Besides proving new theorems, how can a person contribute to mathematics? There are at least a few things a person can do to contribute to the mathematics community without necessarily obtaining novel results, for example:


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*Organizing known results into a coherent narrative in the form of lecture notes or a textbook

*Contributing code to open-source mathematical software


What are some other ways to make auxiliary contributions to mathematics?

It is useful to contribute to databases of mathematical objects such as Sloane's Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences, FindStat and others.  These resources have become invaluable for mathematicians searching for references to objects that they don't know the name of.  Using these databases, mathematicians are able to find connections between seemingly distant fields if both make use of a certain integer sequence or other object in a database.  For more information, see Billey and Tenner's manifesto here.
