Welcome to sci.math.research, a moderated newsgroup. The charter ----------- CHARTER: This newsgroup is a forum for the discussion of current mathematical research. Additional hints about suitability of materials ----------------------------------------------- We understand "mathematical research" to be an exploration of mathematics whose goal is the establishment of new mathematical facts, previously unknown to the mathematical community. In addition to discussing current mathematical research, you are encouraged to post announcements of: - mathematics conferences - preprints available, electronically or physically - new mathematics journals - online resources of interest to research mathematicians - availability of new mathematical software - job openings for mathematicians - professional obituaries of mathematicians We discourage requests for: - solutions to homework problems - a particular complicated equation to be solved symbolically - a particular function to be integrated symbolically - solutions of problems at an undergraduate level - elementary combinatorial algorithms - information about computer software - information pertaining to mathematics education - e-mail addresses of mathematicians - jobs - responses to be sent by email directly to you We discourage the use of: - fighting words The moderators -------------- The moderators of this group are Dan Grayson <> Maarten Bergvelt <> Gerald A. Edgar <-state.edu> Robert Israel <> David Rusin <> The moderators appreciate receiving feedback about their moderation decisions, so if you see a post that should, in your opinion, not have appeared, please drop the acceptor of it a note. You can see who accepted it by glancing at the "Approved" line in the header of the article. Where to find this and other information ---------------------------------------- This document is available at http://www.math.uiuc.edu/sci.math.research/ You can also find pointers there to other useful sources of information on the Internet for mathematicians. The readers of sci.math.research --------------------------------- The newsgroup is read by thousands of research mathematicians, some of them among the most distinguished mathematicians in the world, as well as tens of thousands of graduate students, undergraduates, and others with an serious interest in mathematics. Therefore posting to the newsgroup carries with it a serious responsibility to present your contribution in a professional, accurate, and courteous manner appropriate for a gathering of research mathematicians. If you post polite and carefully considered questions and answers, it can burnish your reputation as a professional or amateur mathematician, even if you make mistakes. But if you toss off obscure questions that you haven't thought through and that hold no particular interest beyond your current project, or if you lose your temper when writing a posting, then you should indeed be embarrassed. You can't count on the moderator to reject any particular posting. Even if you cancel a posting, it will still be permanently archived by commercial services that redistribute Usenet traffic. The basics of posting to a moderated newsgroup ---------------------------------------------- This newsgroup is moderated, but you should post original articles and followups in the usual way. The news reading software automatically forwards submitted articles to the current moderator. The moderator receives the articles by email, forwards accepted articles to the rest of the net, and returns rejected articles to the authors by email. This process takes time. If you post an article, and three days later it hasn't appeared, and you haven't received a rejection notice, then either it was never delivered to the moderator, or the rejection notice couldn't be delivered to you. Using a false return email address (to avoid spam, for example) will guarantee that you receive no messages from the moderator about rejected articles. Often the moderator has changes to suggest to the author which will make the posting acceptable, and a false return email address prevents the moderator from communicating with the poster. We may reject postings which lack a valid return address. Anonymous postings are discouraged, although postings sent through anonymizing services are currently being accepted. Many readers of sci.math.research read this newsgroup through an ASCII terminal or its equivalent, so please post messages in plain ASCII text, with perhaps a bit of TeX thrown in when absolutely necessary. Multipart messages with attachments are discouraged. Articles with some components encoded so they are unintelligible without MIME-decoding software will be rejected. For the same reason, don't expect it to be easy for the readers to follow a link to a web page included in your article. Instead, you should provide the main mathematical ideas in plain ASCII to get readers interested, and offer a link to a web page only as a supplement. If you wish to communicate with the current moderator, one good way to do it is to post an article which begins with "Dear Moderator". Or you may send email to the moderator at . If you have any comments about the moderation, please submit them. Make sure to omit any extraneous text from your posting. This includes trailing blank lines, gratuitously many blank lines, initial salutations such as "Hello", and redundant or very long signatures. In particular, when posting a followup, pare down any previously posted text as much as possible. If you have some TeX which you would like to post, consider instead running it through a deTeXing filter before posting it. There is a deTeXing perl script available as http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/support/tex2mail/ which will handle subscripts, superscripts, and even commutative diagrams. When posting a followup, please don't modify the subject line, as it makes it more difficult for readers to follow the thread. Crossposting to other moderated newsgroups is discouraged, because the moderator has no criteria for judging the acceptability of the article to the other newsgroups. It is better to post the article separately to other moderated newsgroups, so the other moderator can receive and judge the article. Crossposting to other unmoderated newsgroups is discouraged, too, because it leads to parallel and hence wasteful discussions, especially if the other newsgroup is sci.math. If you do cross-post, be patient - the article will not appear in the other newsgroups until it has been moderated. The news software detects the presence of a moderated group in the list of newsgroups, sends the article to the moderator, and does not arrange for it to be posted to the other newgsroups. That job is left to the moderator, sigh. Newsgroups operate as a forum for public discussion, so it is courteous to follow the discussion on a newsgroup for a while after you have posted a question. Some readers feel it is impolite for a poster to request replies be sent by email, because this robs the other readers of the benefit of hearing what the answer was. Some newsgroup reading software has problems: here are the problems we know about. The epigone software at Mathforum.org: (1) for a reply it leaves the subject field blank in the form presented to the user, thereby encouraging a new or incorrect subject to be entered; (2) articles with different subject lines are regarded as being in different threads, even if they are in the same thread according to the "references" header; (3) articles with the same title are regarded as being in the same thread, even if there is no "references" header indicating that; (4) there is no way to view all the headers of an article (to see what thread it's really in, for example). Related newsgroups ------------------ If you are considering posting to sci.math.research, it's possible that the article is better suited to another research newsgroup such as: comp.graphics.research Highly technical computer graphics discussion. sci.crypt.research Cryptography, cryptanalysis, and related issues. sci.econ.research Research in all fields of economics. sci.physics.research Current physics research. or to another sci.math.* news group: sci.math Mathematical discussions and pursuits. sci.math.num-analysis Numerical analysis. sci.math.symbolic Symbolic algebra. or to a mathematically oriented mailing list such as: GRAPHNET at http://listserv.nodak.edu Graph theory or to one of the following groups: bionet.biology.computational comp.compression comp.compression.research comp.graphics.algorithms Algorithms used in producing computer graphics. comp.infosystems.gis comp.soft-sys.math.mathematica Mathematica (moderated). comp.soft-sys.math.maple Maple. comp.text.tex Discussions about mathematical typesetting using TeX. comp.theory Theoretical computer science. comp.theory.cell-automata Discussion of all aspects of cellular automata. comp.theory.dynamic-sys Ergodic Theory and Dynamical Systems. sci.crypt Different methods of data en/decryption. sci.econ Economics. sci.engr.control sci.fractals Objects of non-integral dimension and other chaos. sci.geo.satellite-nav sci.logic Logic -- math, philosophy & computational aspects. sci.mech.fluids sci.nonlinear Chaotic systems and other nonlinear scientific study. sci.op-research Operations research. sci.physics Physical laws, properties, etc. sci.physics.computational.fluid-dynamics sci.physics.particle Particle physics. sci.stat.math Statistics from a strictly mathematical viewpoint. sci.systems At http://db.uwaterloo.ca/~alopez-o/math-faq/math-faq.html is an FAQ for sci.math; look here for answers to common questions.