I thought as an experiment I would put up an open thread. Feel free to discuss the hardness of math, or whatever else is on your mind.

I’ve invited frequent commenter PeterMcB to guest post on Ars Math.

Last week’s claim to be back online turned out to be greatly exaggerated. I think I really am back online this time, though.

In a surprising development, arxiv.org has added trackbacks for weblog posts that link to papers. Ars Math links to a lot of arxiv abstracts, so this is good for us, but I’m curious what uses people will put this to. Will authors obsessively check their abstracts to find out what people are saying about them? Will no one care? Will the whole thing be destroyed by spammers?

Via Crooked Timber (which was via Cosmic Variance).

I’m back online, finally. (Though my e-mail is tragically now broken — I can’t reply to any mail. Teach me to ever go offline.) I would like to thank sigfpe for helping out in my absence.

I’m going to be far from the Internet starting on Monday, so I’ve asked sigfpe — of comment board and Neighborhood of Infinity fame — to help fill in for me.

We’re going to start experimenting with having guest bloggers. Our first guest blogger will be our most voluminous commenter, Michael.

This site is dedicated to the mathematical arts: mathematics itself, and its many children. Mathematics, even the most abstruse, is now pervasive throughout physics, computer science, economics, and other fields. We explore these topics, in lieu of doing our jobs or conversing with our loved ones.