Math Roundtable: Notes from my presentation on Math blogs

Cross-posted to my personal blog.

There are quite a few math bloggers and some physicists who do a lot of math, mathematicians who work in physics, and math librarians (most or all of these are also science librarians).

Brief agenda:

• what's a blog
• v. v. quick discussion of informal scholarly communication of mathematicians
• how mathematicians use blogs (by example)
• doing math on blogs
• listing of a few math blogs
  

What's a blog?
- Reverse chronological listing of discrete posts each with a permalink, and frequently the ability to comment/trackback. Has an archive that allows retrieval by date and may have a way to retrieve by assigned category.

V.V. quick discussion (no notes here, even!)

How mathematicians use blogs:
(note: not based on research, but an unscientific reading of a few of the most popular)

• notes on readings outside of their core field
  
• discussions of controversies in evolution, string theory...
• math and the public
• math and teaching
• life as a graduate student
  

Doing math on blogs:
Not trivial perhaps, but solutions exist! (little joke there, get it?)

• MathML
- IE requires a plug-in, but Firefox gets it

• Itex to MathML (a flavor of LaTex)
  
• MovableType plug-in
see results: http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/~distler/blog/

Some active "math" blogs (not arranged anyway in particular although flavor of math might be helpful... also just a smattering):

• Ars Mathematica - group blog
  
• Never Ending Books - professor in Europe
• Diary of a Black Mathematician - professor
• Gooseania - grad student in the UK
• Chapter 0 - uses latex renderer that uses title= and alt= for equation image so content is web searchable
  
• ecstatic over numbers - a Singaporean
• Not Even Wrong - a famous blog (may be controversial) from a math professor
  

Can also look at Technorati's blogfinder math category.

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Also, David mentioned del.icio.us . IMHO, social tagging is *another* web 2.0 technology, not competing, really.

For more information on how to monitor blogs, please refer to my article published in Online (July/August 2005). Feel free to ask, too :)