Manjil P. Saikia,Department of Mathematical Sciences,Tezpur University,manjil.saikia@gmail.comhttp://www.facebook.com/manjilhttp://www.gonitsora.com

Web 2.0 is more of an user advantage than any technical marvel.

It’s a better web. Its about interacting and

collaborating via the web.Facebook, Flickr, Youtube, Gmail are

all examples of Web 2.0 sites.

Like every field of human endeavor, math has also had its share of Web 2.0 glamour.

With the myriad of math blogs across the web, the FB profile pages of mathematicians, interactive blogs of mathematicians and what not.

Typical examples are mathlinks.ro, mathoverflow.net, tricki.org etc.

I have been using various social networking websites and interactive websites since I was in High School (2005+).

Have met many like minded people interested in math through Facebook, Twitter, Orkut and Mathlinks.

It’s a useful means of learning while relaxing at the same time.

Till now I have collaborated with 3 persons (all from different countries) and each one in a different career track, and all collaborative works were through the web, interestingly all were on different topics!

A brief description of that follows.

Jure is a final year undergrad student of mathematics at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. He was an IMO Bronze Medalist and was the Deputy Leader of the Slovenian IMO team in 2010.

We first had our interaction in late 2008 when Jure replied to a question I had posted in the popular math forum, Mathlinks.

We began working together in 2009 and by the end of that year we had done some substantial work to write out a paper.

After all the corrections and revisions, we first presented our work at the “International Congress of Mathematicians Satellite International Conference” held in 2010.

The title of the paper was “A Few Results in the Theory of Numbers”.

Following good reviews by some very distinguished mathematicians there (including Dr. Neeraj Kayal), we decided to send our work as a series of papers to different journals.

That resulted in the following three papers by us:

“On a Simple Number Theoretic Result”, Journal of the Assam Academy of Mathematics, Vol3 (2010) pp 91-96.

“On a Periodic Sequence”, accepted in South East Asian Journal of Mathematics and Mathematical Sciences.

“Binomial Symbols and Prime Moduli”, accepted in the Journal of the Indian Mathematical Society.

Mohayeminul (Mohaimin) is a student in the Institute of Information Technology, Dhaka University, Bangladesh where he is doing his Bachelors degree in Engineering.

Tim is a retired industrial consultant now residing in Auckland, New Zealand. He holds two bachelors degrees, one masters degree and a Ph.D in mathematics.

The genesis of my work with Mohaimin and Tim is interesting.

Mohaimin out of fun posted a status on FB saying something about a FB polygon.

I followed it up with a few variations of my own, and posted a few problems related to it in a group of which I am a member called “Ramanujan Gonit Songho”.

The responses to that problem suggested that it was more complex than we had anticipated, and so we began thinking about it deeply.

However, our limited mathematical as well as programming skills meant that we had to seek help. We approached Tim after we saw one of his comments.

This act followed up with some intense discussions on FB and Gmail, and this resulted in another paper by me:

“The Facebook Polygon Problem” accepted in Applied Mathematical Sciences.

This work is however related to Algorithmic Graph Theory and Probability Theory unlike the other purely Number Theoretic work.

Recently I started with Pankaj Jyoti Mahanta, an online magazine on Mathematics in particular and Science and Tech in general called, Gonit Sora (http://www.gonitsora.com).

We plan to update the site from time to time with articles (both English and Assamese). The site used Wordpress!

The site is still in Beta stage.

Another project in the pipeline is FOSS North East with Pranab.

We plan to launch it very soon.This will be the first and only FOSS

related website totally dedicated to North East India.

There will be tutorials on FOSS, podcasta, a LUG, help forums, and many more.

FB is good for work!Math can be done on the web!Web 2.0 is a cool way to

collaborate!FB and math are interconnected!