I’ve added some new pages to this blog. Firstly, I’ve moved my old page on my books to a new page on this blog, so that each book now has its own page for publication information, errata, etc., as well as its own comments section for feedback (including the inevitable reports of future errata).
I also added a new page to my advice page on writing and submitting papers, on “taking advantage of the English language“.
Finally, I added some links on the sidebar of this blog to some of the more popular of my older posts and articles, and reorganised the categories slightly. In particular, my expository articles were moved out of the “short story” category (they didn’t fit particularly well with the other wordpress articles in this category) and into the “expository” category. (Now that there are a number of wordpress blogs in research mathematics, it might eventually be worth trying to establish some standards for use of mathematical tags, but this is hardly an urgent concern.)
[Update, July 18: Added the arXiv math categories, as well as a parent Mathematics category.]
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17 July, 2007 at 3:16 am
Mikael Johansson
I suspect that a highly relevant first step toward such a standard is for someone to simply step up and propose a system – much reminiscent of the RFC system for by and by establishment of other networking standards.
Thus – why don’t you simply state what system you’d like to use, and the rest of us’ll surely step into the discussion gladly!
17 July, 2007 at 3:42 am
aravind
Happy Birthday Terry, and I wish you many more such power-of-two birthdays!
17 July, 2007 at 6:05 am
valentin10
Very good blog, very rich nice pictures and articles, congratulations !!!
17 July, 2007 at 8:33 am
Terence Tao
Dear Mikael,
I haven’t given the matter a lot of thought, other than a vague feeling that tags could be more useful than they currently are. They seem to serve two purposes: a “local” purpose, allowing one to extract useful subsets of any given blog (e.g. all the non-technical posts in my blog), and a “global” purpose, allowing one to find other blogs with content similar to a given blog. For the local purpose, there is of course no need for a standard, but for the global purpose there might be.
Here’s a sample suggestion: would it be worthwhile for us to all slap a “mathematics” tag on all our maths posts (which, for me at least, would be about 90% of all my posts)? Richard Borcherds already does this. The global benefits of doing so are admittedly somewhat minor, though. (The same is even more so for trying to agree upon a uniform set of tags for, say, algebra, analysis, geometry, topology, etc.)
Dear Aravind – thanks! A friend pointed out to me that while I can hopefully expect one more power-of-two birthday, this is the last fifth-power birthday I am likely to have :-)
17 July, 2007 at 9:56 am
thomas1111
Dear Terry,
what about the arxiv tags (‘math.NT’, etc.)? They are well-known to all (and even if they don’t appear in the identifiers of preprints anymore the corresponding categories still exist on the arxiv website). This would have the advantage of extracting “serious” mathematics-related posts from those by laymen who tagged theirs with ‘mathematics’.
17 July, 2007 at 11:47 am
Terence Tao
Dear Thomas1111,
I like that solution; one can then search for math.* to get all research mathematics topics with essentially no false positives. It also helps solves the (still rather distant) problem of what to do once the number of research maths blogs out there exceeds the size of any reasonable blogroll; one can scan one’s favourite math.* categories in order to keep abreast.
I’ve decided to just go ahead and tag all my posts with these categories, to illustrate how they would work. (The exercise also illuminated, for me, how my interests are distributed across mathematics.)
18 July, 2007 at 12:58 am
PinJun
Dear Terry
Can you put your tags in the form of “clouds”, just like that of del.icio.us? It would be more convenient for appearance.