This post contains two unrelated announcements. Firstly, I would like to promote a useful list of resources for AI in Mathematics, that was initiated by Talia Ringer (with the crowdsourced assistance of many others) during the National Academies workshop on “AI in mathematical reasoning” last year. This list is now accepting new contributions, updates, or corrections; please feel free to submit them directly to the list (which I am helping Talia to edit). Incidentally, next week there will be a second followup webinar to the aforementioned workshop, building on the topics covered there. (The first webinar may be found here.)
Secondly, I would like to advertise the erdosproblems.com website, launched recently by Thomas Bloom. This is intended to be a living repository of the many mathematical problems proposed in various venues by Paul Erdős, who was particularly noted for his influential posing of such problems. For a tour of the site and an explanation of its purpose, I can recommend Thomas’s recent talk on this topic at a conference last week in honor of Timothy Gowers.
Thomas is currently issuing a call for help to develop the erdosproblems.com website in a number of ways (quoting directly from that page):
You know Github and could set a suitable project up to allow people to contribute new problems (and corrections to old ones) to the database, and could help me maintain the Github project;
You know things about web design and have suggestions for how this website could look or perform better;
You know things about Python/Flask/HTML/SQL/whatever and want to help me code cool new features on the website;
You know about accessibility and have an idea how I can make this website more accessible (to any group of people);
You are a mathematician who has thought about some of the problems here and wants to write an expanded commentary for one of them, with lots of references, comparisons to other problems, and other miscellaneous insights (mathematician here is interpreted broadly, in that if you have thought about the problems on this site and are willing to write such a commentary you qualify);
You knew Erdős and have any memories or personal correspondence concerning a particular problem;
You have solved an Erdős problem and I’ll update the website accordingly (and apologies if you solved this problem some time ago);
You have spotted a mistake, typo, or duplicate problem, or anything else that has confused you and I’ll correct things;
You are a human being with an internet connection and want to volunteer a particular Erdős paper or problem list to go through and add new problems from (please let me know before you start, to avoid duplicate efforts);
You have any other ideas or suggestions – there are probably lots of things I haven’t thought of, both in ways this site can be made better, and also what else could be done from this project. Please get in touch with any ideas!
I for instance contributed a problem to the site (#587) that Erdős himself gave to me personally (this was the topic of a somewhat well known photo of Paul and myself, and which he communicated again to be shortly afterwards on a postcard; links to both images can be found by following the above link). As it turns out, this particular problem was essentially solved in 2010 by Nguyen and Vu.
(Incidentally, I also spoke at the same conference that Thomas spoke at, on my recent work with Gowers, Green, and Manners; here is the video of my talk, and here are my slides.)
