Polymath Project

The Polymath Project began in February 2009 as an experiment to collectively work on an unsolved mathematics problem using a blog. Timothy Gowers and Michael Nelson started this project, and wrote this article in Nature, to test the success of an open-source platform to group problem solving. They wanted to prove the density Hales–Jewett theorem (DHJ), which while is known to be true still needs proofs.

The project was successful and in just over a month, the problem was solved. There were many contributors from all aspects of the mathematical community, such as an award winning researcher and a high school teacher. Gowers and Nielson liked the way their experiment differed from other team projects in the sciences, since in those teams "work is usually divided up in a static, hierarchical way. In the Polymath Project, everything was out in the open, so anybody could potentially contribute to any aspect."

Farsightedly, Nielson and Gowers realize this situation raises authorship and preservation issues. Who gets credit for solving the DHJ theorem? The authors of this article will provide a link to the blog as a list of collaborators, so that someone who didn't provide insightful comments won't get the same credit as another who made major advances. Of course, this brings preservation into it, since the blog might not always be a permanent link. Nielson an dGowers mention how the Library of Congress saves certain legal blogs and hope to emulate that somehow. I think the issue is more complex than that, and more investigation should be done on how other web sites are preserved.

The articles notes that "outside mathematics, open-source approaches have only slowly been adopted by scientists" but the authors give several examples for how other sciences could benefit from this kind of collaboration and online data sharing. Almost summing up what we've learned in class, Nielson and Gowers realize "the widespread adoption of such open-source techniques will require significant cultural changes in science." I'm not sure how a blog can be considered that revolutionary as 'open-source' , but opening up a process that is usually confined to classrooms and chalkboards is a step in the right direction. It's nice to see people within the community noting the problem and challenging their colleagues.