Math Questions For P6

[Argelia Long]

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I read a story about some guy who was deathly sick and to pass the time before he expired he began to read Euclid's Elements. Needless to say he made a miraculous recovery. I was also close to buying the farm so I joined a bunch of math forums and became a little active on a few here and guess what? I feel like a 85 year old again. Sharing what you have no matter how small, giving back for everything that was given to me, that is what life is about. Sure trying to find people who know less than I do to help is hard but even a blind squirrel can find an acorn now and then.

Whenever I use a new program, get an error message or install a new hardware, I use google to find my problem on some forum where usually someone already answered it free of charge. This person will never even know that I was helped by the answer.Whenever I have a question about language that is not well answered by my textbook or a question about a fact, I use wikipedia and I find that someone compiled answers for free that are way better than my books. No feedback on the usefulness for me reaches the many editors of the respective articles.

The gamification might play some role there, but for me this is counteracted by the restriction on human contact. It is much more important to me that the interface just works reasonably well and allows others to find my answers reasonably easily.

There's something entertaining about answering questions that are hard enough to hold my interest but not so hard as to be a grueling experience. Also it's good to be helping students with math. I rarely use mathoverflow because the problems there are much harder and would take a while to solve if I even could. The problems in my field there often involve technical issues in other people's research.

Now I notice that when I write an answer it is mostly when I see the problem and think I can write a concise "cool" answer or apply a tool that surprised my when acquiring it. If you have an aha-moment, you feel like now you're the one who gets it and want to induce that point of view in others.

I also don't find answering particularly rewarding, because when a $\gg 10\,\mathrm k$-user answers in the same thread, he will automatically get more votes than me and I don't think it's always because of the answer, but because of established trust.

I'm just trying to become better at math. Learning from a book and by homework exercises is not that interesting to me, but I really do enjoy teaching others. In addition, I find that I tend to give the clearest and most rigorous answers when I'm trying to explain something to someone who doesn't understand, rather than to a grader or to myself.

In 2010 a psychology graduate student did one or two surveys on motivation for people using, and especially answering, on MO; see here. Tausczik eventually published her results in psychology journals. She had been an undergraduate math major at Berkeley when MO was still in its formative stages, so she had an early interest.

I was one of the ones telephoned. At the time, I gave a lot of high-flown reasons, helping people, what have you. I think that is how many people feel for the first year or two of contributing on a site of this type. For me, there was a middle era where i mostly felt i was just showing off what i knew (this is more MSE, really), finally a relaxed time where I just answer when I feel like it. Similar with MSE, just a delay of a year. Things being what they are, it appears that those who go full blast answering questions for years at a furious pace are fairly likely to quit completely when that becomes tiresome.

Anyway, the sites are not parallel in one way that is significant for the question. On MO it is peers helping peers. On MSE it is more one-sided, more strictly teaching, and motivation does differ. I suppose I have mixed together descriptions of my behavior on the two sites. Oh, well.

It occurs to me that I can be quite specific about reputation. On MO, before it joined stackexchange proper, it was possible for a 10K user to search deleted posts, including questions deleted by the person asking, all the way back to the beginning of the site. I did this in connection with this unpleasant episode. Under the circumstances, I felt it was desirable to quickly get up to 10K here on MSE, but was disappointed to find that I had severely limited ability to search deleted posts, and no way at all to see self-deleted questions. Also there was something about not being 100% trusted until 20K. So I did that, and found no improvement in searching. After that, I felt that I had no specific benefit in answering tons of questions that I did not necessarily enjoy, or tinkering with adequate answers so as to get more points, so I just slowed down.

Well I hope this doesn't sound naive, but I just love teaching. At work I get paid for it, which of course is brilliant, getting paid for doing something you enjoy. But I'm still happy to do more, so there's MSE. And I guess reputation is payment of a kind. So in a way I suppose you could say it's all about me, though I do also think that helping (in however small a way) to raise the world's competence in and appreciation of mathematics is a worthwhile aim.

To be a bit more specific about what I get out of teaching: a significant number of students who ask questions (whether face-to-face or online) do not really understand what their difficulty is. It may not be the question they are actually asking, but rather some very deep-rooted misunderstanding. Identifying what their real problem is and trying to answer in such a way as to address both the question asked and the deeper issues is one of the most intellectually satisfying aspects of teaching.

I am not now a mathematician or in a mathematical job, but I have enjoyed maths all my life (done pretty well too), and I want to keep myself sharp and learn what's going on. I have discovered that I get more out of participating than reading - it varies over seasons and how busy I am how much I contribute here. But I enjoy it, and I learn from the engagement.

Third, which I've discovered by participating, I relish the challenge of helping someone to understand something when they seem to be stuck, not just giving the answer to the problem, but also some understanding which will develop mathematical skill and knowledge, and open up useful new ways of thinking about what to do when you are stuck.

The best way to learn is to teach, and answering questions helps me learn. Sometimes I recover lost knowledge, sometimes in attempting to answer a question in a different way I learn something new. I enjoy teaching, but I work in industry, so my opportunities to share insight are otherwise limited.

Because of my limited time, I try to limit myself to questions that I can answer quickly, and where I believe I can transmit a genuine insight to the OP. I enjoy lots of homework and algebra-to-calculus level questions, because I feel that math education is sorely deficient in these areas, and that if I can provide insight instead of an algorithm, then I am doing that person a favor.

Self-esteem. Sometimes, when I read or hear things like Youtube comments, poorly spelled Facebook posts, oversimplified political rants on blogs, TV, bars, et cetera, I start feeling incredibly smart. I know I'm not, I just feel that way.

So I need to meet somebody smarter to guide me, to challenge me, to prove me wrong, to point at my mistakes, or to offer me interesting new points of view. I come to Math.SE, and I immediately realize how dumb I actually am. (And I start feeling incredibly sorry for who posted the Youtube comments.)

Then the question becomes, why Math Stackexchange as opposed to some other forums (which can have their benefits over MSE)? The answer is probably that MSE is a Skinner Box, albeit one in which I have other good reasons to stay in.

I am also making an effort to learn to be a more effective communicator, making posts is good practice for learning to write better. And the positive and negative feedback provides a good indicator of how well I am doing and if I need to edit my response.

Honestly I am also hoping that gaining reputation and more importantly engaging with people who run a business (more so on StackOverflow) will lead to an increase in job potential. Although I am not sure how well this mechanism will work.

As for why most of my time is spent on the Mathematics site? I can answer more questions consistently as a B.S. of Mathematics then as a self taught programmer of three years, also math is more fun where as programming is my job.

I've been 'researching and teaching mathematics' at a German university for about 10 years -- from 1992 till end of 2001 -- and then got a job in the industry. My current job is rather far away from any mathematics. I think I do this for several reasons:

While this was not asked for, I cannot reply to this question without at least remarking that this site has also some shortcomings which make me think of wanting to have my account deleted (I've done this once some time ago already)

A few reasons. First, I like learning about math. There are interesting questions and well written answers on here. Second, I like teaching math. There have been a few pedagogically interesting questions on here. One I saw recently (can't remember the link) was a student being confused about a "ball" in the $xy$ plane. They said no matter how small the radius was, a "ball" would come out of the plane to get some $z$ points. This was an interesting misconception and I'm glad I saw it. Third, all the bells and whistles and reputation and badges. I love positive feedback. Reputation makes me feel so accomplished.

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