I would welcome something close to a database of problems / theorems across all mathematics, but there at least two things that already exist and have not been mentioned yet. - It is a tradition of several great conferences (such as the British Combinatorial Conference) to take advantage of the gathering of many experts and make a list of open problems and conjectures (as well as survey papers), publish it. They usually end up on the web and can be commented and updated. Talking of surveys, one of the features of the EJC (Electronic Journal of Combinatorics) was "dynamic surveys", meaning articles regularly updated by their authors on a given topic. That's something that could be carried further with computer support tools. Of course this does not cover the multi-field case. - We have new (a few years ago), quite open, virtual discussion places for scientists, such as MathOverflow with a very diverse expertise. One advantage of M.O. for short is that almost everything is archived and searchable (there are situations where questions are deleted or closed, but that's more a problem for other forums of the same kind for more practical subjects) And we may hope that the trend toward computer assisted proofs push for a large repository of more formalised mathematical knowledge and questions. Olivier On Sun, Apr 3, 2016 at 2:29 AM, Neil Sloane <njasloane@gmail.com> wrote:
I mistakenly said: "It has been in the OEIS for ever: did you try searching there? Just enter 8022581057533823761829436662099 in the search window and you get https://oeis.org/A060792".
I was wrong - although the sequence has been in the OEIS since about 2003, the term 8022581057533823761829436662099 wasn't there until Keith added it in January 2014!
Best regards Neil
Neil J. A. Sloane, President, OEIS Foundation. 11 South Adelaide Avenue, Highland Park, NJ 08904, USA. Also Visiting Scientist, Math. Dept., Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ. Phone: 732 828 6098; home page: http://NeilSloane.com Email: njasloane@gmail.com
On Sat, Apr 2, 2016 at 6:23 PM, Neil Sloane <njasloane@gmail.com> wrote:
For instance when I discovered that 8022581057533823761829436662099 was a palindrome in both binary and ternary, a Google search assured me that (probably) nobody had ever noticed this fact before.
It has been in the OEIS for ever: did you try searching there? Just enter 8022581057533823761829436662099 in the search window and you get https://oeis.org/A060792
Best regards Neil
Neil J. A. Sloane, President, OEIS Foundation. 11 South Adelaide Avenue, Highland Park, NJ 08904, USA. Also Visiting Scientist, Math. Dept., Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ. Phone: 732 828 6098; home page: http://NeilSloane.com Email: njasloane@gmail.com
On Sat, Apr 2, 2016 at 6:03 PM, Dan Asimov <dasimov@earthlink.net> wrote:
I've worked on at least two problems in the past five years that I couldn't find anything about previous work on, even when I used to have access to the MathSciNet database. I did eventually conclude that they hadn't been addressed before by asking several experts in the areas they fell in. (In these cases, they didn't straddle several areas.)
—Dan
On Apr 2, 2016, at 2:46 PM, Keith F. Lynch <kfl@KeithLynch.net> wrote:
Meta-problem: Find a problem that doesn't generate anything searchable. Not sequences, not large integers, not unusual real numbers, not even unusual keywords. Bonus points if it's not obvious what, if any, existing branch of math it belongs to.
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