Terence Tao

So we don't have this tradition as in the sciences of lead author and second author and so forth, which we're proud of.

We make all the authors equal status, but it doesn't quite scale to this size.

So a decade ago, I was involved in these things called polymath projects.

It was the crowdsourcing mathematics, but without the lean component.

So it was limited by, you needed a human moderator to actually check that all the contributions coming in were actually valid.

And this was a huge bottleneck, actually.

But still, we had projects that were, you know, 10 authors or so.

But we had decided at the time...

not to try to decide who did what, but to have a single pseudonym.

So we created this fictional character called DHJ Polymath in the spirit of Bobakhee.

Bobakhee is the pseudonym for a famous group of mathematicians in the 20th century.

And so the paper was authored on the pseudonym.

So none of us got the author credit.

This actually turned out to be

Not so great for a couple of reasons.

So one is that if you actually wanted to be considered for tenure or whatever, you could not use this paper as you're submitted as one of your publications because you didn't have the formal author credit.

But the other thing that we've recognized much later is that when people referred to these projects, they naturally referred to the most famous person who was involved in the project.

So this was Tim Gower's project, this was Terence Tao's project, and not mention the other 19 or whatever people that were involved.

So we're trying something different this time around where everyone's an author, but we will have an appendix with this matrix, and we'll see how that works.

Yeah, the difficulty increases exponentially with the number of steps involved in the proof.