More F_un November 30, 2008
Posted by Ben Webster in Algebraic Geometry, characteristic p, crazy ideas, Number theory.trackback
Incidentally, I hope you’ve all been reading F_un mathematics. Even if you aren’t all that interested in the field with one element, it’s a beautifully designed site and might give you some ideas about pushing Web 2.0 in mathematics a bit further than just blogs. While I like our blog, with all its messy diversity (as my collaborators can tell you, messy diversity is a core component of my mathematical style), F_un mathematics has a much more organized focused feel, which I think maybe more promising for getting actual mathematics done. I also think the division of the posts into “outreach,” “undergraduate,” “graduate,” and “research” has some interesting potential and sort of makes me feel like we should be doing a better job of indicating the background level for our post.
Are you suggesting that our posts should be written at a consistent level? Or just that we should put up warnings like “everyone will understand the beginning and no one (author included) will understand the end”?
Obviously not the former. Something like the latter. I mean, I don’t think it’s necessarily all that big a deal, just that it might be helpful to have tags along those lines or something.
Speaking of ways to communicate math that are a bit more organized than blogs, someday you guys should check out the nLab. Not now – it’s just getting started. But someday.
Dissent: I find the F_un set-up really hard to follow and wish it were organized like a traditional blog!
I agree with JSE.
The F_un layout reminds me of a news website, like the BBC, and I think it is more suited for sites that update very frequently. I think the traditional blog layout has more “suck you in” power, because you can read more than just the headline of an article before launching into it.
On the other hand, I suppose it could be helpful to have some indication of what background is assumed in an article, since (speaking from experience) it can be frustrating to start reading an article that initially looks interesting and find that most of it is well over your head.
Ben, thanks for the kind words. JSE, Jon & Scott, thanks for the fair criticism. It’s just an experiment to see whether a magazine-style-wordpress-theme is usable for math-blogging. It has a few pros and arguably more cons. But hey, all we have to do is to change the theme if we ever want to turn it into a ‘more traditional blog’…
Written as “F_1″ it took a while to realize the French pun. I am impressed at this level of geometric outreach!
[...] interesting series on TQFTs via planar algebras by Chris Schommer-Pries. They also had a few nice words on the design of the F_un-site (though their commenters prefer a ‘traditional’ [...]