For much of this year, Andrej Bauer has spent more time on GitHub than on Facebook. But Bauer wasn't writing software. A mathematician by profession, he's been on a bold adventure in online collaboration. He and about two dozen other mathematicians just wrote a book on GitHub.
After six months of work, they've finished "Homotopy Type Theory: Univalent Foundations of Mathematics," a six-hundred-page fusion of mathematics and logic. Bauer is proud of the book. But he's especially proud of the way it came together.
The mathematicians -- all of them working on a year-long project at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, the onetime home to Albert Einstein -- were amazingly collaborative, focused, and productive, Bauer says. If they'd tried to write this book by emailing each other files or using something like Dropbox, it would have been a complete mess, he says. But GitHub made it fun.
Collaborative book-writing is just the latest in a growing list of unexpected use for GitHub, the social network for hackers that now boasts 3.6 million users. Over the past year, it's been used to manage a household, rewrite government policy, and even revive forgotten Gregorian chants.
But in many ways, Bauer's use is the most natural of these experiments. Even though many of the mathematicians weren't software developers, many of them were already old hands building mathematical models on computers. "For us, it was just the natural tool to use because we were already using it for computerized mathematics," he says.
Using GitHub came at a cost, though. Like many academics, Bauer's grant money is linked to academic prestige. And GitHub may be cool, but it's not exactly prestigious. Anyone with a computer can publish on GitHub. "We sacrificed a certain small amount of personal benefit that we could have gotten if we'd gone through an academic publisher," says Bauer, a professor with the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia. "As far as my government is concerned, this book will be, say, the equivalent of my giving a minor talk at a conference."
But the mathematicians wanted to publish their book quickly and they wanted it to be widely available. They considered going the traditional academic publishing route, "but we decided it was not worth it," Bauer says.
He says he loves the collaborative exchange of ideas that you get on GitHub. Within a day of going public with their project last week, the mathematicians had received a half-dozen pull requests (most of them typo fixes) from strangers on the site.
"There is a lesson to be learned here," Bauer wrote on his blog last week. "Namely, that mathematicians benefit from being a little less possessive about heir ideas and results."
The team's youngest mathematicians were the ones who most wanted to go the GitHub route. That's interesting because they're the ones who would have gained the most from a prestigious academic imprint.
"They're young and they're idealistic,' Bauer says. "When you're 20-something, you want to have a revolution."
