and opens up several methodological questions for the sociology of mathematics and the Internet. Between the mathematical and meta-mathematical negotiations of the Polymath1 project, there emerges a rich virtual site for the study of collaboration in mathematics and related disciplines.