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Results of Gowers’ mathematical writing experiment

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Timothy Gowers’ mathematical writing experiment, which we reported on last month, has now concluded and the results are available. The experiment concerned a set of proofs of results on metric spaces; Gowers sought opinions on how well-written and understandable each one is.

It turns out that experiment was a ruse!: Gowers revealed on his blog that he has been working on a program which can produce human-readable proofs of propositions, and its proofs were smuggled in amongst two others written by humans. After revealing that, he asked for people to tell him which proofs were the computer’s. He’s just published the results of that second experiment on his blog, along with a description of the program.

Gowers needs you for an experiment concerning mathematical writing

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Do you know about metric spaces? Would you like to be the subject of an experiment? Then Timothy Gowers needs you!

Gowers put a post on his weblog this morning containing five propositions to do with metric spaces, along with three write-ups of proofs of each proposition. He’s looking for feedback on how easy or hard to understand each write-up is, as well as how well-written they were.

If you’ve some time to spare, go and take part in the experiment over at Gowers’s weblog.

Follow Friday

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I’m hijacking Katie’s newly-instituted series of posts about who to follow on Twitter with a post about who to follow on Google+.

Google+ famously has almost nobody on it. If anyone knows the potential for really interesting exceptions to the word “almost”, it’s mathematicians, so by that mad logic there should be some really interesting mathematicians on Google+. As luck has it, there are! It seems that the unconstrained nature of Google+ posts gives mathematicians the space they need to express themselves usefully.

Here are a few mathsy people you might like to encircle on Google+.

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