SoME2 submissions are closed, let the reviewing begin!

This is the fun part

Peer review

The August 15th deadline has passed, meaning all the submissions for the second summer of math exposition are now in, and the submission form is closed. Here’s what happens next.

1. Peer review: August 17th through September 1st

2. In-house review: September 1st through September 15th

3. Announcement of results: September 22nd

If you submitted an entry, you will automatically be signed up to join the peer reviewing sessions. If you want to participate and did not submit an entry, you can sign up here.

Sometime between the 17th and 20th you’ll receive an email with a personalized link to join the peer review system, all instructions for how it works will be there.

One thing that genuinely surprised me last year is how effective the peer review period was at bringing attention to all the entries. By having a dedicated period of time when people with shared interests all agree to look over each other’s work, often providing feedback and encouragement as they do, there’s a guaranteed flurry of activity centered on a small network of new math explainers.

On YouTube, this had the unexpected but very delightful consequence of helping get many entries looped together in the recommendation algorithm, such that by the time I was manually reviewing them, many had already reached thousands of viewers, in some cases even tens or hundreds of thousands.

Also, reviewing is fun! We use a system called Gavel, which will present each peer reviewer with new pieces of content one at a time, based on where it thinks your judgment will be most useful. All you have to do is watch/read/consume the lessons presented to you, which are often very enjoyable and edifying, then decided which one of the last two you saw is “better”. The general criteria to keep in mind are whether the lesson is clear, well-motived, novel, and memorable.

Our original motivation for the peer review was to surface some of the best entries so that I could personally give an in-depth look at the top 100 entries, and get a few guest judges to do the same, with the goal of discovering 5 as winners. Now, I think of it less like a perfunctory piece of logistics necessary to handle the volume, and more like an end-of-summer symposium where everyone has a chance to have their work seen, and to meander through the space of other submissions to appreciate what others have done.

In addition to the sponsorship from Brilliant, we also have some prize sponsorships from RISC Zero and Google Fonts, so there will also be more cash prizes for honorable mentions, but specific details are TBD.

Extensions?

Naturally, as the deadline approached, the last few days have included numerous requests for an extension.

I get it. Back in the day, I was one of those students who always waited until the last minute to write the paper I was supposed to be working on during the entire quarter. Those merciful professors who offered an extension seemed like shining beacons of hope in my most desperate hour.

There are a lot of behind-the-scene logistics to this event, so to stick to our timelines we do have to be firm. Also, I personally think a big part of the value of the whole event is having an immovable deadline. It serves as a motivation to actually follow through, and by being the same for everyone, we can get the flurry of activity mentioned above.

If you really have a great explanation that just needs a little more time to live up to your vision, keep in mind that the internet will still be here waiting for you. Feel free to send me your work when it’s done, or send it to the SoME community members. The contest itself is just an invocation.

I’m looking forward to seeing what everyone has made,
Grant