By Kareem Carr
An intriguing article, which ties together the recent debate over a proof by Vinay Deolalikar of Hewlett-Packard and the emergence of collaborative mathematics online has appeared on the New York Times site. It might be fair to say that finding new ways of collaborating online is becoming one of the most exciting sociological changes in science today.
It is not at all clear how this will all turn out. One promising alternative, Google Wave, has been cancelled. This is an acutely sad event for many in the mathematics community who had already been developing tools to do mathematics on Google Wave. For instance, there were several LaTeX display tools.