Date of Award:

12-2026

Document Type:

Dissertation

Degree Name:

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department:

Instructional Technology and Learning Sciences

Committee Chair(s)

Hillary Swanson

Committee

Hillary Swanson

Committee

Deborah Fields

Committee

Ha Nguyen

Committee

Lisa Lundgren

Committee

John Edwards

Abstract

In an effort to describe why some problems can’t be solved, a character compared them to a cubic meter of platinum - a block so dense that all the people who could squeeze around it still couldn’t lift it off the ground. In the same way, these problems simply can’t have enough people gathered around and communicating about them - and so they remain unsolved.

This research looks at the first Polymath Project (2009) as an example of a distributed epistemic game to examine how groups engage with complex problems. and without a locally omniscient individual. In this setting of epistemic uncertainty, interactions between individuals reveal patterns of participation, and an analogy opens a new solution pathway by introducing a problem-solving approach from another field.

These insights answer the initial question of the Polymath Project - ‘Is massively collaborative mathematics possible?’ - and offer hope for lifting the cubic meter of other unsolvable problems.

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