The Web Practice of Mathematicians on the Web: An Insight into Significant but Neglected Web Groups

Abstract

In this paper, we describe the findings from a three-year multi-phased investigation into the Web practice of online mathematics communities. Our results indicate that the equivalent technologies that enable text-input or image-uploads without the need to understand programming languages have not been made available for the mathematics/ scientific communities to enable fluid communications. Given the global importance of mathematical and scientific collaborations, we argue that the mathematical and scientific communities are significant but neglected groups, and that more attention should be given to the user-interface designs to support fluid online mathematics communications.