CrowdMath

This repository hosts resources for the paper:

CrowdMath: A Dataset of Crowdsourced Mathematical Research Discussions

Overview

This dataset captures the collaborative mathematical reasoning that took place on the MIT PRIMES CrowdMath online research program (2016-2025). In CrowdMath, high-school students work together on open research problems in mathematics, posting conjectures, proofs, error corrections, and questions on a shared message board (Art of Problem Solving / AoPS).

Expert annotators read every thread and labeled each post with its role in the mathematical discourse. Those annotations were then grouped into progress chains -- sequences of posts that together advance a single mathematical result from an initial claim to a verified proof.

The dataset file dataset/dataset.json is a JSON array of progress chains.

An example progress chain showing how student posts are annotated with discourse labels.

File format

dataset/dataset.json is a JSON array. Each element is a progress chain object with the fields described below.

Progress chain fields

Field	Type	Description
result_id	string	Unique identifier for the chain, formatted as <topic_id>-<post_number> with an optional letter suffix (e.g. "1228277-14", "1320553-27a").
project_id	string	CrowdMath project identifier (e.g. "mitprimes2016", "mitprimes2021"). Each project corresponds to one year of the program; some years have multiple projects (e.g. "mitprimes2024" and "mitprimes2024-2").
open_problem_ref	string or null	The open problem reference as written by the annotator (e.g. "2020-6", "2017-5"). Null when the chain could not be matched to a specific open problem.
open_problem_year	integer or null	Four-digit year of the matched open problem. Null when unmatched.
open_problem_number	integer or null	Problem number within that year's problem set. Null when unmatched.
problem_text	string or null	The mathematical problem statement that this chain addresses. When an open problem was matched, this includes official problem text from the CrowdMath problem set. Otherwise it contains the text of the first "Problem" post in the thread.
problem_resources	string or null	Supplementary resources (references, hints, relevant background) associated with the open problem. Non-null for only a small number of chains.
posts	array	Ordered list of post objects that form this chain (see below). The Problem post is excluded from this array because its content is captured in problem_text. Posts are sorted by post_order.

Post fields

Each element of the posts array is an object with these fields:

Field	Type	Description
topic_id	string	AoPS forum thread ID.
post_number	integer	1-based position of this post within its thread.
post_order	integer	Global ordering index across the entire dataset. Use this field to sort posts chronologically.
post_id	string	AoPS database identifier for this post.
project_id	string	CrowdMath project this post belongs to (same format as the chain-level project_id).
title	string	Title of the forum thread this post appears in.
text	string	Full text of the post in BBCode markup (see "Text format" below).
thanked	integer	Number of "thank" reactions this post received from other users.
comment_count	integer	Number of comments on the thread at the time the data was collected.
labels	array	Annotation labels assigned to this post (see below). A post may have multiple labels.

Label fields

Each element of the labels array is an object with these fields:

Field	Type	Description
label_type	string	The annotation category (see "Label types" below).
result_ref	string	The progress chain this label contributes to, formatted as <topic_id>-<post_number>. For Published-in-paper labels, this is an arXiv ID and theorem reference instead (e.g. "1704.05211,Theorem-2.3").
prev_ref	string or null	A back-reference to a specific earlier post, formatted as <topic_id>-<post_number>. Used by Answer (points to the Question it responds to) and FindError (points to the post whose error is identified). Null for all other label types.

Label types

Labels describe the role a post plays in the mathematical discourse. They fall into two categories.

Discourse labels

These labels indicate how a post contributes to the progress chain:

Label	Meaning
Start	Introduces an initial claim, conjecture, or approach for a result.
Progress	Extends or partially advances an existing line of reasoning.
NewProgress	Introduces a new direction or substantially different approach to an existing result.
Proof	Provides a complete proof of the result.
NewProof	Provides a complete proof using a substantially different method than prior proofs.
Question	Asks a mathematical question relevant to the result.
Answer	Responds to a specific Question (see prev_ref).
FindError	Identifies a mathematical error in a specific earlier post (see prev_ref).
Erroneous	Marks a post whose mathematical content was found to contain an error.
Result	Marks the post that states the final, verified result of the chain. Often co-occurs with Proof.

Metadata labels

Label	Meaning
Published-in-paper	Indicates this result was published in a peer-reviewed paper. The result_ref field contains the arXiv ID and theorem number.

Project IDs

Each project_id corresponds to one CrowdMath research project:

Project ID	Year	Chains
mitprimes2016	2016	26
mitprimes2017a	2017	59
mitprimes2018	2018	6
mitprimes2019	2019	11
mitprimes2020	2020	21
mitprimes2021	2021	19
mitprimes2022	2022	8
mitprimes2023	2023	2
mitprimes2024	2024	3
mitprimes2024-2	2024	2
mitprimes2025	2025	5
mitprimes2025-2	2025	2

License

This dataset is released under the MIT License.

Citation

If you use this dataset, please cite:

@misc{muckatira2026crowdmathdatasetcrowdsourcedmathematical,
      title={CrowdMath: A Dataset of Crowdsourced Mathematical Research Discussions}, 
      author={Sherin Muckatira and Jesse Geneson and Slava Gerovitch and Pavel Etingof and Mikhail Gronas and Anna Rumshisky},
      year={2026},
      eprint={2606.06526},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.AI},
      url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.06526}, 
}