It's rather disappointing that mathematicians seem to understand and leverage social media better than computer scientists.

It sounds good, but I'm not quite sure that your statement is true (yet).

The article states "it used blogs and a wiki to mediate a fully open collaboration", but how about running (not just writing) the algorithms (code) to test and experiment collaboratively?

This is the goal of open-source projects like http://codenode.org and http://sagenb.org.

Thanks for those two links. Verified, versioned math is better, and more sustainable like http://www.vdash.org/ . How does Vdash differ from sagenb and codenode?

From what I understand, Vdash does not execute code (actually run it on a backend process, and return the result) written in a standard programming language, where as codenode and sagenb do.

Vdash executes math using the open source proof theorem prover Isabelle :

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/hvg/Isabelle/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isabelle_%28theorem_prover%29

Very exciting.

It's kind of the anti-Andrew Wiles (who worked alone and in secret for many years before proving Fermat's last theorem).

I don't know much more about the history of the proof than this, but in the following talk, Malcolm Gladwell describes the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem as the work of 13 smart guys in collaboration, rather than one lone genius.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/video/conference/2007/gladwe...

From what I know about the problem, his assertion that Ventris worked alone is not quite right, Alice Kober contributed significantly to the decipherment as well.

There's also http://www.vdash.org/. Vdash is verified math with a wiki front end. Hoping the author will comment here. :)

See also http://groups.google.com/group/vdash

Interesting. I wonder if a workable rating system for comments could be found. This might help with the attribution of credit when a significant result is produced.

Another article on HN is an interview with Terence Tao. In it, he references these rules for collaboration:

http://www.math.ufl.edu/misc/hlrules.html

Part of it is that one shouldn't worry about how "good" a comment is before posting. Just post, and if its good, it'll get used.

I admit, this may not be as good an idea when you have a lot of amateaurs, but I think having a rating system would deter a lot of people.

Sounds like a job for google wave.

I haven't read all of it yet, but it seems like this other piece from the same edition of Nature is saying exactly that:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v461/n7266/full/461881a...