Terence Tao

So there are actually standard categories from the sciences of what types of contributions people give.

So there's this concept and validation and resources and coding and so forth.

So there's a standard list of 12 or so categories.

And we just ask each contributor to, there's a big matrix of all the authors in all the categories, just to tick the boxes where they think that they contributed.

And just give a rough idea, you know, like, oh, so you did some coding and you provided some compute, but you didn't do any of the pen and paper verification or whatever.

And I think that that works out.

Traditionally, mathematicians just order alphabetically by surname.

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.