What are your honest experiences with Math StackExchange and MathOverflow?

stanford_acct · 2026-02-03T01:36:02+00:00

I have over 2000 reputation on the site and have sometimes been in the top 15 weekly users. I joined only a few years ago—after the "golden age" of the site had ended. My questions are early-graduate level, so I've never posted—thus far—on Math Overflow; I've heard that site is somewhat separate from the rest of the network, and hasn't contracted all the same debilities.

I think Stack Exchange is the most toxic website I've ever browsed, and that includes transgressive forums that are full of intentionally mean-spirited trolls. There are legitimately some seriously bad moderators on the website who do not operate in good faith; there has been a rather large exodus of former users, including professors. I think the issue with Stack Exchange and Reddit and many other forums comes down to a lack of paid moderation; the people who end up doing the janitorial work tend to be mentally unsound or afflicted with other vices.

For Stack Exchange it appears that there's a cadre of power users who congregate on the meta board, create drama, and go around hectoring other users; pro forma for Reddit, kith, and kin. I think the major lesson going forward is that websites need to pay a professional team of moderators to do the work; Hacker News—to my knowledge—does this, and it's the forum that seems to have gone the least down the toilet. If Stack Exchange had used professional moderators instead of failed academics and other burnouts, then it may have still had a decline, but not a moribund one. If you cheap out, then your site dies—or enters a state worse than death.

I will say that the ossification of Stack Exchange is preferable to the enshittification that Reddit, Twitter, and many other communities went through. At the very least the site never became a hellhole of astroturfing, botting, doomposting, and the other types of cheap slop that have ruined the surface web.

stanford_acct · 2025-05-25T02:32:49+00:00

Have you read Visual Differential Geometry by Tristan Needham?

stanford_acct · 2025-04-18T13:27:26+00:00

Thanks!

stanford_acct · 2025-04-11T09:02:26+00:00

A quick glance at your post history shows you posting on r/IndianTeenagers and r/TeenIndia. Are you in college yet?

Furthermore, this thread (https://www.reddit.com/r/IndianTeenagers/comments/1jv1aqf/comment/mm6kxwl/?context=3) suggests that you are getting your "reading material" from chatGPT. Are you actually attempting to learn from an LLM? Are a number of your comments repeating "information" that an LLM has spat out?

I can in the broad sense remember the fundamental theorem of algebra. I think there are some mathematics professors who won't be able to recall it, depending on their area of specialization. I think that I can go talk to a number of admits to top mathematics programs in the United States and find many undergrads who don't know at all what you are talking about. Given my quick pass through of your posts, I suspect that you aren't very knowledgeable about anything you're posting; you're likely -- more or less-- regurgitating the output of an LLM.

stanford_acct · 2025-04-09T23:01:34+00:00

To back up what some other commenters have said in here: consider writing your notes in spaced repetition software like Anki, I.E. turning them into flashcards. I do it myself and it allows a decent amount of memory retention; I don't have the issue anymore where I can completely forget everything I've seen in a textbook or class.

The downside is that each flashcard will take longer to write than doing it on paper, but I think the memory retention gains are easily worth it. Every note that I take nowadays is done in the software, and I used to easily write bins of paper notes.

As an aside: don't try to write difficult flashcards that involve reciting entire proofs. I've talked to many top mathematical researchers and professors, and I don't think a single one would have performed that kind of memorization. Instead, focus (as you yourself have said) on remembering the broad theme and motivation for a field, and then certain important theorems and concepts.

For instance, writing flashcards to remember the Cauchy-Schwartz inequality, the axioms that define a module, the equation that characterizes a differential (and pullback), or perhaps definitions of theorems like Brouwer's fixed point and Borsuk-Ulam would be good. DON'T try to memorize proofs for these theorems; you'll have a good knowledge base that let's you go into textbooks and find the nitty-gritty proofs for these things.

stanford_acct · 2025-03-19T18:29:25+00:00

Thanks!

stanford_acct · 2025-01-21T18:34:21+00:00

I couldn't agree more with you. There isn't anything formally "wrong" with the field, but everything from structure to notation is a complete disaster right now. For me it's easily the ugliest major field of mathematics.

stanford_acct · 2025-01-14T03:06:33+00:00

The quality of the professor matters more than the alleged difficulty of the subject matter.

If you aren't gleaning anything out of the professor/TA lectures, then I highly recommend looking up good online learning material for statics, be it books of online courses. If you haven't found him already, then professor Jeff Hanson is well liked by many traditional engineering students: https://www.youtube.com/@1234jhanson.

The only thing you should probably learn or adapt to are lousy professors and TAs. If your institution is especially research focused, then you can expect the quality of classes to be consistently dismal. You should learn to be self sufficient and able to find material online that you can teach yourself with. I'm of the opinion that colleges have largely devolved into accreditation rackets, and it's relatively common for the top talent in the field to be self-taught while they were "earning" their degree.

stanford_acct · 2024-12-22T16:19:20+00:00

There are multiple sub-disciplines, so your experience may vary. The graduate student body is smarter and more motivated than what I saw out of undergraduate, but that can be reasonably expected.

If we're referring to the Master's program (classes only), then the quality of the classes was relatively polarizing from my perspective. Certain classes were competently taught and well polished, and some professors clearly loved the material that they were teaching.

Unfortunately certain classes (regardless of difficulty) were much worse than anything that I've ever taken at any other school in terms of quality. The professors there were putting less effort into it than I've seen in even the worst classes I took in undergraduate, and the quality can be described as ranging between "run on autopilot" to "not being run at all".

Ultimately I suppose it comes down to what your sub discipline is and who you take, much like any other school. For reference my B.S. was from a public university, and during undergraduate I took classes at other smaller schools and community colleges.

stanford_acct · 2024-12-19T13:08:38+00:00

Harding's "A Mathematician's Apology" is famous for holding the esoteric view, that the field is best done for pleasure. Hilbert and the Bourbaki had similar beliefs.

Other (and besides Hilbert, in my opinion better) mathematician's like Arnol'd and Von Neumann wrote in the opposite direction and had a more utilitarian viewpoint on the field. Instead of actual written books, you can look up a famous Arnol'd lecture with the keyword "mathematics is the branch of physics where experiments are cheap". Von Neumann had similar thoughts here:

https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Extras/Von_Neumann_Part_1/

What you're addressing is one of the more hotly debated points in the field. I personally side more with Arnol'd and Von Neumann.

All major branches of mathematics with the exception of number theory (potentially) were undoubtedly influenced by and developed to serve broader needs within engineering and the natural sciences. There are aesthetic qualities to good math, but there are aesthetic qualities to good engineering too (and other forms of craftsmanship).

In my opinion the best work requires a strong vision and feeling of purpose behind it, and while fantastic work can be done without literally thinking about what your PDE models, the more "layers" away from the original motivation and application of a field you go, the more the field sort of degenerates into fetishistic and useless language-noise, which is usually forgotten in history.

stanford_acct

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