Mathematics Resources

Saturday, May 05th, 2012 | Author:

This is a list of resources available on the web for research mathematicians, which used to be updated regularly. The first version was published May 5, 2012. The last update was on March 12, 2015, marked by [UPDATE 15-03-12]. It is now no longer actively maintained.

If you have any recommendations on what to add to this list, please leave a comment below or write an email. Anything resembling advertising will be deleted without comment.

Reference & Bibliography tools

Doing research (and even preparing seminar talks), you need to check the available literature. There are many tools to do this, most notably MathSciNet to get correct bibliographic data, reviews of articles and links to journals to download articles, if possible.

Open Access Journals & Preprint Archives

Nowadays many publications are discussed as soon as they reach a preprint archive, or an e-print archive. It can take years until journal publication of a preprint, so you will most likely work with preprints anyway.

Open Access Textbooks & Videos

Sometimes there is no need to buy that expensive textbook.

Recommend this to non-mathematicians

If you encounter people who seem to like math but aren't (yet) ready for research, send them to these places to play around:

Innovative Projects & Experiments & Various

A collection of partly well established (MathOverflow), and partly more experimental projects which might change the way you do mathematics, collaboratively, on the web.

Some Math Blogs

I warmly recommend clicking through this list and then through the blogrolls of each blog, until you found your niche in the blogosphere. There are vast amounts of content, and there is always some quality content hidden, deep inside. It is really worthwile to search once and to grab the RSS feeds of the 2-3 most interesting blogs. I also recommend to browse through the archives of interesting blogs, sometimes an article from some years ago might inspire you!

The Cost of Knowledge - The Academic Spring

In January 2012, Fields medallist Timothy Gowers wrote a blog post about the academic publisher Elsevier, its bad business practices and that he decided to boycott them. This lead to the creation of a boycott movement website "The Cost of Knowledge" and a discussion forum to change the world of mathematical publishing. The Academic Spring it was called.

How to give a talk

Beware that there are many kinds of mathematics talks: seminar talks (audience should understand), workshop talks (experts should understand), colloquium talks (mathematicians should understand most), general public talks (non-mathematicians should understand most) - and all mixtures of these. Most talks take about 45 up to 90 minutes, although some plan only 20 to 30 minutes. It is crucial to know what kind of talk is expected and who the audience is. Besides that ... there are some tips & tricks:

How to fail graduate school / obtaining a PhD

Inspired by this MO thread, but mostly stuff I actually read and can recommend. Most of these advice articles seem to think of the US system, where you stay in grad school for a while and then look for an advisor, while it's different in many other countries. However, much advice is useful, and I recommend to read it early on, before entering anything similar to grad school at all!

How to write mathematics teXnically

If you have to write math, you either do it on paper, on a blackboard or on a computer.
On any computer, you'll likely use LaTeX, since the days of trying to use ASCII are long over.
TeXing is an art to be learned, but the basics are pretty easy and it's no longer limited to creating PS or PDF files, but you can literally TeX the web.

Some conference & summer school listings

You should choose which one is most useful to you, then check that one more often and maybe ignore the rest.

Mailing lists

They still exist. And they're mostly used for job offers and conference announcements.

For fun

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Category: English, Mathematics

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3 Responses

  1. 1
    anton maier 
    2012-07-30 (30. July 2012)

    thx for this list. here is another list i'd like to share with you:
    http://www.reddit.com/r/learnmath/comments/w3q6g/list_of_interactive_math_websites/

  2. 2
    Johan Commelin 
    2012-09-20 (20. September 2012)

    Thanks for this website! There is a lot of valuable information on it.
    Maybe you can also put a section on software, like Sage, Pari, &c.
    --jmc

  3. 3
    Konrad Voelkel 
    2012-11-20 (20. November 2012)

    So, I added some nice "experiments" and also the Reddit suggestion (thanks!).

    Do you know of any list on math software? I'm helpless when it comes to statistics (there is too much) and I don't want to manage a comprehensive list on algebra or geometry software tools.

    And of course, I would welcome any other links, in particular links for PhD students in math (not so much undergrad or K12 teacher resources, as this would be too much for me).