Manifold Atlas: Diary

This page records interesting events in the history of the Atlas as well as its current phase of development.

1 - 2010

1.1 April & May: North American tour

In April and May Diarmuid Crowley travelled across the USA and Canada giving talks on the Atlas at:

• McMaster, Penn State, Wayne State, Notre Dame, Chicago, Carbondale, Bloomington, Boise State and Binghamton.
• Here are the slides: Binghampton and August 2010 update.

1.2 March: Bordism builds

In March Taras Panov began work on several new Bordism pages with careful assistance from Peter Landweber.

1.3 February: Embeddings of manifolds

In February the first three pages in the Embeddings of manifolds category were started based on a survey pre-print written by Arkadiy Skopenkov.

On the technical side, Philipp Kuehl added intra-article referencing for all Atlas pages.

On the staff side, Philipp Kuehl was officially employed the HIM to continue developing the Atlas interface.

Status as of 28/02/10:

• 2 mature, unrefereed pages.
• 10 growing pages.
• 7 seedling pages.

1.4 January: The bordism project begins

In 2010 we started a collection of pages on the most common bordism theories, their generators and properties: see B-Bordism.

Also, Philipp Kuehl completed the automation of the bibliography which passed 100 entries in size.

2 - 2009

2.1 November & December: First public steps

In November the Atlas went on to the world wide web.

• Diarmuid Crowley presented a talk about the Atlas at the HIM rigidity workshop.
• Andrew Ranicki started the page Exotic spheres.
• Philipp Kuehl began work on Addref and created the Atlas Observer.

2.2 September-October: Forming the Editorial Board

In September and October 2009 the Manifold Atlas formed it's editorial board. Prospective editors were invited by email to register in the Atlas, to browse its then current pages and to begin using it: in particular by write and discuss the first articles of the Atlas. Oleg Viro wrote the first page by an non-HIM author.

Prospective editors were also invited to:

• review the proposed editorial process,
• contribute to the community portal,
• add to the discussion on other project pages.

2.3 March to September: The idea and the platform

From March 2009 until September 2009, Matthias Kreck, Daniel Müllner, Christian Ausoni and Diarmuid Crowley began the process of creating the Atlas. A conceptual challenge which arose was how to combine the flexibility and openness of the world wide web and a Wikipedia style of knowledge creation with the desire to have scientifically reliable and citable information. The solution was two fold: to have both open-editing and author-based options for page creation and development and to have citable, editorially approved static pages which are indefinately preserved for reference in parallel with the more usual evolving pages in the Wikipedia style.

As of writing the hope is that the above concepts will combine the best aspects of flexibility and openness with scientific reliablity.