Xena project blog stats/stuff

Stream: general

[Kevin Buzzard]

So like mathlib, the Xena project blog seems to exhibit exponential growth right now, and that's with me barely having posted there over the last 6 months (although I have a couple of posts being written, and I will be posting more when my Lean course starts on 21st Jan). In 2019 I got 42,000 views and in 2020 I got 95,000. Right now I am getting around 300 views per day on average, although when stuff trends on Hacker News or something it can go much higher (e.g. the Scholze blog post got 6000 views the day after it was posted).

Patrick expressed concerns to me in the past that people would confuse Lean and Xena (and indeed I could see it happening on Twitter) so I have been spending much less time in 2020 saying "Xena" and much more time saying "Lean". As people might have observed, I also spent a lot less time in 2020 saying "modern maths is in a mess" (even though I still believe this, at least to a certain extent) and a lot more time saying "let's teach a computer loads of maths and then see what happens". As far as I am concerned now, brand Xena := "let's teach mathematicians (especially young ones) to use theorem provers / let's promote theorem provers in mathematical circles" (without specifically making any claims that they're going to solve anything in the near future, but just dangling the carrot that clearly they have potential to change stuff, but we need to get our act together first and actually do some proper maths in them).

If anyone is interested in writing a guest post, I would be interested to hear. Anything which is appropriate for either mathematician undergraduates or Lean beginners, or is related to formalisation of mathematics as I recognise it, would be of interest. So far we've had two guest posts, one from an undergraduate and one from a Fields Medallist, so as you can see there is certainly some scope here.

In 2017 I just sort of rushed into Lean and started the blog without any clear and coherent plan (this is how I live a lot of my life) and in some sense I'm still figuring out what to do with it. Bryan's idea of posting stuff about some recent PR's (of mine and others) is something I might run with for a while, but I'm very much open to other ideas.