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Posted by u/achenet a year ago
Ask HN: Good Online Maths Communities?
Hello everyone,

I've gotten back into doing maths more seriously lately, and was wondering if there were any good online maths communities. Part of this is because there are some problems I'm stuck on, and part of it is because I think that much like hanging out on HN can help one become a better programmer, hanging out on a good math forum could help me become a better mathematician.

Does anyone know of any good communities? Math Overflow maybe?

susam · a year ago
The Libera IRC ##math community [1] has been around for over 29 years now! Originally based on the Freenode network, the community migrated to Libera in May 2021 following a controversial shift in Freenode's management.

This community played an instrumental role in my early days of beginning to study mathematics seriously. During its prime, weekly mathematics seminars [2] were organised by the members, which I thoroughly enjoyed. I still vividly remember the IRC user "TRWBW", who seemed to have an answer for every question, no matter how complex. TRWBW's ability to explain even the most challenging concepts with clarity and precision was very impressive. Sadly, he hasn't been seen in several years.

Although many of the original regulars have come and gone over the past three decades, the community continues to remain active. It still remains a good forum for discussing mathematics as well as asking and answering questions.

[1] https://web.libera.chat/##math

[2] https://freenode-math.fandom.com/wiki/Seminars#Past_Seminars

jhanschoo · a year ago
I recommend the math discord in addition to mathoverflow and mathstodon. https://discord.gg/math

I got help with grad-level problems there. There's discussion there from high school through research, and is quite active.

susam · a year ago
We have a little IRC/Matrix-based computer science and mathematics discussion community called Bitwise. The connection links are:

* https://web.libera.chat/#bitwise (i.e., #bitwise on irc.libera.chat)

* https://app.element.io/#/room/#bitwise:matrix.org (i.e., #bitwise:matrix.org)

Both channels above are bridged together. So joining either one of them is enough to follow all conversations.

This isn't specifically targeted at professional mathematicians though. Most members come from a computing background. However, mathematics is a central topic here, with much of the discussion revolving around computer science and mathematical literature. Recent reading and discussions have been about topics like theorem provers (Z3, Lean, etc.), real analysis, Galois theory, distributed consistency, compiler and interpreter development, Standard ML, etc.

mlacks · a year ago
oguz-ismail · a year ago
This. I got more help from /g/, /sci/, and /wsr/ than anywhere else on the internet
mazsa · a year ago
https://github.com/metamath/set.mm , if you do not object to your theorems being machine-provable.
syadegari · a year ago
While not a community itself, Terence Tao's blog (https://terrytao.wordpress.com/) is a good source of high quality, clearly explained maths. As you may know, he has a very broad range of interests, and there might be something for you to pick up and get involved in. He has also been involved in several collaborative math communities, which he writes about at length in his blog. I recall Polymath project and recently some project involving Lean Theorem Prover that even showed up on the first page of the HN.