Alternative maths reviews

Here’s another idea for a wiki-style website, one that might bring closer the day when mathematicians ceased to bother about print journals. It’s a site where people can post reviews of mathematical papers. Such a site, if it did what I have in mind, would have one disadvantage and two advantages over Math Reviews. The disadvantage, which is also one of the advantages actually, is that by no means every paper would be included. If you want a list of all published papers in mathematics, then Math Reviews (or Zentralblatt) does the job very well. However, it’s not really a site where one would browse for fun, and part of the reason is that all papers are given equal status, so if one is looking for an interesting paper one has to look amongst a whole lot of uninteresting ones. With a bit of skill and prior knowledge one can find interesting things of course, but that’s not really what I’d call browsing, in the sense of just having a look at what’s there and finding all sorts of gems.

What might an expository mathematical wiki be like?

This post has its origins in a discussion that arose as a result of a very interesting post of Terence Tao. Both the post and the discussion can be found here . The post outlines a rather general idea, or trick, that can be used in many mathematical situations. With such tricks, it is usually difficult, and in any case not desirable, to formalize them as lemmas: if you try to do so then almost certainly your formal lemma will not apply in all the situations where the trick does. This has the unfortunate consequence that they are relegated to something like “folklore,” transmitted orally (to a lucky few) or rediscovered over and over again (the more usual experience).