How do you feel about the Maths forum?

I don't post detailed solutions (unless posting a "model" solution, which I do occasionally).

But detail is helpful when explaining exactly where in a page of calculations an OP has gone wrong. Or explaining how to advance to "the next line" in their solution.

When someone has posted something like:

$\displaystyle \sum_{i=0}^k \sum_{j=0}^l \dfrac{\partial^2}{\partial x_i \partial x_j} \sin (\pi i x_j) \cos (\pi j x_i)$

I hope you can see that it's pretty darn painful looking at that in one browser tab and trying to reply to it in another tab.

I think you are being too fussy - posting a hint does not need a massive effort.

I'd just say look again at line three or whichever the error is in.

Quoting the maintainer of the guide to get his attenion...

Well, that's too broad a statement to be true. Sometimes a hint takes a couple of minutes, sometimes I have to solve the problem in order to find a nice hint that points someone in the right direction. And to latex it up nicely can be time consuming. And writing up explanatory background information can take a long time, and need a lot of thought to assemble.



I'm broadly in agreement but with caveats:

The fundamental problem is ensuring that people post comprehensible questions. To my mind, this means either:

a) writing up clear latex or
b) posting a photo/upload of clear readable working, at the right resolution

I prefer latex, since even with a good picture, sometimes it's hard to read someone's writing style, but that's a relatively minor thing.

Too often people do neither, and we end up with a half-arsed attempt at formatted mathematics (e.g. x^2+2x+1/3x-1 or int[0^1] e^(-x)sin(x)dx) that is almost-latex, but either totally unreadable without lots of effort, or ambiguous. Given that many people try to write formatted mathematics, it's certainly not unreasonable to push them to go the whole hog and stick tex tags around it. It would be nice to have a dedicated tex button in the editor to do this.

In addition, whereas say 5 years ago, latex was a rare and seldom seen beast, these days, we are in the world of MathJax - it's easy to for sites to support it, and hence it will become more common, and more expected. It's in the interests of people learning maths to learn latex at the same time, so we ought to encourage it, if not require it.

Another advantage of requiring someone to either provide latex or good attachments is that is forces them to think about the layout and presentation of their work. Far too often, I see bizarre, barely comprehensible stream-of-conciousness descriptions of working ("..and then I multiplied by x^2, which made the whole thing = <blah>, and then I divided by 2, which seemed to give the right result..." ) rather than the actual working itself - I don't want a story, I want your working.

And to echo DFranklin's complaint: I have poor vision specifically at screen distance (unusually, I have good very-near vision, and good far vision, but am near sighted at 0.5.-1m) - even with glasses, I sometimes struggle to read attachments, and the poorly formatted semi-latex monstrosities, so typically I simply ignore them. It's not unreasonable to expect people who are requesting help to put in some effort to ensure that other people can, in fact, help them.

In addition, whereas say 5 years ago, latex was a rare and seldom seen beast, these days, we are in the world of MathJax - it's easy to for sites to support it, and hence it will become more common, and more expected. It's in the interests of people learning maths to learn latex at the same time, so we ought to encourage it, if not require it.

Hi guys

We've noticed that posting in the Maths forum has been really low for the past couple of months.

We just wanted to know if you've noticed anything wrong in the forum, and whether we could do anything to help? Either in terms of helping to promote threads, create content, or even help keep the forum tidy.

The fundamental problem is ensuring that people post comprehensible questions.

If there's a slip then saying 'look again; is often enough.

I agree that this is the most fundamental issue, but for me a non-trivial secondary issue is providing questions in a machine readable/editable/copyable format. That both means I can adjust font sizes etc. to get something that's easier to read

It doesn't really take effort for me until it starts getting pretty involved. But for sure you get to a point where it's like "Sorry, OP, but you really need to use LaTeX for this..."

Stackexchange is much closer to a "professional mathematician" website though.

Its something to think about for this subforum. I really like the title prompt but if we had a template then I think two sections would be clearer : question and attempt at a solution.