Research Seminars: A New Hope
The site researchseminars.org provides a crowdsourced list of seminars and conferences happening worldwide. We describe the history of the site, its current scope, and its prospects for the future.
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A long time ago, in a world that now seems far, far away, the Boston area hosted seven weekly research seminars in number theory. Frustrated by the task of scanning the seminar homepages every weekend to find talks of interest, one of us (Edgar Costa) created a website to collect them automatically into one page. That site, Bean Theory, proved to be a valuable resource for local number theorists, especially those new to the community. When the pandemic reached the U.S. and we moved our seminars online, we were pleasantly surprised to see some mathematical friends from faraway places participating. We realized that audiences for seminars like ours might be even larger if there were an effective way to advertise them. Conversely, there might be online seminars that we might like to attend, if only we knew about them. This inspired two of us (Edgar Costa and David Roe) to begin creating a website that mathematicians worldwide could use to find seminars, listed in their own time zone, with direct videoconference links. Because of our experience developing Bean Theory and the L-functions and Modular Forms Database (a database of objects in arithmetic geometry), we were able to get a running start. The rest of us soon joined in designing and developing the site, which we called mathseminars.org. Even though we all put aside other work to complete our project quickly, we were not the first to produce a website listing online mathematics seminars. By the time our site was ready, a few other websites existed, but our site had the advantage that its content was crowdsourced. We realized from our experience with Bean Theory
B.P. was supported in part by National Science Foundation grant DMS-1601946 and Simons Foundation grants #402472 and #550033.
E. Costa (*) · B. Poonen (*) · D. Roe (*) · A. Sutherland (*) Department of Mathematics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA https://math.mit.edu/~edgarc/; https://math.mit.edu/~poonen/; https://math.mit.edu/~roed/ e-mail: [email protected]; https://math.mit.edu/~drew/ © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Wonders (ed.) Math in the Time of Corona, Mathematics Online First Collections, https://doi.org/10.1007/16618_2020_21
E. Costa et al.
that this would make it easy for our list to grow: any seminar organizer with a web browser could add new talks without our direct involvement, after being endorsed by any other content creator on the site (a measure intended to reduce spam). And indeed it grew, even faster than we had anticipated! During the first 28 days after the April 10, 2020 launch, the site received 411,015 page views from 83,618 visitors. mathseminars.org is like the departure board at O’Hare if you could just get on any flight you wanted and they were all free!—Jordan Ellenberg
Mathematicians thanked us for enabling them not only to continue learning about new research but also to reconnect with their colleagues at a time when many were feeling isolated. Conference organizers scrambling to host events onlin
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