Timeline for What is the current status of the question of whether or not the mapping class group has Kazhdan's Property (T)?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
26 events
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| Aug 5, 2022 at 17:54 | comment | added | Timothy Chow | @NoahSnyder Note that my answer there still doesn't automatically rule out the present question. | |
| Aug 5, 2022 at 16:53 | history | edited | LSpice | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Aug 5, 2022 at 16:52 | comment | added | LSpice | The answer given by @TimothyChow to On discussion of published papers at MO, referenced by @NoahSnyder. | |
| Aug 5, 2022 at 16:47 | comment | added | Noah Snyder | @TimothyChow: Perhaps I should have linked to this meta thread instead? General questions about published papers correctness are off-topic too. I agree with the answer given there by (checks notes) Timothy Chow :-) | |
| Aug 5, 2022 at 16:46 | comment | added | Thomas | @NoahSnyder: A further comment. I don't think this is the same kind of situation addressed by Scholze-Stix or Mnev. The papers S-S criticized were the subject of a huge publicity campaign in the popular press, so there was a need for experts to take a stand. The paper M criticized appeared in the Annals and won prizes (e.g. the Clay Fellowship) for its author. This current situation is less public and about a topic that is important for a specific subfield, but not for the broader mathematical public. It'd be weird to post a paper explaining what is wrong with a 15 yr old unpublished preprint. | |
| Aug 5, 2022 at 16:31 | comment | added | Carl-Fredrik Nyberg Brodda | @Thomas As far as historical record goes, I (was 9 years old when the preprint came out and) find your question very useful for precisely that purpose. In particular, I had neither seen the previous question nor heard of the preprint before (my literary interests were somewhat different back then…). | |
| Aug 5, 2022 at 16:01 | comment | added | HJRW | @NoahSnyder: It would be great if an expert would do that! But since they haven't, it doesn't solve the problem for the many people in the field who would like to know the status of this important result. Your comment may be a good account of what "should" happen, but doesn't suggest a useful way forward for the OP. | |
| Aug 5, 2022 at 15:53 | history | edited | Thomas | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Aug 5, 2022 at 15:53 | comment | added | Timothy Chow | @NoahSnyder I kind of agree with Thomas that the "policy" you linked to about preprints doesn't automatically imply that this question is inappropriate for MO. The word "preprint" has connotations of something recent that hasn't been looked at much. If a preprint has been around a long time, and its contents are well known to experts, then it's not materially different from a published paper. (But one could make a different argument, that MO is the wrong forum for potentially controversial discussions about correctness, whether of preprints or published papers.) | |
| Aug 5, 2022 at 15:37 | comment | added | Thomas | @LSpice: As you suggested, I did delete references to the preprint. | |
| Aug 5, 2022 at 15:37 | comment | added | Thomas | @NoahSnyder: I removed all references to the preprint. I decided that I did have to link to the old MO thread, but hopefully that is arms-length enough to satisfy the Keepers of the Rules. | |
| Aug 5, 2022 at 15:35 | history | edited | Thomas | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Aug 5, 2022 at 9:46 | comment | added | HJRW | My sense is that the problem is still regarded as open by many people in the field. But it would be great to hear from someone with more direct knowledge. | |
| Aug 4, 2022 at 20:56 | comment | added | Noah Snyder | If an expert would like to set the historical record straight, and I see why that could be desirable, then they should write it up like Scholze-Stix or Mnev did. MO is not a good venue for this. At any rate, if you disagree with the long-standing MO policy, then suggest at meta.MO that we change the policy. The main MO page is not the place for that kind of debate, I was simply explaining my vote-to-close, not trying to start a policy debate here. | |
| Aug 4, 2022 at 20:53 | comment | added | Thomas | To be clear, I think it is totally reasonable to forbid questions about the correctness of e.g. random articles claiming to prove the Riemann hypothesis, or semi-recent preprints that the community is still digesting. I think that property (T) for the mapping class group is kind of unique -- for most problems, it is not hard for serious people in the field (or in my case, an adjacent field) to figure out the expert consensus. | |
| Aug 4, 2022 at 20:43 | comment | added | Sam Hopkins | I will again side with being permissive about this type of question. When it's genuinely unclear what the expert consensus about the status of an important problem in a field is, it's hard to imagine any better venue than MO for sussing that out. | |
| Aug 4, 2022 at 20:40 | comment | added | Thomas | (I mean, at this point this is almost more a matter of the historical record. A substantial number of active MO users weren't even in college when this paper came out. Does it make sense to allow a single unpublished preprint to wall off all discussion of a topic forever?) | |
| Aug 4, 2022 at 20:40 | review | Close votes | |||
| Aug 11, 2022 at 3:03 | |||||
| Aug 4, 2022 at 20:35 | comment | added | Thomas | @NoahSnyder: I'm not directly asking whether this specific 15 year old preprint is correct or not. In fact, I thought about not mentioning the preprint at all (and would be happy to delete the reference to it), though I expect that it would come up in any discussion. A perfectly good answer would be a pointer to another paper proving or disproving it. More generally, while I think it is totally reasonable to forbid discussion of the correctness of papers, there has to be some kind of statute of limitations. | |
| Aug 4, 2022 at 20:26 | comment | added | Noah Snyder | I can certainly understand why you're frustrated, but it's longtime MO policy that this kind of question (asking about whether a preprint is correct or not) is not on topic. This just isn't the right venue for hashing out these kind of sensitive issues. | |
| Aug 4, 2022 at 19:08 | history | edited | Thomas | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Aug 4, 2022 at 19:03 | comment | added | Thomas | @RyanBudney: It's a property of the set of unitary representations that has amazing group-theoretic consequences. See here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazhdan%27s_property_(T) | |
| Aug 4, 2022 at 18:57 | comment | added | Ryan Budney | Could you remind us what "property T" is? | |
| Aug 4, 2022 at 18:53 | history | edited | YCor | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| S Aug 4, 2022 at 17:53 | review | First questions | |||
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| S Aug 4, 2022 at 17:53 | history | asked | Thomas | CC BY-SA 4.0 |