4 ms·

I do wonder where all the mathematicians / academics hang out online. Now that I'm out of (compsci) grad school, I find myself without like-minded peers to stu

I do wonder where all the mathematicians / academics hang out online. Now that I'm out of (compsci) grad school, I find myself without like-minded peers to study math with. Currently working my way through Riehl's category theory book, but it's a bit tough without anyone to talk to! I know there's MathOverflow, and some people in the FP community hang out on IRC. What's the academic equivalent of HN? GitHub? I'm guessing there must be quite a few hard-to-find Discords for specific research communities.

williamstein 5y ago
One answer to "What's the academic equivalent of HN?" is "going to week-long conferences and workshops", which often involves a bunch of presentations of papers (with Q&A) and discussions long into the night. Before the pandemic, an academic (such as me) could easily spend the entire summer just going from one conference to another. With the pandemic, there's now a lot of live video chat, and seminar series where everybody gets together in Zoom, there's a talk, and discussion afterwards. Here's an example of such a series for number theory: https://sites.google.com/view/vantageseminar https://sites.google.com/view/vantageseminar And, here's a massive list of mathematics (and related) online seminars: https://researchseminars.org/ https://researchseminars.org/ In math there's also a lot more "think deeply and send an email" that happens, rather than things like Hacker News.
- bakuninsbart 5y ago
  > In math there's also a lot more "think deeply and send an email" that happens, rather than things like Hacker News. That would have been my guess, too. I shared an office for a while with a math professor, and he spent around half of his time in the office writing emails to colleagues.
- uyt 5y ago
  The Lean community uses zulip which seems to be a nice compromise between chat and forum/email threads https://leanprover.zulipchat.com/login/ https://leanprover.zulipchat.com/login/
renewiltord 5y ago
An ex-girlfriend of mine is a mathematician. Mostly conferences and symposia. It’s a very meatspace activity. I haven’t kept in touch but the pandemic might have upended that. I’d speculate that it’s because it’s hard to understand much of mathematics without the back and forth of a lecture to help. But that could just be because I truly suffered through my Mathematics graduate degree and am glad a Masters is all I managed.

williamstein 5y ago

One answer to "What's the academic equivalent of HN?" is "going to week-long conferences and workshops", which often involves a bunch of presentations of papers (with Q&A) and discussions long into the night. Before the pandemic, an academic (such as me) could easily spend the entire summer just going from one conference to another. With the pandemic, there's now a lot of live video chat, and seminar series where everybody gets together in Zoom, there's a talk, and discussion afterwards. Here's an example of such a series for number theory: https://sites.google.com/view/vantageseminar https://sites.google.com/view/vantageseminar And, here's a massive list of mathematics (and related) online seminars: https://researchseminars.org/ https://researchseminars.org/ In math there's also a lot more "think deeply and send an email" that happens, rather than things like Hacker News.

bakuninsbart 5y ago
> In math there's also a lot more "think deeply and send an email" that happens, rather than things like Hacker News. That would have been my guess, too. I shared an office for a while with a math professor, and he spent around half of his time in the office writing emails to colleagues.
uyt 5y ago
The Lean community uses zulip which seems to be a nice compromise between chat and forum/email threads https://leanprover.zulipchat.com/login/ https://leanprover.zulipchat.com/login/

renewiltord 5y ago

An ex-girlfriend of mine is a mathematician. Mostly conferences and symposia. It’s a very meatspace activity. I haven’t kept in touch but the pandemic might have upended that. I’d speculate that it’s because it’s hard to understand much of mathematics without the back and forth of a lecture to help. But that could just be because I truly suffered through my Mathematics graduate degree and am glad a Masters is all I managed.