The
nLab was originally conceived to provide a repository for ideas (and even new research) generated in the comments on posts at the
n-Category Café, a group blog run at the time by
John C. Baez,
David Corfield and
Urs Schreiber. Eventually the
nLab developed into an independent project, which has since grown to include whole research projects and encyclopedic material. Associated with the
nLab is the nForum: an online discussion forum for announcement and discussion of
nLab edits (the analog of Wikipedia's "talk" pages) as well as for general discussion of the topics covered in the
nLab. The preferred way of contacting the
nLab steering committee is to post on the nForum. An experimental sub-project of the
nLab is the '
Publications of the n
Lab', intended as a
journal for refereed research articles that are published online and cross-hyperlinked with the main wiki. This sub-project appears to be inactive as of 2014. The
nLab was set up on November 28, 2008 by
Urs Schreiber using the
Instiki software provided and maintained by
Jacques Distler. Since May 2015 it runs on a server at
Carnegie Mellon University that is funded in the context of
Steve Awodey's Homotopy Type Theory
MURI grant. The domain ncatlab.org is owned by
Urs Schreiber. The
nLab is listed on
MathOverflow as a standard online mathematics reference to check before asking questions. Many questions and answers link to the
nLab for background material. It is one of two wikis mentioned by the mathematical physicist John C. Baez in his review of math blogs for the
American Mathematical Society. There is an informal steering committee, which doesn't run the
nLab, but exists in order to resolve issues that could cause the whole project to run into trouble. The content of this wiki is not placed under a specific
copyright license. ==See also==