Welcome

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.