The question might be reasonable, but regarding "I'm hoping something off topic on stackexchange would be on topic on overflow." <-- anything on-topic at MathOverflow is on-topic at math.SE, though the attention it might receive is different. If it's legitimately off-topic there, then it's off-topic here. And note that old questions from almost 9 years ago are not necessarily a good guide to what is now accepted. — David Roberts 11 mins ago
5:56 AM
It is not really true that everything which is off-topic on Mathematics is automatically off-topic on MathOverflow. MO has much more relaxed approach to soft questions and big list questions. And MO does not put much attention to context being included in the question.
The rules on MO say that the questions should include background/motivation and it is explicitly suggested that the asker should "do their homework": How to write a good MathOverflow question? But they are not really enforced.
1 hour later…
7:20 AM
@DavidRoberts "anything on-topic at MathOverflow is on-topic at math.SE": well, almost. For instance math.stackexchange.com/questions/3135015 (now open) has been closed 3 times in MathSE (by 15 users) while probably nobody here would have the idea of closing it. — YCor 3 mins ago
Another example would be Physical meaning of the Lebesgue measure. Basically the same question was deleted on Math.SE: math.stackexchange.com/questions/1524356/…
However, it's probably not an ideal example - I wanted to mainly stress difference in the requirements about context/background.
Discussion about differences between MO and Math.SE
Oct 1 '17 at 15:13, 2 days total – 23 messages, 2 users, 6 stars
Bookmarked Oct 20 '17 at 16:53 by Martin Sleziak
This Todd Trimble's answer and some comments below it also touch on the differences: What happened to the dear user “quid” (9072), they appear deleted?
8:26 AM
I thought M.SE was for mathematics questions at all levels? Or is that a euphemism? — David Roberts 24 mins ago
I don't think that the difference mentioned here is about level of the question - rather more about including background for the question. And possibly there are difference also in some types of question - MO being more permissive for broad, big list, soft questions.
As differences between (closures of posts on) MO and MSE seem to be a tangential topic to the question at hand, I have posted some comments on this in chat rather than continuing the discussion here. — Martin Sleziak 16 secs ago
8:41 AM
For example, it seems that a post which can be answered simply by a quick google search has better chance of surviving on MO (assuming that it is of sufficient level) than on MSE.
Despite "Do your homework" section of the FAQ post "How to write a good MathOverflow question?" explicitly says:
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