Polymath project

The Polymath Project is a collaboration among mathematicians to solve important and difficult mathematical problems by coordinating many mathematicians to communicate with each other on finding the best route to the solution. The project began in January 2009 on Tim Gowers' blog when he posted a problem and asked his readers to post partial ideas and partial progress toward a solution. This experiment resulted in a new answer to a difficult problem, and since then the Polymath Project has grown to describe a particular process of using an online collaboration to solve any math problem.

In January 2009, Gowers chose to start a social experiment on his blog by choosing an important unsolved mathematical problem and issuing an invitation for other people to help solve it collaboratively in the comments section of his blog. Along with the math problem itself, Gowers asked a question which was included in the title of his blog post, "is massively collaborative mathematics possible?" This post led to his creation of the Polymath Project.

Since its inception, it has now sponsored a "Crowdmath" project in collaboration with MIT PRIMES program and the Art of Problem Solving. This project is built upon the same idea of the Polymath project that massive collaboration in mathematics is possible and possibly quite fruitful. However, this is specifically aimed at only high school and college students with a goal of creating "a specific opportunity for the upcoming generation of math and science researchers." The problems are original research and unsolved problems in mathematics. All high school and college students from around the world with advanced background of mathematics are encouraged to participate. Older participants are welcomed to participate as mentors and encouraged not to post solutions to the problems. The first Crowdmath project began on March 1, 2016.

The initial proposed problem for this project, now called Polymath1 by the Polymath community, was to find a new combinatorial proof to the density version of the Hales–Jewett theorem. As the project took form, two main threads of discourse emerged. The first thread, which was carried out in the comments of Gowers's blog, would continue with the original goal of finding a combinatorial proof. The second thread, which was carried out in the comments of Terence Tao's blog, focused on calculating bounds on density of Hales-Jewett numbers and Moser numbers for low dimensions.

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