contributed by rebecca nguyen

tim gowers, a renowned british mathematician from the university of cambridge, extended an invitation in 2009 for anyone— mathematicians and nonmathematicians alike— to join him in a “massively collaborative mathematical project”. since the inception of that first “polymath project”, volunteer collaborators have flocked to integrate their own blogs and content into the polymath open-source community. gowers’ first project of networked science connected the expert knowledge of mathematicians, or, as we might think of them, “main characters in a play,” with ideas of active participants from the rest of the world. each contributor built on another’s performance and all the comments added up to the creative process of doing mathematical research together.