Asking math questions

Question

I understand that asking pure math questions on the physics site is discouraged and I've seen many questions moved over to math. However, often times such questions are more suited for physicists to answer since they encounter those types of questions more often. Furthermore, they are more likely to answer the question using tools that a physicist would be familiar with. This is certainly the case for example is in this post and there are many other similar examples.

Should it really be disallowed to ask a math questions on the physics stackexchange if you would like a physicist's perspective on it?

Update: I just wanted to give an example for what my issue was. I recently needed some help with a math question from my QFT book, so I posted it here. However, the response I got was (as I expected) very formal, and not the approach a physics student would normally take.

Answer 1

I agree, the language of physics is mathematics, and the more advanced the topic considered, the more math is needed to understand and talk about it at a technical level. So IMHO Physics SE is currently way too aggressively voting to close for and migrating technical questions involving mathematical concepts and ideas which are of paramount importance to understand advanced physics, away (sometimes even against the judgment of established experts on the topic at hand)

In particular in theoretical physics, no clear separation can often reasonably be drawn, mathematical and physical ideas strongly interact and overlap. I would appreciate reviewers to refrain from too strictly separating things.

In addition, questions involving mathematical topics/concepts the "smell" too physicsy are often ignored on Math SE, as said for example here such that they find no answers if they have not already obtained some before being migrated, as the mathematicians there are not too interested in maths that is mostly useful for physicists. It also has to be considered that mathematicians often use different language/terminology, strategies to approach a problem (mathematicians consider physicists often to be sloppy, whereas the very rigorous point of view of mathematicians is often not directly useful for a physicist to solve his issue if interest), etc. ...

Answer 2

It depends on the question. Many a time, the physics of the question is already done, and the mathematics is jut regular math, which can be handled equally well (or better) by those on Math.SE.

There are those questions which are really physics-math and not math-math (eg some kinds of theoretical physics), and afaict they aren't migrated unless they have other issues.

Here's a snapshot of the recent migrated questions, to paint a better picture of the migrating practices:

(10ks can have a look at the page directly here)

Answer 3

The criterion for a question to be on topic here is that is is about physics. That's all. So yes, if a question is about math and not about physics, it shouldn't be allowed here.

Merely being more suited for a physicist to answer isn't really relevant; for one thing, if that were our criterion, it would allow many other kinds of questions that I think everyone would agree are off topic here. We've seen this happen in the early days of Stack Overflow, where people would ask questions that weren't about programming simply because they thought programmers would have the right perspective to answer. They were widely considered to be "polluting" the site.

Now, there is a fine line between advanced theoretical physics and pure math. To that end, there are certain topics, which one might consider purely mathematical, but which the community has effectively decided to include in the scope of physics, including renormalization and group theory. So sometimes it's a bit of a judgment call. But overall, the principle is that the question must be about physics to be on topic here.