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While most of the posts are aimed at those with a graduate maths background, I will also occasionally have a number of non-technical posts aimed at a lay mathematical audience.I welcome comments from people with all kinds of mathematical backgrounds and levels of expertise; my only requests are that the discussions are kept constructive, polite, and at least tangentially relevant to the topic at hand. Comments which are spam, self-promoting, off-topic, or otherwise not fulfilling the above requests will be summarily deleted.  Also, comments which essentially duplicate previous comments may also be deleted, or used to replace the previous comment, as appropriate.

Any discussion, feedback, questions or suggestions not related to one of these topics can be placed as a comment to this “About” page, or at my open thread. Comments about formatting and presentation can be made at this page.

Terence Tao

[Update, Mar 31 2007: Opened this page to comments.]

— Some technical remarks —

WordPress has the ability to insert LaTeX math displays (e.g. \int_{-\infty}^\infty e^{-\pi x^2}\ dx = 1) into both posts and comments. The format for this is “$latex [Your LaTeX code]$”. See this announcement for details.

There are some minor glitches with the wordpress LaTeX installation. One of these is that any LaTeX code beginning with a bracket [ will not compile correctly. A hack to fix this is to prefix the [ with a brace pair {}.

WordPress also supports a certain amount of HTML. As a consequence, be careful with using the < and > signs in a comment, they may be misinterpreted as HTML tags! You can use &lt; and &gt; instead. (Inside of a LaTeX environment, you can use \lt and \gt.)

In case a comment really gets mangled up by formatting errors, you can contact me and I can try to manually correct it.

I have heard that it is possible to configure wordpress so that comments can be previewed; if anyone has any specific knowledge on how to implement that feature, I would appreciate knowing about it. [Removed, Apr 8 2007, in response to comments.]

If a comment does not immediately appear after you submit it, it may have been accidentally flagged as spam (this in particular can happen for a post with an excessive number of links). In that case, please contact me and I will de-flag it.

– Copyright etc. –

Readers are welcome to copy, quote, or translate reasonable portions of the content of this blog (e.g. a single article) into other media, as long as a reference to the URL that the content originates from is provided. If you wish to copy a significantly larger fraction of the content (e.g. an entire series of articles), please contact me about it first.