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Sometimes people say that this is an encyclopedia as a reason for excluding certain information that is considered too specialised/difficult. I don't see their point. I have seen some mathematics articles that suffer from too narrow a perspective, like laplace operator, which completely ignored generalization to forms and still ignores a discription in terms of covariant derivatives so it would apply to all tensors. Also I have seen some mathematics articles which are now physicist territory, like Noether's theorem and Lagrangian. I think that a good article should start at it's highest level and then explain how lower levels are special cases of it. These lower levels may then also have their own page if necessary. And if something has application to physics or anything else, these should then be treated. BTW The laplace article is still very far from decent since it does not say anything usefull about the (general) Laplace operator etc etc. Any comments? MarSch 18:47, 25 Mar 2005 (UTC)
I would like to mention that even I don't agree with myself anymore about the top-down approach. Bottom-up is the way to go, but now it is mostly bottom. I would like the encyclopedia to be more comprehensive. -- MarSch 13:02, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Would like to see the Guideline recommend the inclusion of a History section - many mathematical fields and concepts have a rich and interesting background - see fractal, chaos theory or group theory for examples. Would be good if we could reach a concensus on the position of the History section - my preference is near the beginning of the article, straight after the intro, but in some articles (such as complex number) it appears near the end. Gandalf61 09:15, Jun 2, 2005 (UTC)
Perhaps we could add a section giving an example of an informal introduction for continuous functions, e.g.: "In the case of the real numbers, a continuous function corresponds to a graph that you can draw without lifting your pen from the paper." (This was a working definition at the beginning of a calculus class I once taught.) Dmharvey Talk 14:48, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)
There are various issues of writing style that I see crop up every now and then. I have put one of them on the "how to write..." page. Please feel free to add your own favourites. Dmharvey Talk 1 July 2005 15:32 (UTC)
With consensus I would add that the construction "then if" is especially annoying. Why can't people just state their theorems as hypothesis-conclusion, with the stage set in a previous sentence? Orthografer 16:49, 7 June 2006 (UTC)
Lately I've been working on removing spurious "note that…", "it should be noted that…" and similar phrases from Wikipedia articles. I noticed these phrases crop up a lot in the math articles. It seems to be a side effect of the conversational, second-person, lecture-like tone taken in a lot of the articles. I have mixed feelings about this writing style; it is often found in textbooks and can help the reader understand a difficult subject by holding their hand through an explanation, so I don't want to suggest that it be abandoned. However, it does run counter to the detached, 'encylopedic' tone considered ideal in Wikipedia articles, so I want to encourage authors to avoid going overboard with conversational clichés. In a lecture situation where the listener is more open to having their attention redirected, it is typical and comfortable to hear certain phrases like "note that" repeated often. But in prose, where exposition is more linear, it tends to be jarring (especially if it happens often), and reflects either poor organization (crucial points shouldn't be afterthoughts) or a lack of confidence in the reader's willingness to continue reading. Therefore, I tried to add a bullet point to this effect.
I've seen examples of math articles written very much in a conversational, lecture style, and others that are written very much in a detached, encyclopedic style. I don't remember which ones they were, though, so if someone feels like mentioning examples or further improving the guideline, please have at it. Thanks — mjb 02:57, 9 August 2005 (UTC)
See Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Mathematics#.22Tone.22.2C_pronoun_use.2C_etc._in_math_articles ( current version) and the related Talk:Knot_theory#You.2FMe ( current version) and Talk:Braid_group ( current version) for discussion on this topic. I was unaware of the discussion here, otherwise I would have directed people here instead. -- C S (Talk) 05:47, 14 May 2006 (UTC)
Recently, User:Jitse Niesen reverted edits by User:MathKnight to spectrum of an operator, citing this article as the reason for the revert. The things that were reverted were primarily the TeX-ification of plain-markup formulas, for example, the conversion of the plain-markup
to the TeX formula
I don't really like this revert at all, and I don't like the plain-text markup, for several reasons. TeX formulas can be converted to plain html, or not, depending on one's settings of Special:Preferences. Thus, if the page is marked up with TeX, the user can control conversion to HTML by changing thier preferences. By contrast, if a formula is in HTML, it's stuck there forever, and can't be TeX-ified. Thus, the general WP reader has far more control over TeX formulas than plain formulas. (Disclaimer, I am sensitive to this issue because my browser seems to be lacking fonts with the ∈ symbol, so it looks like a dumb square in my browser.) I would like to see a policy spelled out here that explicitly enourages the use of TeX, and discourages the use of plain HTML for math markup. linas 6 July 2005 00:57 (UTC)
This is a topic that returns regularly, see for instance Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mathematics/Archive4(TeX). Of course this does not mean that it is not worth having, for instance, I didn't realize that some people do not have a font for ∈ which must be very annoying. However, PNG in running text looks very ugly to some people (including myself). I think that past discussions have showed that there is not a good solution at the moment which makes everybody reasonable happy.
However, it may be possible to change the software so that a decent solution will be possible. One alternative is to support MathML, and I'd love to find out how feasible that is, both on the server side and on the client side. The other possibility is to improve the routines that convert the TeX to HTML. It should be possible to do a better job, and then we could use <math> tags everywhere. -- Jitse Niesen ( talk) 6 July 2005 19:34 (UTC)
Help_talk:Formula#Maynard_Handley.27s_suggestions — Omegatron 02:18, 1 November 2005 (UTC)
See also Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Mathematics#graphs
Hello. In the discussion of graphs on Wikipedia:How to write a Wikipedia article on Mathematics, it is suggested to make the graph too big, then downsample it. I understand the concept but I'm not familiar with the commands. Can someone state the commands that are needed to do that? I think it would help a lot if we can bypass the need for reading through man pages or whatever to find it. Thanks for your attention to this topic & happy editing, Wile E. Heresiarch 01:14, 11 July 2005 (UTC)
For Windows users, You have to install Ghostscript to open .ps files in the GIMP. I linked to the instructions but those instructions aren't the best. You should really set enviroment variables instead of copying the file to your system directory. You need to right-click My Computer --> Properties --> Advanced tab --> Environment Variables --> New and create variable names and variable values as such:
Though your path name may vary. I don't really want to put all these instructions in the middle of the text, though. Maybe this information should go under the GIMP or Ghostscript articles, and we can link to that? It's too "how-to", though, for the WP. - Omegatron 14:41, July 22, 2005 (UTC)
I agree, let's move the graphs to its own page. -
Omegatron 18:59, July 22, 2005 (UTC)
Every time I upload a picture with one of these methods, I include more and more detailed instructions. They should really just be made general, go in the graph section instead, and save me a lot of work. Here are the lastest, though: Image:Butterworth response.png - Omegatron 17:20, July 23, 2005 (UTC)
Yes I like the "typesetting" part leapfrogged to the end. Dmharvey Talk 02:44, 19 August 2005 (UTC)
moved from Talk:American and British English differences
It is often abbreviated maths in Commonwealth English and math in American English. — 203.132.240.221 23:15, 20 August 2005
Recent manual of style edits by User:Crasshopper deprecate this commmon linguistic style. But I wonder if that is the right thing to do; in fact, I think its not. When a mathematician says "its easily shown that", they are not trying to belittle the reader, (and the reader should not feel belittled or stupid), rather, it is a verbal hint about the length of the proof of a theorem. There is many a time that I've been stumped by some formula, while faced by the mocking words "it is easy to show...". This is always followed by a slap to the forehead, "but of course ... its obvious". For that is the very nature of math. So what shall we write instead of the words "its easy to show"? Should we say instead "the proof of this proposition is very short"? Instead of writing "its easy to show", should we start inserting very short proofs that show it? No I think not. linas 04:24, 2 September 2005 (UTC)
I want to add a new section entitled Points, stating, "Points are usually written in uppercase italics, such as point A, P, O." All text books I checked use uppercase italics for point labels.
Secondly, we currently have the following statement under Variables. "Descriptive subscripts should not be in italics, because they are not variables. For example, mfoo is the mass of a foo." The Superscripts and subscripts section also states superscripts and subscripts should have no other formatting. Should we add a sentence or phrase to both sections stating whether or not superscripts or subscripts that are variables should usually be/not be in italics? An example follows.
Although text books usually show variable superscripts/subscripts in italics, I believe it might be acceptable (for HTML formulas) to use unemphasized variable superscripts/subscripts for on-line purposes. Italic subscripts are slightly less legible on-line, whereas italic and upright subscripts are equally legible in text books. -- Simian, 2005-10-02, 22:06 Z
Concerning italics vs. bold vs. bold italics, this manual of style seems to contradict itself and Wikipedia:Technical terms and definitions. From what I can infer, the relevant rules according to that article are
Actual WP math articles use a variety of conventions, but they often give defined terms in bold, not bold italics, and leave subsequent uses in plain face. On the other hand, this 'Manual of Style (mathematics)' seems to give them in bold sometimes and italics sometimes. (Also, is there a reason why 'Style' is capitalized?) It might be nice to agree on a simple set of conventions. Joshuardavis 17:06, 22 October 2005 (UTC)
When I learnt (La)TeX, I also learnt that the "mathit" (or italics in the mathematical environment) should be used only for valiables (e.g. x or i as an index in a sum) and generic functions (such as f(x)). This is why, for example, we have special TeX commands for well-known functions, such as "log" or "sin". I also remember vividly (but unfortunately cannot find a reference) that this also applies to any other non-variable and non-function, be it a less-known function, a subscript having a non-variable meaning (e.g. , or a constant. I know it would be a pain now to put "mathrm"s everywhere, but can anybody confirm that is the (if often neglected even in authoritative books) typesetting rule? Thanks. PizzaMargherita 21:10, 1 November 2005 (UTC)
I'm looking at the -40 article, and wondering if there is a rule or guideline about the use of the words minus and negative. My understanding is that negative is a unary operator and so it is correct to speak of the number negative forty but incorrect to speak of minus forty, while minus is a binary operator and so three minus five is correct while three negative five is not. Can someone please confirm or deny this? And if it is the case, should the wording in the article be changed? I would like it to read negative forty personally, but it is much much more common when speaking of temperatures to hear minus forty. Macho Philipovich 15:50, 21 December 2005 (UTC)
I think a large part of the contents can be moved to meta:Help:Formula. That page is currently biased towards TeX. Moving these HTML instructions/guidelines in that (Meta) page would make it self-contained, and would avoid duplication/contradiction with this page.
I think in this (Wikipedia) project should keep referencing that page, and keep only WP-specific guidelines, like colon for indentation and rendering settings. PizzaMargherita 21:59, 14 January 2006 (UTC)
The example of an in-line formula on line 5 of this section does not show up (on my browser, anyway). Is this a general problem? Hgilbert 21:07, 2 March 2006 (UTC)
I haven't been able to find any official guidelines for typsetting algorithms, particularly mathematical algorithms. I note that Itoh-Tsujii inversion algorithm and Pohlig-Hellman algorithm both use a fairly standard pseudocode style that is common in mathematics. Is there any chance of formalising some guidelines for presenting mathematical algorithms? Leland McInnes 04:50, 29 January 2006 (UTC)
:'''Inputs''' Description of inputs :'''Output''' Description of output :# Description of the first step on the algorithm :# If the algorithm has substeps due to conditional or looping constructs :## Substeps should be nested numbered like so :## Etc.
I thought that people may like to know that colour mathematics is now possible, like this: . —Preceding unsigned comment added by Lupin ( talk • contribs)
Any consensus on the policy on fractional powers? We write the squareroot sign for powers of one half, but what about cube roots? Do we put the squareroot with the 3 above, or do we put ^1/3? And the others? yandman 14:26, 10 October 2006 (UTC)
I didn't see anything about which infix to use for definitions. Some use , but I find this very misleading, since it already has two other meanings: equivalence (hence its Latex code) and identity (first use). I would therefore advocate := or the equal sign with "def" underneath. (Sorry, I don't know the Latex code for that.) — Sebastian (talk) 01:43, 19 October 2006 (UTC)
Are we allowed to use ² and ³? (They're much easier to type than the alternatives.) Shinobu 18:41, 20 December 2006 (UTC)
I think browsers that don't get ² and ³ are just as rare as those that don't get sup. Shinobu 00:49, 21 December 2006 (UTC)
I agree that ² etc. should not be mixed with sups. As for the ² being too small, I can't confirm that, here it looks okay. Unlike sup it doesn't interfere with the line height. So stylistically it depends on the particular situation, I'd say.
@The typical way to type the superscript-2 character is to use an entity name: no. The typical way to enter them is AltGr-2 etc. Fitts' law predicts I'll probably use ² when I'm feeling lazy. Shinobu 22:45, 28 December 2006 (UTC)
I feel that we should have some section on respect for different notational styles in mathematics articles. Something along the lines of Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style#Disputes_over_style_issues. As long as two notations are acceptable it is inappropriate for an editor to change from one style to another. There have been extremely long-winded debates over such issues (e.g. roman i vs. italic i or := vs. ≡) which always end up going nowhere and draining huge amounts of time. It would be nice to point to this article to end such debates before they get out of hand. -- Fropuff 18:33, 21 December 2006 (UTC)
I like , coded in TeX as \Pr, because sometimes a capital P is used for a particular probability measure, as when one writes
etc. Michael Hardy 22:07, 24 February 2007 (UTC)
I am working on a follow-up guideline: Wikipedia: Writing about math. It is more focused on the body rather than notation and has differences. If it passes, I would like it meged with this guideline. -- Ineffable3000 23:47, 25 December 2006 (UTC)
Is there any consensus how to format categories? Sometime one sees (mathbf) or A, sometimes (mathcal). Jakob.scholbach 22:42, 12 March 2007 (UTC)
It might be a good idea to reference some of the style guidance given in international standard ISO 31, in particular ISO 31-0 and ISO 31-11. In particular the following come to mind:
Markus Kuhn 17:44, 5 May 2007 (UTC)
I always write
rather than
Should we have a norm prescribing this usage? Michael Hardy 18:45, 23 June 2007 (UTC)
Hi, could anyone exlain why these two expressions are so different in size of font? Is there an easy way to make the font size larger in the second expression?
sbandrews ( t) 09:08, 26 June 2007 (UTC)
Answering my own question - its because the top one has a superscript and a subscript - so:
works although its obviously the wrong equation,
does the same with an empty subscript bracket - there must be an easier way! sbandrews ( t) 14:54, 14 July 2007 (UTC)
There is! use a \ after the math tag :<math>\ R(r) = A r^l e^{-\alpha r}</math> sbandrews ( t) 15:02, 14 July 2007 (UTC)
I'm trying to figure out how to make a legible division equation with terms that have subscripts in them (like abeta, etc.) 204.52.215.107 16:40, 23 October 2007 (UTC)
In section 5.1 of this article, when the LaTeX formula is shown on its own line, it is not formatted as LaTeX. Can this be explained?
JIMOTHY46 c t 00:20, 21 November 2007 (UTC)
Never mind, I figured out the problem and corrected it myself.
JIMOTHY46 c t 00:33, 21 November 2007 (UTC)
It seems useful to have links to how-to-articles on forming equations for articles that otherwise are hard to find. Brews ohare ( talk) 19:30, 29 November 2007 (UTC)
Dear fellow editors—The idea is to centralise debate and consensus-gathering when there are inconsistencies between the pages.
The most straightforward way is to have MOS-central prevail, and to involve expertise from sub-pages on the talk page there, rather than the fragmentary discourse—more usually the absence of discourse and the continuing inconsistency—that characterises WP's style guideline resources now. If consensus has it that MOS-central should bend to the wording of a sub-page, so be it. But until that occurs in each case that might occasionally arise, there needs to be certainty for WPians, especially in the Featured Article process, where nominators and reviewers are sometimes confused by a left- and right-hand that say different things.
Of course, no one owns MOS-central, and we're all just as important to its running as other editors. I ask for your support and feedback HERE. Tony (talk) 12:20, 5 February 2008 (UTC)
Is there, and if not should there be, a convention on which types of objects are denoted with upper case letters and which with lower case? My understanding is that the current de facto standard is variables, functions and elements of sets are denoted with lower case, and sets and more complicated objects are denoted with upper case. For example, one might have "Let x be an element of the group G," rather than "Let X be an element of the group g." The standard seems to change over time, e.g. a group theory book from 50 years ago might well use X for an element of a group, so it wouldn't do to carve such a convention in stone. But it would make articles look neater if a standard matching current usage was followed. The reason I'm bringing it up is that the constant of integration in Lists of integrals is denoted C rather than c. I'm more used to seeing c and that's what I used on a different page (before I saw the first article). -- RDBury ( talk) 19:03, 23 March 2008 (UTC)
The Article body section has the following sentence, 'If you need to use non-standard notations, or if you introduce new notations, define them in your article.' It seems to me that, given OR guidelines, non-standard notation should rarely be used and new notations should hardly ever be used. Non-standard might be used if there doesn't seem to be any standard notation or if the the existing standard is so unwieldy that it can't be used in the article while preserving clarity. In that case the notation itself should have reference, such as 'Using the notation appearing in ...' or 'As defined in ...' If there are competing standards then the article should mention all of them and discuss the differences. A new notation might conceivably be used if there are very few sources for the topic and none of them has notation that is suitable for an article. In this case, perhaps an explanation of the situation on the talk page of the article would be appropriate. Standard notation as well should be either defined or have link to a page defining it, if it might not be familiar to someone at the level that the article is targeting.-- RDBury ( talk) 17:17, 27 April 2008 (UTC)
It would be nice if the MOSMATH could address the issue of what sort of examples might be appropriate in a mathematical article. At present, the is the Wikipedia policy WP:NOT#TEXTBOOK seems rather firm about the inappropriateness of certain types of examples:
To my mind, this clearly does not exclude the "good" examples from mathematics articles. However, I think some further stylistic advice on what kinds of examples are "good" might be helpful. I know for a fact that there have been lengthy discussions about this in the past, but now the MOS does not give much guidance on which examples are desirable, and which are undesirable.
To that end, I suggest explicitly mentioning that the purpose of an encyclopedia is to inform rather than instruct. (See this edit.) It may or may not be appropriate to do this in a separate section of the MOS so that it can receive a more comprehensive discussion. silly rabbit ( talk) 12:38, 9 May 2008 (UTC)
I have recently discovered the command \scriptstyle, which causes inline PNG formulas to be smaller, often aligning better with the surrounding text. For example, consider
to
This trick doesn't seem to be discussed here or at the meta:Help:Formula page (although I may have missed something). silly rabbit ( talk) 13:36, 19 May 2008 (UTC)
Lambiam and I have a disagreement on interpretation of the MoS when it comes to punctuation of block-displayed formulae which are parts of sentences. I say that
is acceptable as a sentence that comes to an end, whereas Lambiam asserts that the MoS requires that this be punctuated with a period
In support of his interpretation, Lambiam notes subsection 5.3 (“Punctuation”) which states “Just as in mathematics publications, a sentence which ends with a formula must have a period at the end of the formula.” I interpret this as in reference to in-line formula elements, and support my interpretation by reference to the MoS itself, which in prior sections has multiple block-displayed formula elements that end sentences but are not followed by periods. ( Lambiam notes that the MoS is not itself an article in mainspace, and in any event could simply fail to conform to its intended prescriptions while maintaining the intentions.)
We have agreed to move our disagreement here, in the hope that a consensus will support some clarification. — SlamDiego ←T 09:06, 13 June 2008 (UTC)
Ozob just took out the recommendation to use scriptstyle, and replaced it with in the following:
<math>\sum_{n=0}^\infty 1/n^2 = \pi^2/6</math>
, which produces the too tall , with <math>\textstyle\sum_{n=0}^\infty 1/n^2 = \pi^2/6</math>
, which produces the more compact .My experience is that scriptstyle, while semantically wrong, works a lot better for matching typical browser text size. For this example it would be . In my browser, the scriptstyle version is a little smaller than the browser text, but close enough to flow with it, while the textstyle version is so huge that it might as well be a separate displayed equation. Shouldn't we be recommending scriptstyle rather than textstyle? — David Eppstein ( talk) 15:57, 9 August 2008 (UTC)
(Unindent) Wikipedia has, because of browser differences, a complex way of specifying the HTML font size in monobook/main.css, which boils down to 14 pixels for the main text with default 16px browser font settings. What I mean by choosing a font size is to match inline math (in \textstyle) to the default font size, even though I have my browser setup for sligthly smaller fonts. I am pretty sure that the vast majority of users stick with the default font size since it's typically located under "Advanced settings" in the browser.
The problem of small font sizes is of course that, starting from 14-pixel math fonts, subsubscripts and supersuperscripts tend to become too small. This could be dealt with by recommending in the MoS/Math that \textstyle is only used for very simple equations without fractions and nested subscripts. Displayed equations could still be shown in the current, large font sizes. That way, the smallest font that would be displayed in an equation under normal circumstances would be the same in displayed equations and textstyle equations.
Re what \scriptstyle etc. mean: they are documented in the TeXbook by Donald Knuth. \displaystyle is the default for displayed equations; \textstyle for equations in-text. Although the base font size (i.e., used for ordinary letters) is the same, large constructs such as \sum, \int, \frac are typeset differently. Inside a displayed equation, some parts are automatically formatted as \textstyle, for example when they are inside an \array or \frac. Then, \scriptstyle is for subscripts and superscripts, and \scriptscriptstyle for second-order sub- and superscripts, so they are supposed to have different sizes from \textstyle.
Re matching browser fonts: it is very hard to do this automatically. The Wikipedia CSS files only specify that the font is sans serif, which can mean different things on different computers. Math equations should not be typeset in sans serif, or you get problems reading I=l/2 (uppercase i is ell divided by 2).
Han-Kwang ( t) 08:42, 11 August 2008 (UTC)
In addition to the above issues with \textstyle, I'd like to propose a lobby for better vertical alignment of in-text formulas. For example the baseline of sticks out below the baseline of the surrounding text. Compare with that is better aligned because there is a j. Currently, in the Wikipedia CSS there is the CSS rule [2]
img.tex { vertical-align: middle; }
and the equation is something like <img src="blabla.png" class="tex">. With some effort (requires changes in the database and mediawiki code), it could be replaced by something like <img src="blabla.png" class="tex" style="vertical-align: -5px">, where the database stores the vertical offset (-5px) with every equation, obtained during the TeX rendering process. Han-Kwang ( t) 08:42, 11 August 2008 (UTC)
ONLY since November 2007???? We've been talking about this one since the beginning of 2003. Michael Hardy ( talk) 19:31, 23 August 2008 (UTC)
It was just recently when there was an argument of TeX vs HTML, where it was reaffirmed that in general PNG images inline are not that preferrable. However, it seems that recent changes to this manual of style push that too far. Now it reads that one should not use LaTeX inline to start with, which I think is a bit too much. Opinons? Oleg Alexandrov 15:35, 9 August 2005 (UTC)
1) I dislike the idea to let MediaWiki decide to render an easy <math></math> Tex command in plain HTML code (called "HTML if very simple or else PNG" in the user's preferences). This sometimes really makes it hard to recognise variables for being the same, for example, the "letter a" looks different in TeX () than the "HTML a", ax. When registering a new user, I must say it would be better to always activate the option Always render PNG by default. Therefore, I generally prefer to always use <math></math> TeX tags in formulas to have a unified look throughout the article.
2) Right now, many articles in the Wikipedia don't have a unified base for the variables used - one article uses
another article uses
Another difference is, for example, and - two ways for writing vectors. An additional example is . It often confuses the reader to have different variables for basically the same thing - more confusingly, sometimes two totally different variables have the same placeholder. I wonder that there doesn't seem to be an ANSI standard / IEC standard or comparable standard that helps to unify placeholders. It'll be great in my eyes if there was an own Manual of Style about that topic.
3) When writing in direct HTML, is it better to use the correct Unicode symbol or the Ampersand+name HTML entity? For example: Unicode α instead of α, λ instead of λ, ≈ instead of ≈? I prefer to use the Unicode encoding, as it is easier to read.
It'll be great if some of you could comment on my thoughts. Thanks, -- Abdull 14:06, 19 August 2005 (UTC)
-- I think that <math>\alpha</math> is preferable to α, even with the math rendering problems, with either preferable to the Unicode. But I've written so many equations in Microsoft Equation Editor/MathType, WordPerfect Equation Editor, TeX ('Tex' is just wrong; 'TeX' is closer, 'TeΧ' is closer yet), and other formats, that I don't have any trouble writing TeX as if it were WYSIWYG, so I may not be the best person to comment -- Arthur Rubin 21:55, 24 September 2005 (UTC)
Sorry, but I am a bit of a newbie around here. I would like to do something which is easily available in LaTeX, but not easily available in TeX. I need to be able to set characters (or expressions) over other characters (or expressions). For example:
(I normally use \mathop, \xrightarrow, or the xypic LaTex package for such things, but these are less intuitive and none of them happen to be supported by TeX.) The only thing I can think of is:
but this clearly looks bad as far as the typesetting goes. Any suggestions or solutions? Silly rabbit 22:57, 18 November 2005 (UTC)
You could fake it:
but yeah, it would be nice if it was supported natively. — Omegatron 23:54, 18 November 2005 (UTC)
Is there any reason that LaTeX codes that render as HTML are smaller than if they were just written as HTML? For example, for me (using MSIE and with "Recommended for modern browsers" selected at the preferences):
both render as HTML but the first one is a larger font thatn the second. Any ideas, or is this just some problem that only I'm having? -- mets501 03:52, 12 March 2006 (UTC)
span.texhtml { font-family: sans-serif; }
Maybe there should be a guideline on how symbols are to be explained.
Example 1: The foocity is given by
where b and a are the barness vector and coefficient and r is the gnat vector.
and
Example 2:The foocity is given by
where
Style 2 is used quite often in Wikipedia articles, especially in physics. [4] [5] [6] [7] (links obtained from random clicking in Category:Fundamental physics concepts; apparently style 2 is used in about 20% of the articles) However, in all professionally typeset academic-level physics and mathematics texts that I have seen, style 1 is used. Style 2 is sometimes used in high school and college level textbooks. Han-Kwang ( t) 15:55, 16 July 2008 (UTC)
A couple of items related to WP:JARGON. First, in #Encyclopedic vs conversational tone above, there's a discussion about phrases such as "it should be noted". I think it would be a big help if, when copyeditors remove material, they remove it for the most accurate, least offensive, most persuasive reasons. So: removing something due to core content policy should be at the top of the list, and if that's the reason for the edit, then we shouldn't be sniping about poor word choice. Likewise, I sometimes see "it should be noted" removed with the less-than-helpful edit summary "per WEASEL". I think that's the wrong reason; "it should be noted" is common in academia in general and in math articles in particular, and in many contexts, it's not confusing at all. It means "This is important; now let me list the reasons why I think it's important". That's actually perfectly good expository writing style, in a math article, but IMO it's not appropriate for Wikipedia because it is a kind of WP:JARGON. Your neighbor doesn't say "it should be noted", and you don't read it in the newspaper or hear it on TV (unless you watch Numbers (TV series)!) It's academic-speak. So, would you guys mind if I move it out of WEASEL and WP:WORDS and into WP:JARGON?
Second, WP:JARGON now contains "... as a rule of thumb, if expressing an equation requires LaTeX (as most do), do not assume the reader will understand what it means. It is also considered polite (but not always necessary) to explain how the symbols are read, e.g. "A ⇔ B means A is true if and only if B is true". That seems like too much and not enough at the same time. It's not enough because it really should be on the style page that discusses LaTeX, which is this page. It's too much because something shorter would be less of a turn-off to some people; it would also be useful to promote this (MSM) page by pointing people here instead of trying to cover it there. Any objections to putting something like this at WP:JARGON? "Mathematical symbols can sometimes be jargon, to be avoided, written out in words, or explained and given pronunciation; see [proper section of WP:Manual of Style (mathematics)]." - Dan Dank55 ( send/receive) 23:11, 19 September 2008 (UTC)
I've noticed that many inline statements and formulas do not use a non-breaking space or method to keep it from wrapping to the next line. It seems stupid to see "A+" on one line and "B" on another line. There are four possible inline versions that I can imagine:
In my browser, #1 looks terrible. #2 looks good, except when it breaks the line, but #3 is an ugly HTML mess if you have to edit it. #4 is nice, but a bit lengthy, especially for a series of statements. I think it would be useful to start using some method to control wrapping, and I would like to hear others' opinions. - grubber 00:26, 18 September 2006 (UTC)
span.texhtml { white-space: nowrap; font-family: serif; }
Action (physics) uses a boxed equation using some ad-hoc markup. For consistency, I think it's better to use a template for this. Is there already such a template? If not, I suggest {{ box eq}} as a template name. I also think the big black box is a bit harsh - we could use something more playful like toc colours. Shinobu 04:27, 4 October 2006 (UTC)
The editor may want to put any information in a box.
except that it does not look like encyclopaedia any more. -- Yecril ( talk) 17:52, 23 September 2008 (UTC)
We seem to be using a mixture of typographic styles for derivatives in Wikipedia: using either an italic or roman 'd'.
or
Both styles are used in the literature. The same issue applies to integrals and other uses of differentials. — ras52 ( talk) 18:12, 5 December 2007 (UTC)
''
is common on Wikipedia because it resembles a quote and works like one and it is great for marking external text embedded in the current paragraph; '''
is an extension of that concept. There are other uses of italic variant that should not be quoted in this way, e.g. EM for emphasis.
Bold text, where it is required for definition, can be served as a hyperlink to itself; I do not know what other uses of bold are legitimate in running text. All this has nothing to do with entering formulas that are technical by their nature and obviously require more sophisticated mechanisms (preferably templates).''
is used because it is common typographical practice to put variables in italics. Also, you might want to look at
[8] to see just how awkward it is to enter MathML content markup; but as far as I know there's no better solution.
Ozob (
talk)
23:13, 30 September 2008 (UTC)''
is the worst and it is not for variables exclusively, not even mainly. Per Wikipedia, Wikitext is a better solution than MathML because it does not require any client-side support.Examples of bad style should be explicitly marked as such, otherwise the readers tend to memorize them along with, or instead of, the examples of good style, especially if they come first. It should be explicit even if the example is taken out of context. I am going to add DEL+red markup to bad examples and INS markup to good examples as in my recent edit. -- Yecril ( talk) 16:13, 30 September 2008 (UTC)
This is meant to be a guideline. A guideline by definition is a good advice in some circumstances but not all. In particular, it is much more natural and appropriate to use the English word describing the symbol in order to avoid starting a sentence with a symbol than to invent conjunctions for the purpose as the current text does. How do you recommend differentiating between BAD because missing and BAD because present?
I would appreciate an example where obeying this guideline would be detrimental to the content. -- Yecril ( talk) 18:07, 30 September 2008 (UTC)
Is this discussion about this text [9]?
- Terms in running text should be preceded by a short English word that briefly describes what they mean:
- Any group G that fulfills the conditions above may be decomposed into cosets as follows.
- Let H be the corresponding subgroup of the group G. Then the group H must be finite.
Doing so will make the text easier to understand when it is being listened to. This recommendation does not apply to embedded statements like x = 0.
That style differs from all published mathematics I am used to, and all mathematical writing style guides I have seen. Of course the first use of a variable has to explain what the variable represents; but uses after that don't need to repeat that. This is the purpose of variables, after all.
More fundamentally, the variables in the terms above aren't needed at all and should be omitted:
- Any group that fulfills the conditions above may be decomposed into cosets as follows.
- Any such subgroup of the original group must be finite.
— Carl ( CBM · talk) 02:02, 1 October 2008 (UTC)
I am considering the possibility of making a template for π and π to discern the two in formulae. Another option would be π and π. The advantage to the reader would be that she can hover over the symbol do discover its meaning. I am not sure how these templates should be named; perhaps {{ math/perim}} and {{ math/pcf}}? -- Yecril ( talk) 21:47, 5 October 2008 (UTC)
Hover over the symbol to see the benefit. This agrees with what you do when you see something you do not know: you focus on it, you examine it, and, quite probably, you move the mouse pointer over it. I need your opinion about which way of doing this is fine: a wikilink, which also provides a title but happens to change the colour as well, or a plain title. I am concerned with overlinking as well so it seems having just the title is a bit safer. -- Yecril ( talk) 13:00, 6 October 2008 (UTC)
Myself, I don't think these are needed, for the general reason that we should used text to explain things. If it isn't clear that π is meant to be the prime counting function, then the article should come out and say it, not hope the reader will hover over the symbol. This improves the prose, is still usable when the article is printed or viewed without a mouse, and is generally better expository style.
In any case, don't start any massive changeover to the new style without getting some agreement first about it. This is true of any massive style change; these are not well received in general. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 14:08, 6 October 2008 (UTC)
I never opposed using plain text to introduce things, or suggested that special templates could be used instead; I only think it can be a convenient reminder to the reader when it is likely that a formula would make him scratch his head. And you cannot explain things in the middle of the formula so the user has to scroll somewhere else, losing context. In a printed work, you have to look it up in an index of symbols, where you can find the right meaning if you are lucky. An interactive medium such as HTML can do better than that.
I included the templates in new sections in case only one section is selected to be viewed. -- Yecril ( talk) 14:50, 6 October 2008 (UTC)
So apparently we can treat the math tags like any HTML tag, add style to them, change the border, and even add an alternate description. So my question is how to best give an alternate description to the equation above.
Is it understandable? Too wordy? — Dispenser 03:09, 20 October 2008 (UTC)
I would like to raise concerns about the guidelines for the use of HTML-based 'sub' and 'sup' tags for creating simple mathematical formula in Wikipedia. I think that these HTML tags do a rather bad job of separating content from style: I think that all mathematical entities should be surrounded by <math></math> tags,nd we shouldn't have multiple ways of writing such things. Down the track, Mediawiki will surely become better software, and the minor issues of line-alignment, font sizing, etc will be overcome, and with <math></math> tags we will have a much clearer markup that reflects the true meaning of what is being written, eg an italicised 'c' is not a mathematical thing, but clearly is. User preferences could then be harnessed to highlight mathematical objects in a different color, etc, etc, but this is only possible if users are discouraged from 'hacking' math using HTML. Furthermore it saves people from having to learn two entirely different markup systems (eg HTML entities for the infinity character, versus latex markup for the infinity character).
I think that use of <math></math> tags is the future-proof semantic markup that we should be using, and it really does do the job of separating style from content in a way that HTML does not. Jdpipe ( talk) 11:21, 23 October 2008 (UTC)
When typing values for measurements that include units of measurement, it is vastly more readable when editing a page if the writer has used unicode characters as in N/m², compared to N/m<sup>2</math> or even worse Nċm<sup>-2</sup>. It's not hard to learn how to type these special characters, and they do make editing a much more pleasurable process. Furthermore, these unicode characters render correctly in text-only browsers such as Elinks and Lynx, but superscript characters do not (contrary to what is stated in this Manual of Style page). The argument is made that using these <sup> tags somehow aids separation of style and contents. This is a dud argument, because the superscript location of the '2' in W/m² is part of its meaning -- this is not a '2' in the sense of 'multiplied by', so without its correct position, it means something else.
The argument about using <sup> for mathematical formulae is what I argued against earlier. For units of measurement the case is different however, because exponents greater than 3 in units of measurement are extremely rare. I can only think of the stefan-boltzmann constant as a case where higher exponents are used in units of measurement. Given that digits up to 3 are available in standard fonts in unicode, I think it is best to use them for units, so that values can be easily read by as many users as possible, and without clogging up pages with excessive markup. For particularly complex units of measurement, I think that using HTML markup is appropriate, but this happens only quite rarely.
Units of measurement within mathematical formulae are another case; obviously then latex markup (nonitalics) must be used.
Jdpipe ( talk) 11:21, 23 October 2008 (UTC)
<sup>
, not <span style="whatever the CSS for superscript is">
, so what do you mean exactly? --
Army
1987
(t
— c)
12:57, 23 October 2008 (UTC)Consider the value of π in Pi:
We currently have: 3.14159 26535 89793 23846 26433 83279 50288 41971 69399 37510 582
Greg L would have us use: 3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510582
I think this is both ugly to edit and difficult to read, in spite of the international standards for 3-digit spacing. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 22:28, 7 October 2008 (UTC)
Now stop trying to divert us away from the real issue here and get busy and provide some evidence for us to back up your allegation that the mathematics world decided to flout the rule of the SI (and the NIST and the ISO) and standardize on delimiting numbers every five digits to the right of the decimal marker. I think you are wrong about your facts. Greg L ( talk) 23:56, 7 October 2008 (UTC)
I think we need to resolve whether there is any truth to the suggestion that mathematics departs from what is clearly spelled out by the BIPM for compliance with the SI (and which is further supported by the NIST and the ISO) with regard to delimiting every three digits on the fractional side of significands.
If a Ph.D. mathematician who has had a couple of papers published can weigh in here and resolve this issue, that would be much appreciated. If it can be shown that mathematics flouts the rule of the SI and there is a well-established style in the mathematics world, then, please advise. Short of any proof that mathematics marches to the tune of a different drummer, it is too unwieldily to discuss this in two forums. May I suggest we keep this all here on WT:MOSNUM? Greg L ( talk) 04:21, 8 October 2008 (UTC)
Please forgive if this is the wrong guideline, but looking through the Linear regression articles, I've noticed a plethora of notations for the transpose of a matrix X.
Number 2 is obviously bad, and I think number 1 is hopeless; if we ever start differentiating, the ambiguities are obvious. I'd like to propose that we standardize on number 4, or with possibly number 3 as an option. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 15:36, 7 November 2008 (UTC)
I know this will probably be considered anathema to many here, but, if possible, shouldn't a mathematics-related article explain the topic in lay language? Currently, the manual of style, suggests that math-related articles be written in simple terms. But, an overwhelming number of articles seem to consider "simple terms" to be paired down definitions that are still, alas, filled with technical nomenclature and jargon. A "simple" intro that still has four or five blue-colored (linked) jargon-words that a lay person would have to look up is not really that simple. The definition may be simple to you and me, but I don't get the sense that it would be for most people. The article, Pell number, is an example of an Wiki entry whose intro ought to be clearer for lay people. Now this isn't always possible, and, often, an introduction will try its best to be intelligible to a wide audience but will inevitably leave some readers scratching their heads. But, if possible, simplification of introductions should be achieved. If others agree, perhaps, this instruction can be added to the Manual of Style for mathematics. In the end, the more people that understand Wikipedia's mathematics articles, the better it is for the math as a whole, no? ask123 ( talk) 15:45, 26 November 2008 (UTC)
I just read the first three paragraphs of Pell number, and I think reasonable high-school students would understand. (But "lay person" usually means someone who doesn't know high-school math.) Michael Hardy ( talk) 23:29, 26 November 2008 (UTC)
I draw an analogy to this page over at WT:Layout#Proposal; if my analogy is wrong, let me know (either there or here, depending on where you want the thread). - Dan Dank55 ( send/receive) 18:19, 12 December 2008 (UTC)
continuous function is...a function from one topological space to another that preserves open sets? That is loosely speaking? That DO is wrong. It is open map.-- 刻意 21:14, 20 December 2008 (UTC)
I've tried to revive the discussion on different styles of proof over at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mathematics/Proofs - please come join the discussion! I was torn as whether to put it here or there... SetaLyas ( talk) 11:18, 28 December 2008 (UTC)
I and another editor disagree over the phrase "square, symmetric, positive definite matrix" in the Matrix decomposition article. I am of the opinion that squareness is implied by symmetric and therefore redundant. He takes the point of view that "some readers may not notice that symmetric implies square, so the redundancy makes it clearer". I disagree with that too but that's not really relevant to my current posting. (It's not really an argument between us as there has only been one revert but it raised for the first time for me an important question about Wikipedia's approach to these type of situations.) Obviously the Wikipedia:Use common sense guideline is always in effect but in this case it's not so clear which makes more sense. Could somebody point more to a section of the MoS that advises on redundancy issues? I skimmed Wikipedia:Manual of Style (mathematics) but did not find a section that addresses this problem specifically. Advice appreciated too. Jason Quinn ( talk) 14:00, 20 February 2009 (UTC)
User:CBM and I are having a discussion (
User talk:CBM#MSE) about the use of \scriptstyle
to adjust symbol size. Symbols with decorations (hat or tilde, for example) automatically display as PNG, and those without, or with simple super/sub scripts, displayed as HTML. When I was working on the
Maximum spacing estimation article, I used \ss to make many of the decorated symbols appear "normalized" (in my opinion) with the in-line HTML, as I had my settings set as per the MoS (HTML if simple, PNG otherwise). CBM believes that they should always be shown as displaystyle, and the simple ones forced to display using \,. I pointed out that this was not in agreement with the Math MoS, and he suggested that we bring this for discussion here, as scriptstyle is too small in his opinion. Here is how the scriptstyle looks on my browser (FF 3.0 under WindowsXP)
[10]. Here is a comparison on CBM's browser
[11]. The article as it stands now has CBM's changes in it. What is the opinion of the greater WP:MATH community on this? Thank you. --
Avi (
talk)
18:57, 6 March 2009 (UTC)
I agree with the top post in this discussion page. I just came here to say exactly that, and noticed that somebody already had. I'd like to extend the notion a little bit to say that, even if Wikipedia is not *obligated* (ethically, or according to its own policies) to provide layman's explanations, it would really be nice if there were such an encyclopedia mathematica for laymen somewhere, and what better medium than Wikipedia to be that.
The problem with explaining mathematical ideas in jargon terms is that the learning curve for people who aren't already highly educated in mathematics to learn about a concept this way is ridiculously steep, maybe not even practical. Perhaps you might argue that someone not highly educated in mathematics wouldn't need to look up things like, for example, 4-d rotation, or how to make a Bezier spline, but I've found myself in this position *often*. Wikipedia could be a great portal between the layman's and the mathematician's worlds.
I'm sure those who *do* know their maths could argue that they shouldn't have to wade through descriptions put into layman's terms where a more concise terminology would suit them better, but I'm not proposing that the layman's-terms descriptions act as a replacement for the concise definitions - just that writing additional sections where things are thoroughly (or even summarily) explained in simple terms in a guiding way could be encouraged.
Also I'd like to see more algorithms posted for how to arrive at mathematical results. That's usually what I basically need, and having an algorithm there would be 1000x easier for me than trying to understand an abstract mathematical description and then coming up with my own algorithm. And even to people who understand these terms, I would think a formal definition alone doesn't necessarily imply some highly efficient algorithm for arriving at the given result that some mathematician may have come up with.
Maybe not every article can guide a layman to an understanding of the mathematical concept in a self-contained manner without including an entire lecture series in higher maths, but between having links to other articles and striking a good balance between generality and specificity, I think a very informative middle-ground could often be reached.
Inhahe ( talk) 19:21, 20 April 2009 (UTC)
Is there a consensus as to when it's appropriate to use blackboard bold and when not? Right now, the MOS has a section, WP:MOSMATH#Common_sets_of_numbers, which, in my opinion, can be read to endorse either bold or blackboard bold for, e.g., the real numbers R, the complex numbers C, or the quaternions H. My own opinion is that blackboard bold is ugly and hard to read in print: The two vertical lines create a sharp, distracting contrast between whitespace and ink. For this reason I prefer to use blackboard bold only on blackboards. But we don't seem to have a policy. This became an issue recently at quaternion when an anonymous user switched boldface to blackboard bold and User:Virginia-American and I disagreed over which we should use. Does anyone have an argument for one or the other? Ozob ( talk) 14:44, 2 June 2009 (UTC)
Is there a preference with respect to the usage of "proper" Unicode angle brackets versus "faking" them with less than/greater than signs? Apparently, the angle brackets in an expression like 〈v,w〉 (using ⟨ and ⟩) are not displayed properly for many users. Should one write this expression as <v,w> instead? — Tobias Bergemann ( talk) 08:50, 10 June 2009 (UTC)
can be found at http://www.maths.ox.ac.uk/files/study-guide/index.shtml, esp. part II. I found this info out far too late to be of any use to me, but I felt good knowing that someone made explicit the process of writing theorems (or I was away at the lecture they told everyone else)...
Perhaps this should be basic knowledge for anyone actually writing a maths article on WP. Otherwise a link to it may be helpful. 118.90.74.32 ( talk) 02:22, 16 July 2009 (UTC)
The Greek letter pi is italicized in some parts of the Pi article, and roman in others. That needs to be fixed, but which is correct?
67.171.43.170 ( talk) 02:37, 17 September 2008 (UTC)
WRONG. π should always be italic, for the following reasons..
“ | These traditions are hundreds of years old. Italics help distinguish between variables and other things like numbers and operators. For instance cosine of x is written "cos ". (This issue comes up in other symbolic systems; programmers need that distinction too, but today almost universally use color coding instead.) But like any centuries-old tradition, there are a lot of quirks, for example vector variables are sometimes bold, non-italic. Also which letters you use for which variables is important. A lot of today's traditions were introduced by Descartes, like using the end of the alphabet for unknowns and the beginning for known quantities. At one point people used vowels vs. consonants, I think, but no longer. | ” |
“ | One of the things that Euler did that is quite famous is to popularize the letter for pi--a notation that had originally been suggested by a character called William Jones, who thought of it as a shorthand for the word perimeter. | ” |
I believe this article should follow mathematical convention, so I would prefer to italicize the π's. Any objections? ~~ Ropata ( talk) 05:38, 17 June 2009 (UTC)
The Greek alphabet doesn't distinguish between italic and roman types; Greek letters themselves are usually printed slightly inclined to the right, especially in fonts used for Ancient Greek rather than Modern Greek. (Modern Greek fonts are often assimilated to the Latin alphabet, having completely vertical lines and distinguishing between serif and sans-serif fonts.) At any rate, even though the Greek will look slightly italicized to people used to the Latin alphabet, it shouldn't be set as italics.
π should be italicized in a math context because that matches TeX style, and obviously we do use TeX. If writing words in Greek, then one follows different rules outside of the jurisdiction of the WP:MOSMATH policy page. Clearly "sin θ" looks different from "sin θ".
It is not clear that Angr was writing about mathematical typesetting! (If so, he was wrong because TeX italicizes the lower-case π. If not, then he shouldn't get quoted as an authority in this discussion.) Michael Hardy ( talk) 00:10, 29 July 2009 (UTC)
(moved from Talk:Torque)
So, apparently inline LaTeX is discouraged, but not prohibited. From the guidelines it is seen that you still can use LaTeX without getting the full size PNG, which keeps the height of the line almost the same as when using text. For example, is obtained using LaTeX but it is not as big as . I think both symbols are better than using the text symbol τ, which is nowhere close to the symbol from the equation. So, I am asking for people's opinion on this matter. How do you want the article to look like: with inline equations using text or LaTeX? sanpaz ( talk) 04:06, 17 July 2009 (UTC)
Is there some reason you bolded the tau in your text symbol example? Either the regular τ or the italic τ looks better, I think. On my browser, all your TeX-formatted examples are significantly larger than the size of the text. My opinion: text wiki formatting of math is ugly but mis-sized inline bitmap images are even uglier. So I prefer the wiki formatting. — David Eppstein ( talk) 00:15, 18 July 2009 (UTC)
Some articles (such as Z-transform) needlessly use j instead of i for imaginary unit, which can confuse readers. Can there be any addition in this Manual of Style (or maybe somewhere else) that will encourage the usage of i as imaginary unit? -- 93.136.201.179 ( talk) 13:31, 19 July 2009 (UTC)
How come those electrical engineers don't mix up current density j with their imaginary unit j? And why do they have to use lowercase i for electric current while it is standardized to use the uppercase I? -- 78.0.225.197 ( talk) 10:13, 21 August 2009 (UTC)
Why does this page say one should write
<math>\sin x \,\!</math>
when
<math>\sin x \, </math>
would do the same thing? The purpose of the spacing character is to force png rendering, and one is enough. It does not actually affect the appearance to the reader unless something inside the math tags comes after the spacing characters. It's better to keep things simple when complicating them would do nothing except to complicate them. Michael Hardy ( talk) 00:02, 29 July 2009 (UTC)
The whole point is that \, by itself does not force PNG rendering if math preferences are set to "HTML if possible or else PNG", whereas \,\! always does. — Emil J. 14:40, 29 July 2009 (UTC)
Shouldn't the plural form of formula be formulae? The article uses formulas. ~~ Dr Dec ( Talk) ~~ 19:28, 3 August 2009 (UTC)
Ozob, formula itself has a Latin root! If this is English Wikipedia then maybe we should stop using formula too? My dictionary lists eight meanings for formula:
Here's the key: my dictionary says that the plural form in senses 1 and 2 is formulae, and the plural form in senses 3 to 8 is formulas. This is backed up by the fact that in every published mathematical article I have ever read the word used is formulae. Also, Avi, "to be picky" it should be formulae and not formulæ, the latter is the exact Latin word, the former is the English language derivative. ~~ Dr Dec ( Talk) ~~ 10:32, 4 August 2009 (UTC)
(←) Hmm. I find the objections presented here quite interesting. So, my point about English plurals versus Latin plurals runs, in more detail, like this:
There are, of course, several assertions here that can be debated. But even if you were to knock down every one of those assertions, I'd still vote for "formulas", and for reasons that are admittedly subjective and aesthetic. My taste is guided mostly by my own professional experience: I, in my life as a professional mathematician, use "formulas" exclusively, and so does everyone else I know. "Formulae" sounds pretentious to me; you might be able to convince me that it's grammatically correct, but it crashes, discordant, against my ear. Ozob ( talk) 23:40, 4 August 2009 (UTC)
I also commonly read and use "formulas" as a mathematician. I see on google books that Paul Halmos, Stephen Cole Kleene, Donald Knuth, and Nicolas Bourbaki used "formulas" as well; so does the Chicago Manual of Style. This points to the issue being one of style rather than correctness. In such matters, we usually simply stick with the convention first established in each article. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 02:40, 5 August 2009 (UTC)
I am not inclined to believe that formulae (or formulæ) is significantly more prevalent that formulas in mathematical writing, but if someone can produce data to the contrary I will gladly support an addition to WP:MSM recommending formulae. Strad ( talk) 00:46, 6 August 2009 (UTC)
(<-)In my opinion, for what it is worth, I would like to reiterate that this is wikipedia, not Encyclopædia Mathematicæ; it is written by many, many different people. As long as individual articles are consistent with a correct usage (-as, -ae, -æ), I do not see the need to force uniformity across articles. -- Avi ( talk) 01:23, 6 August 2009 (UTC)
I don’t feel very comfortable hearing people say things like “formulae is the Latin plural, we speak English, so we should use formulas.” Well, what exactly is the
English language? The indigenous tribes of what is now the
British Isles spoke a
Gaelic language
Brythonic language, a language very like
modern day Welsh. The along came the
Angles and the
Saxons from what is now Germany speaking an ancient
Germanic language. Then the
Romans came to settle, bringing with them
Latin. The Vikings made the British Isles their home bringing with them ancient
Scandinavian dialects. Finally the
Normans came with a language not dissimilar to modern day
French. All of these languages and cultures mixed to give rise to the English language and the British people. To say that “We are speaking English, and that’s not Latin!” is like saying, “We are eating an omelette, and that’s not eggs!” Also, we always use the Latin plural form many words. For example, do you say basises, or bases? The Latin plural of basis is bases. ~~
Dr Dec (
Talk) ~~
13:45, 6 August 2009 (UTC)
Minima or minimums? Media or mediums? Bases or basises? I'm sure you would agree that the latter options are quite ugly and most uncommon; the traditional forms seems to win the day. Then what about formulae or formulas? ~~ Dr Dec ( Talk) ~~ 00:15, 9 August 2009 (UTC)
Someone said above that formulae is BE and formulas is AE. Actually, I am pretty sure it's the other way round in my field (model theory): formulae is AE and formulas is BE. This would also be in accordance with what an older (British) colleague told me about topoi (AE) vs. toposes (BE), and with the general principle that AE is more conservative than BE except for (1) Noah Webster's reforms such as theater, which were not followed in the UK, and (2) some spellings such as -ise, where BE remains closer to French. (Actually (1) can also be seen as a special case of (2).)
Model theory literature is currently dominated by Europeans, and within the field formulas is standard for this technical term (see well-formed formula), outnumbering formulae by at least 2:1 according to my Google Scholar tests. Note that for such tests one needs to put even the single words formula or formulae into quotation marks. I believe Google changed their algorithm recently. Hans Adler 10:50, 21 August 2009 (UTC)
I am wanting to create a new template for dental formulas, but I keep getting a "Failed to parse (lexing error)" whenever I try it out. The code I'm using is:
<math alt="Upper: {{{upper}}} / Lower: {{{lower}}}{{#if: {{{total|}}} |, Total teeth = {{{total}}}|}}">\tfrac{ {{{upper}}}}{ {{{lower}}}}{{#if: {{{total|}}} | \times 2 = {{{total}}}|}}</math>
Admittedly, this is the first complicated template I've ever written, although I have read Help:Template. If I take the \tfrac part out, and leave <math>...</math>, no errors are generated and the alt text comes out correctly. If I leave the 1 & 2 variables in the \tfrac, but remove the conditional statement, it works fine. For some reason, it objects to the conditional statement, which will allow me to either show a general dental formula or show the formula along with the total number of teeth. Is there something I'm doing wrong, or do I have to create two separate templates? – Visionholder ( talk) 16:12, 15 September 2009 (UTC)
Yesterday I edited this page - ok. But today I could not edit this page via IE: "Internet Explorer has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience." I wrote this message via Konqueror under Linux. At the same time, other pages I had tested is ok.-- Tim32 ( talk) 11:06, 24 February 2010 (UTC)
Mathematically, a circle is a curve and a disk is the region enclosed by it. The same distinctions hold for sphere vs. ball, torus vs. toroid, and I'm not sure if there are different names for square (interior) vs. square (perimeter). While mathematically accurate, these distinctions fly in the face of common usage, for example the area of a circle is actually 0, it's the area of a disk that's πr2. In light of this, I think it would be better to merge corresponding articles together. I've already proposed a merge between Torus and toroid and it occurred to me that this idea could be applied more generally.-- RDBury ( talk) 17:31, 22 October 2009 (UTC)
This section seems to be routinely misunderstood to give free license to write mathematics as inline LaTeX, regardless of whether it displays as inline PNG (and thus conflicts with other parts of the guideline). I suggest emphasizing that this is not what is intended by changing the sentence:
to read
Second of all, the sentence
also seems to be very gameable. I think this sentence should be removed, since it is definitely not acceptable to change inline formulas to TeX if that will force them to display as PNG (unless there is an overriding necessity to do so). 173.75.159.210 ( talk) 15:05, 1 November 2009 (UTC)
I was just told on
my talk page that my use of (A^\top
) for transpose wasn't kosher; that I should be using :
From the histories, it looks like this came from rolling in old content from
Wikipedia:WikiProject_Mathematics/Conventions. That topic saw only
limited discussion on that talk page. While I'm all for consistency, I think I see in more textbooks. Personally, I find it clearer that it's an operator rather than just raising something to the Tth power. Finally, typographically it seems more consistent to use a symbol than a letter, to go along with for
conjugate transpose and for the
Moore–Penrose pseudoinverse.
Orthogonally, is there any way to add a definition of \transpose
to the "global preamble" so that it is available in all of Wikipedia's <math>
? That would separate the typography from the semantics and would make it involve a lot less ugly curly braces in the source.
—Ben FrantzDale (
talk)
03:29, 18 November 2009 (UTC)
There is a good reason for using \top , or a roman T, or something other than a standard T: it frees up T to be a variable name. — David Eppstein ( talk) 15:44, 18 November 2009 (UTC)
\transpose
defined universally to be whatever we agree upon? Is this technically feasible?
—Ben FrantzDale (
talk)
17:29, 18 November 2009 (UTC)
Does anyone have a published style guide dedicated to mathematics handy? I don't have any at present and I am curious to know what they say on this issue. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 13:05, 19 November 2009 (UTC)
Is there a favored way to number equations? I would think LaTeX supports putting numbers like "(1)", "(2)", etc., aligned on the right side of the page, but I can't find any documentation for it. I have seen multiple methods in articles here, all of them ugly. It would be nice to document the "right" way here and/or on WP:MATH. Thanks in advance; I would love to know how to do this. CosineKitty ( talk) 18:30, 20 February 2010 (UTC)
\begin{equation}
or anything like that; there's nothing to distinguish any use of <math>
from any other, and in particular no way to distinguish which uses should be numbered. Another issue is that math tags are processed individually, not collectively; there is no way for any tag to know where it is relative to other tags, and hence no way to number. I can't imagine this problem ever going away, either. But it's not all bad; I find that rewriting my prose to avoid equation numbers often makes it better.
Ozob (
talk)
05:25, 21 February 2010 (UTC)Yep, use {{ NumBLK}}, {{ EquationRef}}, and {{ EquationNote}}. Unfortunately, there seems to be no way to have them automatically number the equations. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 20:26, 23 February 2010 (UTC)
![]() | This page is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Sometimes people say that this is an encyclopedia as a reason for excluding certain information that is considered too specialised/difficult. I don't see their point. I have seen some mathematics articles that suffer from too narrow a perspective, like laplace operator, which completely ignored generalization to forms and still ignores a discription in terms of covariant derivatives so it would apply to all tensors. Also I have seen some mathematics articles which are now physicist territory, like Noether's theorem and Lagrangian. I think that a good article should start at it's highest level and then explain how lower levels are special cases of it. These lower levels may then also have their own page if necessary. And if something has application to physics or anything else, these should then be treated. BTW The laplace article is still very far from decent since it does not say anything usefull about the (general) Laplace operator etc etc. Any comments? MarSch 18:47, 25 Mar 2005 (UTC)
I would like to mention that even I don't agree with myself anymore about the top-down approach. Bottom-up is the way to go, but now it is mostly bottom. I would like the encyclopedia to be more comprehensive. -- MarSch 13:02, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Would like to see the Guideline recommend the inclusion of a History section - many mathematical fields and concepts have a rich and interesting background - see fractal, chaos theory or group theory for examples. Would be good if we could reach a concensus on the position of the History section - my preference is near the beginning of the article, straight after the intro, but in some articles (such as complex number) it appears near the end. Gandalf61 09:15, Jun 2, 2005 (UTC)
Perhaps we could add a section giving an example of an informal introduction for continuous functions, e.g.: "In the case of the real numbers, a continuous function corresponds to a graph that you can draw without lifting your pen from the paper." (This was a working definition at the beginning of a calculus class I once taught.) Dmharvey Talk 14:48, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)
There are various issues of writing style that I see crop up every now and then. I have put one of them on the "how to write..." page. Please feel free to add your own favourites. Dmharvey Talk 1 July 2005 15:32 (UTC)
With consensus I would add that the construction "then if" is especially annoying. Why can't people just state their theorems as hypothesis-conclusion, with the stage set in a previous sentence? Orthografer 16:49, 7 June 2006 (UTC)
Lately I've been working on removing spurious "note that…", "it should be noted that…" and similar phrases from Wikipedia articles. I noticed these phrases crop up a lot in the math articles. It seems to be a side effect of the conversational, second-person, lecture-like tone taken in a lot of the articles. I have mixed feelings about this writing style; it is often found in textbooks and can help the reader understand a difficult subject by holding their hand through an explanation, so I don't want to suggest that it be abandoned. However, it does run counter to the detached, 'encylopedic' tone considered ideal in Wikipedia articles, so I want to encourage authors to avoid going overboard with conversational clichés. In a lecture situation where the listener is more open to having their attention redirected, it is typical and comfortable to hear certain phrases like "note that" repeated often. But in prose, where exposition is more linear, it tends to be jarring (especially if it happens often), and reflects either poor organization (crucial points shouldn't be afterthoughts) or a lack of confidence in the reader's willingness to continue reading. Therefore, I tried to add a bullet point to this effect.
I've seen examples of math articles written very much in a conversational, lecture style, and others that are written very much in a detached, encyclopedic style. I don't remember which ones they were, though, so if someone feels like mentioning examples or further improving the guideline, please have at it. Thanks — mjb 02:57, 9 August 2005 (UTC)
See Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Mathematics#.22Tone.22.2C_pronoun_use.2C_etc._in_math_articles ( current version) and the related Talk:Knot_theory#You.2FMe ( current version) and Talk:Braid_group ( current version) for discussion on this topic. I was unaware of the discussion here, otherwise I would have directed people here instead. -- C S (Talk) 05:47, 14 May 2006 (UTC)
Recently, User:Jitse Niesen reverted edits by User:MathKnight to spectrum of an operator, citing this article as the reason for the revert. The things that were reverted were primarily the TeX-ification of plain-markup formulas, for example, the conversion of the plain-markup
to the TeX formula
I don't really like this revert at all, and I don't like the plain-text markup, for several reasons. TeX formulas can be converted to plain html, or not, depending on one's settings of Special:Preferences. Thus, if the page is marked up with TeX, the user can control conversion to HTML by changing thier preferences. By contrast, if a formula is in HTML, it's stuck there forever, and can't be TeX-ified. Thus, the general WP reader has far more control over TeX formulas than plain formulas. (Disclaimer, I am sensitive to this issue because my browser seems to be lacking fonts with the ∈ symbol, so it looks like a dumb square in my browser.) I would like to see a policy spelled out here that explicitly enourages the use of TeX, and discourages the use of plain HTML for math markup. linas 6 July 2005 00:57 (UTC)
This is a topic that returns regularly, see for instance Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mathematics/Archive4(TeX). Of course this does not mean that it is not worth having, for instance, I didn't realize that some people do not have a font for ∈ which must be very annoying. However, PNG in running text looks very ugly to some people (including myself). I think that past discussions have showed that there is not a good solution at the moment which makes everybody reasonable happy.
However, it may be possible to change the software so that a decent solution will be possible. One alternative is to support MathML, and I'd love to find out how feasible that is, both on the server side and on the client side. The other possibility is to improve the routines that convert the TeX to HTML. It should be possible to do a better job, and then we could use <math> tags everywhere. -- Jitse Niesen ( talk) 6 July 2005 19:34 (UTC)
Help_talk:Formula#Maynard_Handley.27s_suggestions — Omegatron 02:18, 1 November 2005 (UTC)
See also Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Mathematics#graphs
Hello. In the discussion of graphs on Wikipedia:How to write a Wikipedia article on Mathematics, it is suggested to make the graph too big, then downsample it. I understand the concept but I'm not familiar with the commands. Can someone state the commands that are needed to do that? I think it would help a lot if we can bypass the need for reading through man pages or whatever to find it. Thanks for your attention to this topic & happy editing, Wile E. Heresiarch 01:14, 11 July 2005 (UTC)
For Windows users, You have to install Ghostscript to open .ps files in the GIMP. I linked to the instructions but those instructions aren't the best. You should really set enviroment variables instead of copying the file to your system directory. You need to right-click My Computer --> Properties --> Advanced tab --> Environment Variables --> New and create variable names and variable values as such:
Though your path name may vary. I don't really want to put all these instructions in the middle of the text, though. Maybe this information should go under the GIMP or Ghostscript articles, and we can link to that? It's too "how-to", though, for the WP. - Omegatron 14:41, July 22, 2005 (UTC)
I agree, let's move the graphs to its own page. -
Omegatron 18:59, July 22, 2005 (UTC)
Every time I upload a picture with one of these methods, I include more and more detailed instructions. They should really just be made general, go in the graph section instead, and save me a lot of work. Here are the lastest, though: Image:Butterworth response.png - Omegatron 17:20, July 23, 2005 (UTC)
Yes I like the "typesetting" part leapfrogged to the end. Dmharvey Talk 02:44, 19 August 2005 (UTC)
moved from Talk:American and British English differences
It is often abbreviated maths in Commonwealth English and math in American English. — 203.132.240.221 23:15, 20 August 2005
Recent manual of style edits by User:Crasshopper deprecate this commmon linguistic style. But I wonder if that is the right thing to do; in fact, I think its not. When a mathematician says "its easily shown that", they are not trying to belittle the reader, (and the reader should not feel belittled or stupid), rather, it is a verbal hint about the length of the proof of a theorem. There is many a time that I've been stumped by some formula, while faced by the mocking words "it is easy to show...". This is always followed by a slap to the forehead, "but of course ... its obvious". For that is the very nature of math. So what shall we write instead of the words "its easy to show"? Should we say instead "the proof of this proposition is very short"? Instead of writing "its easy to show", should we start inserting very short proofs that show it? No I think not. linas 04:24, 2 September 2005 (UTC)
I want to add a new section entitled Points, stating, "Points are usually written in uppercase italics, such as point A, P, O." All text books I checked use uppercase italics for point labels.
Secondly, we currently have the following statement under Variables. "Descriptive subscripts should not be in italics, because they are not variables. For example, mfoo is the mass of a foo." The Superscripts and subscripts section also states superscripts and subscripts should have no other formatting. Should we add a sentence or phrase to both sections stating whether or not superscripts or subscripts that are variables should usually be/not be in italics? An example follows.
Although text books usually show variable superscripts/subscripts in italics, I believe it might be acceptable (for HTML formulas) to use unemphasized variable superscripts/subscripts for on-line purposes. Italic subscripts are slightly less legible on-line, whereas italic and upright subscripts are equally legible in text books. -- Simian, 2005-10-02, 22:06 Z
Concerning italics vs. bold vs. bold italics, this manual of style seems to contradict itself and Wikipedia:Technical terms and definitions. From what I can infer, the relevant rules according to that article are
Actual WP math articles use a variety of conventions, but they often give defined terms in bold, not bold italics, and leave subsequent uses in plain face. On the other hand, this 'Manual of Style (mathematics)' seems to give them in bold sometimes and italics sometimes. (Also, is there a reason why 'Style' is capitalized?) It might be nice to agree on a simple set of conventions. Joshuardavis 17:06, 22 October 2005 (UTC)
When I learnt (La)TeX, I also learnt that the "mathit" (or italics in the mathematical environment) should be used only for valiables (e.g. x or i as an index in a sum) and generic functions (such as f(x)). This is why, for example, we have special TeX commands for well-known functions, such as "log" or "sin". I also remember vividly (but unfortunately cannot find a reference) that this also applies to any other non-variable and non-function, be it a less-known function, a subscript having a non-variable meaning (e.g. , or a constant. I know it would be a pain now to put "mathrm"s everywhere, but can anybody confirm that is the (if often neglected even in authoritative books) typesetting rule? Thanks. PizzaMargherita 21:10, 1 November 2005 (UTC)
I'm looking at the -40 article, and wondering if there is a rule or guideline about the use of the words minus and negative. My understanding is that negative is a unary operator and so it is correct to speak of the number negative forty but incorrect to speak of minus forty, while minus is a binary operator and so three minus five is correct while three negative five is not. Can someone please confirm or deny this? And if it is the case, should the wording in the article be changed? I would like it to read negative forty personally, but it is much much more common when speaking of temperatures to hear minus forty. Macho Philipovich 15:50, 21 December 2005 (UTC)
I think a large part of the contents can be moved to meta:Help:Formula. That page is currently biased towards TeX. Moving these HTML instructions/guidelines in that (Meta) page would make it self-contained, and would avoid duplication/contradiction with this page.
I think in this (Wikipedia) project should keep referencing that page, and keep only WP-specific guidelines, like colon for indentation and rendering settings. PizzaMargherita 21:59, 14 January 2006 (UTC)
The example of an in-line formula on line 5 of this section does not show up (on my browser, anyway). Is this a general problem? Hgilbert 21:07, 2 March 2006 (UTC)
I haven't been able to find any official guidelines for typsetting algorithms, particularly mathematical algorithms. I note that Itoh-Tsujii inversion algorithm and Pohlig-Hellman algorithm both use a fairly standard pseudocode style that is common in mathematics. Is there any chance of formalising some guidelines for presenting mathematical algorithms? Leland McInnes 04:50, 29 January 2006 (UTC)
:'''Inputs''' Description of inputs :'''Output''' Description of output :# Description of the first step on the algorithm :# If the algorithm has substeps due to conditional or looping constructs :## Substeps should be nested numbered like so :## Etc.
I thought that people may like to know that colour mathematics is now possible, like this: . —Preceding unsigned comment added by Lupin ( talk • contribs)
Any consensus on the policy on fractional powers? We write the squareroot sign for powers of one half, but what about cube roots? Do we put the squareroot with the 3 above, or do we put ^1/3? And the others? yandman 14:26, 10 October 2006 (UTC)
I didn't see anything about which infix to use for definitions. Some use , but I find this very misleading, since it already has two other meanings: equivalence (hence its Latex code) and identity (first use). I would therefore advocate := or the equal sign with "def" underneath. (Sorry, I don't know the Latex code for that.) — Sebastian (talk) 01:43, 19 October 2006 (UTC)
Are we allowed to use ² and ³? (They're much easier to type than the alternatives.) Shinobu 18:41, 20 December 2006 (UTC)
I think browsers that don't get ² and ³ are just as rare as those that don't get sup. Shinobu 00:49, 21 December 2006 (UTC)
I agree that ² etc. should not be mixed with sups. As for the ² being too small, I can't confirm that, here it looks okay. Unlike sup it doesn't interfere with the line height. So stylistically it depends on the particular situation, I'd say.
@The typical way to type the superscript-2 character is to use an entity name: no. The typical way to enter them is AltGr-2 etc. Fitts' law predicts I'll probably use ² when I'm feeling lazy. Shinobu 22:45, 28 December 2006 (UTC)
I feel that we should have some section on respect for different notational styles in mathematics articles. Something along the lines of Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style#Disputes_over_style_issues. As long as two notations are acceptable it is inappropriate for an editor to change from one style to another. There have been extremely long-winded debates over such issues (e.g. roman i vs. italic i or := vs. ≡) which always end up going nowhere and draining huge amounts of time. It would be nice to point to this article to end such debates before they get out of hand. -- Fropuff 18:33, 21 December 2006 (UTC)
I like , coded in TeX as \Pr, because sometimes a capital P is used for a particular probability measure, as when one writes
etc. Michael Hardy 22:07, 24 February 2007 (UTC)
I am working on a follow-up guideline: Wikipedia: Writing about math. It is more focused on the body rather than notation and has differences. If it passes, I would like it meged with this guideline. -- Ineffable3000 23:47, 25 December 2006 (UTC)
Is there any consensus how to format categories? Sometime one sees (mathbf) or A, sometimes (mathcal). Jakob.scholbach 22:42, 12 March 2007 (UTC)
It might be a good idea to reference some of the style guidance given in international standard ISO 31, in particular ISO 31-0 and ISO 31-11. In particular the following come to mind:
Markus Kuhn 17:44, 5 May 2007 (UTC)
I always write
rather than
Should we have a norm prescribing this usage? Michael Hardy 18:45, 23 June 2007 (UTC)
Hi, could anyone exlain why these two expressions are so different in size of font? Is there an easy way to make the font size larger in the second expression?
sbandrews ( t) 09:08, 26 June 2007 (UTC)
Answering my own question - its because the top one has a superscript and a subscript - so:
works although its obviously the wrong equation,
does the same with an empty subscript bracket - there must be an easier way! sbandrews ( t) 14:54, 14 July 2007 (UTC)
There is! use a \ after the math tag :<math>\ R(r) = A r^l e^{-\alpha r}</math> sbandrews ( t) 15:02, 14 July 2007 (UTC)
I'm trying to figure out how to make a legible division equation with terms that have subscripts in them (like abeta, etc.) 204.52.215.107 16:40, 23 October 2007 (UTC)
In section 5.1 of this article, when the LaTeX formula is shown on its own line, it is not formatted as LaTeX. Can this be explained?
JIMOTHY46 c t 00:20, 21 November 2007 (UTC)
Never mind, I figured out the problem and corrected it myself.
JIMOTHY46 c t 00:33, 21 November 2007 (UTC)
It seems useful to have links to how-to-articles on forming equations for articles that otherwise are hard to find. Brews ohare ( talk) 19:30, 29 November 2007 (UTC)
Dear fellow editors—The idea is to centralise debate and consensus-gathering when there are inconsistencies between the pages.
The most straightforward way is to have MOS-central prevail, and to involve expertise from sub-pages on the talk page there, rather than the fragmentary discourse—more usually the absence of discourse and the continuing inconsistency—that characterises WP's style guideline resources now. If consensus has it that MOS-central should bend to the wording of a sub-page, so be it. But until that occurs in each case that might occasionally arise, there needs to be certainty for WPians, especially in the Featured Article process, where nominators and reviewers are sometimes confused by a left- and right-hand that say different things.
Of course, no one owns MOS-central, and we're all just as important to its running as other editors. I ask for your support and feedback HERE. Tony (talk) 12:20, 5 February 2008 (UTC)
Is there, and if not should there be, a convention on which types of objects are denoted with upper case letters and which with lower case? My understanding is that the current de facto standard is variables, functions and elements of sets are denoted with lower case, and sets and more complicated objects are denoted with upper case. For example, one might have "Let x be an element of the group G," rather than "Let X be an element of the group g." The standard seems to change over time, e.g. a group theory book from 50 years ago might well use X for an element of a group, so it wouldn't do to carve such a convention in stone. But it would make articles look neater if a standard matching current usage was followed. The reason I'm bringing it up is that the constant of integration in Lists of integrals is denoted C rather than c. I'm more used to seeing c and that's what I used on a different page (before I saw the first article). -- RDBury ( talk) 19:03, 23 March 2008 (UTC)
The Article body section has the following sentence, 'If you need to use non-standard notations, or if you introduce new notations, define them in your article.' It seems to me that, given OR guidelines, non-standard notation should rarely be used and new notations should hardly ever be used. Non-standard might be used if there doesn't seem to be any standard notation or if the the existing standard is so unwieldy that it can't be used in the article while preserving clarity. In that case the notation itself should have reference, such as 'Using the notation appearing in ...' or 'As defined in ...' If there are competing standards then the article should mention all of them and discuss the differences. A new notation might conceivably be used if there are very few sources for the topic and none of them has notation that is suitable for an article. In this case, perhaps an explanation of the situation on the talk page of the article would be appropriate. Standard notation as well should be either defined or have link to a page defining it, if it might not be familiar to someone at the level that the article is targeting.-- RDBury ( talk) 17:17, 27 April 2008 (UTC)
It would be nice if the MOSMATH could address the issue of what sort of examples might be appropriate in a mathematical article. At present, the is the Wikipedia policy WP:NOT#TEXTBOOK seems rather firm about the inappropriateness of certain types of examples:
To my mind, this clearly does not exclude the "good" examples from mathematics articles. However, I think some further stylistic advice on what kinds of examples are "good" might be helpful. I know for a fact that there have been lengthy discussions about this in the past, but now the MOS does not give much guidance on which examples are desirable, and which are undesirable.
To that end, I suggest explicitly mentioning that the purpose of an encyclopedia is to inform rather than instruct. (See this edit.) It may or may not be appropriate to do this in a separate section of the MOS so that it can receive a more comprehensive discussion. silly rabbit ( talk) 12:38, 9 May 2008 (UTC)
I have recently discovered the command \scriptstyle, which causes inline PNG formulas to be smaller, often aligning better with the surrounding text. For example, consider
to
This trick doesn't seem to be discussed here or at the meta:Help:Formula page (although I may have missed something). silly rabbit ( talk) 13:36, 19 May 2008 (UTC)
Lambiam and I have a disagreement on interpretation of the MoS when it comes to punctuation of block-displayed formulae which are parts of sentences. I say that
is acceptable as a sentence that comes to an end, whereas Lambiam asserts that the MoS requires that this be punctuated with a period
In support of his interpretation, Lambiam notes subsection 5.3 (“Punctuation”) which states “Just as in mathematics publications, a sentence which ends with a formula must have a period at the end of the formula.” I interpret this as in reference to in-line formula elements, and support my interpretation by reference to the MoS itself, which in prior sections has multiple block-displayed formula elements that end sentences but are not followed by periods. ( Lambiam notes that the MoS is not itself an article in mainspace, and in any event could simply fail to conform to its intended prescriptions while maintaining the intentions.)
We have agreed to move our disagreement here, in the hope that a consensus will support some clarification. — SlamDiego ←T 09:06, 13 June 2008 (UTC)
Ozob just took out the recommendation to use scriptstyle, and replaced it with in the following:
<math>\sum_{n=0}^\infty 1/n^2 = \pi^2/6</math>
, which produces the too tall , with <math>\textstyle\sum_{n=0}^\infty 1/n^2 = \pi^2/6</math>
, which produces the more compact .My experience is that scriptstyle, while semantically wrong, works a lot better for matching typical browser text size. For this example it would be . In my browser, the scriptstyle version is a little smaller than the browser text, but close enough to flow with it, while the textstyle version is so huge that it might as well be a separate displayed equation. Shouldn't we be recommending scriptstyle rather than textstyle? — David Eppstein ( talk) 15:57, 9 August 2008 (UTC)
(Unindent) Wikipedia has, because of browser differences, a complex way of specifying the HTML font size in monobook/main.css, which boils down to 14 pixels for the main text with default 16px browser font settings. What I mean by choosing a font size is to match inline math (in \textstyle) to the default font size, even though I have my browser setup for sligthly smaller fonts. I am pretty sure that the vast majority of users stick with the default font size since it's typically located under "Advanced settings" in the browser.
The problem of small font sizes is of course that, starting from 14-pixel math fonts, subsubscripts and supersuperscripts tend to become too small. This could be dealt with by recommending in the MoS/Math that \textstyle is only used for very simple equations without fractions and nested subscripts. Displayed equations could still be shown in the current, large font sizes. That way, the smallest font that would be displayed in an equation under normal circumstances would be the same in displayed equations and textstyle equations.
Re what \scriptstyle etc. mean: they are documented in the TeXbook by Donald Knuth. \displaystyle is the default for displayed equations; \textstyle for equations in-text. Although the base font size (i.e., used for ordinary letters) is the same, large constructs such as \sum, \int, \frac are typeset differently. Inside a displayed equation, some parts are automatically formatted as \textstyle, for example when they are inside an \array or \frac. Then, \scriptstyle is for subscripts and superscripts, and \scriptscriptstyle for second-order sub- and superscripts, so they are supposed to have different sizes from \textstyle.
Re matching browser fonts: it is very hard to do this automatically. The Wikipedia CSS files only specify that the font is sans serif, which can mean different things on different computers. Math equations should not be typeset in sans serif, or you get problems reading I=l/2 (uppercase i is ell divided by 2).
Han-Kwang ( t) 08:42, 11 August 2008 (UTC)
In addition to the above issues with \textstyle, I'd like to propose a lobby for better vertical alignment of in-text formulas. For example the baseline of sticks out below the baseline of the surrounding text. Compare with that is better aligned because there is a j. Currently, in the Wikipedia CSS there is the CSS rule [2]
img.tex { vertical-align: middle; }
and the equation is something like <img src="blabla.png" class="tex">. With some effort (requires changes in the database and mediawiki code), it could be replaced by something like <img src="blabla.png" class="tex" style="vertical-align: -5px">, where the database stores the vertical offset (-5px) with every equation, obtained during the TeX rendering process. Han-Kwang ( t) 08:42, 11 August 2008 (UTC)
ONLY since November 2007???? We've been talking about this one since the beginning of 2003. Michael Hardy ( talk) 19:31, 23 August 2008 (UTC)
It was just recently when there was an argument of TeX vs HTML, where it was reaffirmed that in general PNG images inline are not that preferrable. However, it seems that recent changes to this manual of style push that too far. Now it reads that one should not use LaTeX inline to start with, which I think is a bit too much. Opinons? Oleg Alexandrov 15:35, 9 August 2005 (UTC)
1) I dislike the idea to let MediaWiki decide to render an easy <math></math> Tex command in plain HTML code (called "HTML if very simple or else PNG" in the user's preferences). This sometimes really makes it hard to recognise variables for being the same, for example, the "letter a" looks different in TeX () than the "HTML a", ax. When registering a new user, I must say it would be better to always activate the option Always render PNG by default. Therefore, I generally prefer to always use <math></math> TeX tags in formulas to have a unified look throughout the article.
2) Right now, many articles in the Wikipedia don't have a unified base for the variables used - one article uses
another article uses
Another difference is, for example, and - two ways for writing vectors. An additional example is . It often confuses the reader to have different variables for basically the same thing - more confusingly, sometimes two totally different variables have the same placeholder. I wonder that there doesn't seem to be an ANSI standard / IEC standard or comparable standard that helps to unify placeholders. It'll be great in my eyes if there was an own Manual of Style about that topic.
3) When writing in direct HTML, is it better to use the correct Unicode symbol or the Ampersand+name HTML entity? For example: Unicode α instead of α, λ instead of λ, ≈ instead of ≈? I prefer to use the Unicode encoding, as it is easier to read.
It'll be great if some of you could comment on my thoughts. Thanks, -- Abdull 14:06, 19 August 2005 (UTC)
-- I think that <math>\alpha</math> is preferable to α, even with the math rendering problems, with either preferable to the Unicode. But I've written so many equations in Microsoft Equation Editor/MathType, WordPerfect Equation Editor, TeX ('Tex' is just wrong; 'TeX' is closer, 'TeΧ' is closer yet), and other formats, that I don't have any trouble writing TeX as if it were WYSIWYG, so I may not be the best person to comment -- Arthur Rubin 21:55, 24 September 2005 (UTC)
Sorry, but I am a bit of a newbie around here. I would like to do something which is easily available in LaTeX, but not easily available in TeX. I need to be able to set characters (or expressions) over other characters (or expressions). For example:
(I normally use \mathop, \xrightarrow, or the xypic LaTex package for such things, but these are less intuitive and none of them happen to be supported by TeX.) The only thing I can think of is:
but this clearly looks bad as far as the typesetting goes. Any suggestions or solutions? Silly rabbit 22:57, 18 November 2005 (UTC)
You could fake it:
but yeah, it would be nice if it was supported natively. — Omegatron 23:54, 18 November 2005 (UTC)
Is there any reason that LaTeX codes that render as HTML are smaller than if they were just written as HTML? For example, for me (using MSIE and with "Recommended for modern browsers" selected at the preferences):
both render as HTML but the first one is a larger font thatn the second. Any ideas, or is this just some problem that only I'm having? -- mets501 03:52, 12 March 2006 (UTC)
span.texhtml { font-family: sans-serif; }
Maybe there should be a guideline on how symbols are to be explained.
Example 1: The foocity is given by
where b and a are the barness vector and coefficient and r is the gnat vector.
and
Example 2:The foocity is given by
where
Style 2 is used quite often in Wikipedia articles, especially in physics. [4] [5] [6] [7] (links obtained from random clicking in Category:Fundamental physics concepts; apparently style 2 is used in about 20% of the articles) However, in all professionally typeset academic-level physics and mathematics texts that I have seen, style 1 is used. Style 2 is sometimes used in high school and college level textbooks. Han-Kwang ( t) 15:55, 16 July 2008 (UTC)
A couple of items related to WP:JARGON. First, in #Encyclopedic vs conversational tone above, there's a discussion about phrases such as "it should be noted". I think it would be a big help if, when copyeditors remove material, they remove it for the most accurate, least offensive, most persuasive reasons. So: removing something due to core content policy should be at the top of the list, and if that's the reason for the edit, then we shouldn't be sniping about poor word choice. Likewise, I sometimes see "it should be noted" removed with the less-than-helpful edit summary "per WEASEL". I think that's the wrong reason; "it should be noted" is common in academia in general and in math articles in particular, and in many contexts, it's not confusing at all. It means "This is important; now let me list the reasons why I think it's important". That's actually perfectly good expository writing style, in a math article, but IMO it's not appropriate for Wikipedia because it is a kind of WP:JARGON. Your neighbor doesn't say "it should be noted", and you don't read it in the newspaper or hear it on TV (unless you watch Numbers (TV series)!) It's academic-speak. So, would you guys mind if I move it out of WEASEL and WP:WORDS and into WP:JARGON?
Second, WP:JARGON now contains "... as a rule of thumb, if expressing an equation requires LaTeX (as most do), do not assume the reader will understand what it means. It is also considered polite (but not always necessary) to explain how the symbols are read, e.g. "A ⇔ B means A is true if and only if B is true". That seems like too much and not enough at the same time. It's not enough because it really should be on the style page that discusses LaTeX, which is this page. It's too much because something shorter would be less of a turn-off to some people; it would also be useful to promote this (MSM) page by pointing people here instead of trying to cover it there. Any objections to putting something like this at WP:JARGON? "Mathematical symbols can sometimes be jargon, to be avoided, written out in words, or explained and given pronunciation; see [proper section of WP:Manual of Style (mathematics)]." - Dan Dank55 ( send/receive) 23:11, 19 September 2008 (UTC)
I've noticed that many inline statements and formulas do not use a non-breaking space or method to keep it from wrapping to the next line. It seems stupid to see "A+" on one line and "B" on another line. There are four possible inline versions that I can imagine:
In my browser, #1 looks terrible. #2 looks good, except when it breaks the line, but #3 is an ugly HTML mess if you have to edit it. #4 is nice, but a bit lengthy, especially for a series of statements. I think it would be useful to start using some method to control wrapping, and I would like to hear others' opinions. - grubber 00:26, 18 September 2006 (UTC)
span.texhtml { white-space: nowrap; font-family: serif; }
Action (physics) uses a boxed equation using some ad-hoc markup. For consistency, I think it's better to use a template for this. Is there already such a template? If not, I suggest {{ box eq}} as a template name. I also think the big black box is a bit harsh - we could use something more playful like toc colours. Shinobu 04:27, 4 October 2006 (UTC)
The editor may want to put any information in a box.
except that it does not look like encyclopaedia any more. -- Yecril ( talk) 17:52, 23 September 2008 (UTC)
We seem to be using a mixture of typographic styles for derivatives in Wikipedia: using either an italic or roman 'd'.
or
Both styles are used in the literature. The same issue applies to integrals and other uses of differentials. — ras52 ( talk) 18:12, 5 December 2007 (UTC)
''
is common on Wikipedia because it resembles a quote and works like one and it is great for marking external text embedded in the current paragraph; '''
is an extension of that concept. There are other uses of italic variant that should not be quoted in this way, e.g. EM for emphasis.
Bold text, where it is required for definition, can be served as a hyperlink to itself; I do not know what other uses of bold are legitimate in running text. All this has nothing to do with entering formulas that are technical by their nature and obviously require more sophisticated mechanisms (preferably templates).''
is used because it is common typographical practice to put variables in italics. Also, you might want to look at
[8] to see just how awkward it is to enter MathML content markup; but as far as I know there's no better solution.
Ozob (
talk)
23:13, 30 September 2008 (UTC)''
is the worst and it is not for variables exclusively, not even mainly. Per Wikipedia, Wikitext is a better solution than MathML because it does not require any client-side support.Examples of bad style should be explicitly marked as such, otherwise the readers tend to memorize them along with, or instead of, the examples of good style, especially if they come first. It should be explicit even if the example is taken out of context. I am going to add DEL+red markup to bad examples and INS markup to good examples as in my recent edit. -- Yecril ( talk) 16:13, 30 September 2008 (UTC)
This is meant to be a guideline. A guideline by definition is a good advice in some circumstances but not all. In particular, it is much more natural and appropriate to use the English word describing the symbol in order to avoid starting a sentence with a symbol than to invent conjunctions for the purpose as the current text does. How do you recommend differentiating between BAD because missing and BAD because present?
I would appreciate an example where obeying this guideline would be detrimental to the content. -- Yecril ( talk) 18:07, 30 September 2008 (UTC)
Is this discussion about this text [9]?
- Terms in running text should be preceded by a short English word that briefly describes what they mean:
- Any group G that fulfills the conditions above may be decomposed into cosets as follows.
- Let H be the corresponding subgroup of the group G. Then the group H must be finite.
Doing so will make the text easier to understand when it is being listened to. This recommendation does not apply to embedded statements like x = 0.
That style differs from all published mathematics I am used to, and all mathematical writing style guides I have seen. Of course the first use of a variable has to explain what the variable represents; but uses after that don't need to repeat that. This is the purpose of variables, after all.
More fundamentally, the variables in the terms above aren't needed at all and should be omitted:
- Any group that fulfills the conditions above may be decomposed into cosets as follows.
- Any such subgroup of the original group must be finite.
— Carl ( CBM · talk) 02:02, 1 October 2008 (UTC)
I am considering the possibility of making a template for π and π to discern the two in formulae. Another option would be π and π. The advantage to the reader would be that she can hover over the symbol do discover its meaning. I am not sure how these templates should be named; perhaps {{ math/perim}} and {{ math/pcf}}? -- Yecril ( talk) 21:47, 5 October 2008 (UTC)
Hover over the symbol to see the benefit. This agrees with what you do when you see something you do not know: you focus on it, you examine it, and, quite probably, you move the mouse pointer over it. I need your opinion about which way of doing this is fine: a wikilink, which also provides a title but happens to change the colour as well, or a plain title. I am concerned with overlinking as well so it seems having just the title is a bit safer. -- Yecril ( talk) 13:00, 6 October 2008 (UTC)
Myself, I don't think these are needed, for the general reason that we should used text to explain things. If it isn't clear that π is meant to be the prime counting function, then the article should come out and say it, not hope the reader will hover over the symbol. This improves the prose, is still usable when the article is printed or viewed without a mouse, and is generally better expository style.
In any case, don't start any massive changeover to the new style without getting some agreement first about it. This is true of any massive style change; these are not well received in general. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 14:08, 6 October 2008 (UTC)
I never opposed using plain text to introduce things, or suggested that special templates could be used instead; I only think it can be a convenient reminder to the reader when it is likely that a formula would make him scratch his head. And you cannot explain things in the middle of the formula so the user has to scroll somewhere else, losing context. In a printed work, you have to look it up in an index of symbols, where you can find the right meaning if you are lucky. An interactive medium such as HTML can do better than that.
I included the templates in new sections in case only one section is selected to be viewed. -- Yecril ( talk) 14:50, 6 October 2008 (UTC)
So apparently we can treat the math tags like any HTML tag, add style to them, change the border, and even add an alternate description. So my question is how to best give an alternate description to the equation above.
Is it understandable? Too wordy? — Dispenser 03:09, 20 October 2008 (UTC)
I would like to raise concerns about the guidelines for the use of HTML-based 'sub' and 'sup' tags for creating simple mathematical formula in Wikipedia. I think that these HTML tags do a rather bad job of separating content from style: I think that all mathematical entities should be surrounded by <math></math> tags,nd we shouldn't have multiple ways of writing such things. Down the track, Mediawiki will surely become better software, and the minor issues of line-alignment, font sizing, etc will be overcome, and with <math></math> tags we will have a much clearer markup that reflects the true meaning of what is being written, eg an italicised 'c' is not a mathematical thing, but clearly is. User preferences could then be harnessed to highlight mathematical objects in a different color, etc, etc, but this is only possible if users are discouraged from 'hacking' math using HTML. Furthermore it saves people from having to learn two entirely different markup systems (eg HTML entities for the infinity character, versus latex markup for the infinity character).
I think that use of <math></math> tags is the future-proof semantic markup that we should be using, and it really does do the job of separating style from content in a way that HTML does not. Jdpipe ( talk) 11:21, 23 October 2008 (UTC)
When typing values for measurements that include units of measurement, it is vastly more readable when editing a page if the writer has used unicode characters as in N/m², compared to N/m<sup>2</math> or even worse Nċm<sup>-2</sup>. It's not hard to learn how to type these special characters, and they do make editing a much more pleasurable process. Furthermore, these unicode characters render correctly in text-only browsers such as Elinks and Lynx, but superscript characters do not (contrary to what is stated in this Manual of Style page). The argument is made that using these <sup> tags somehow aids separation of style and contents. This is a dud argument, because the superscript location of the '2' in W/m² is part of its meaning -- this is not a '2' in the sense of 'multiplied by', so without its correct position, it means something else.
The argument about using <sup> for mathematical formulae is what I argued against earlier. For units of measurement the case is different however, because exponents greater than 3 in units of measurement are extremely rare. I can only think of the stefan-boltzmann constant as a case where higher exponents are used in units of measurement. Given that digits up to 3 are available in standard fonts in unicode, I think it is best to use them for units, so that values can be easily read by as many users as possible, and without clogging up pages with excessive markup. For particularly complex units of measurement, I think that using HTML markup is appropriate, but this happens only quite rarely.
Units of measurement within mathematical formulae are another case; obviously then latex markup (nonitalics) must be used.
Jdpipe ( talk) 11:21, 23 October 2008 (UTC)
<sup>
, not <span style="whatever the CSS for superscript is">
, so what do you mean exactly? --
Army
1987
(t
— c)
12:57, 23 October 2008 (UTC)Consider the value of π in Pi:
We currently have: 3.14159 26535 89793 23846 26433 83279 50288 41971 69399 37510 582
Greg L would have us use: 3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510582
I think this is both ugly to edit and difficult to read, in spite of the international standards for 3-digit spacing. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 22:28, 7 October 2008 (UTC)
Now stop trying to divert us away from the real issue here and get busy and provide some evidence for us to back up your allegation that the mathematics world decided to flout the rule of the SI (and the NIST and the ISO) and standardize on delimiting numbers every five digits to the right of the decimal marker. I think you are wrong about your facts. Greg L ( talk) 23:56, 7 October 2008 (UTC)
I think we need to resolve whether there is any truth to the suggestion that mathematics departs from what is clearly spelled out by the BIPM for compliance with the SI (and which is further supported by the NIST and the ISO) with regard to delimiting every three digits on the fractional side of significands.
If a Ph.D. mathematician who has had a couple of papers published can weigh in here and resolve this issue, that would be much appreciated. If it can be shown that mathematics flouts the rule of the SI and there is a well-established style in the mathematics world, then, please advise. Short of any proof that mathematics marches to the tune of a different drummer, it is too unwieldily to discuss this in two forums. May I suggest we keep this all here on WT:MOSNUM? Greg L ( talk) 04:21, 8 October 2008 (UTC)
Please forgive if this is the wrong guideline, but looking through the Linear regression articles, I've noticed a plethora of notations for the transpose of a matrix X.
Number 2 is obviously bad, and I think number 1 is hopeless; if we ever start differentiating, the ambiguities are obvious. I'd like to propose that we standardize on number 4, or with possibly number 3 as an option. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 15:36, 7 November 2008 (UTC)
I know this will probably be considered anathema to many here, but, if possible, shouldn't a mathematics-related article explain the topic in lay language? Currently, the manual of style, suggests that math-related articles be written in simple terms. But, an overwhelming number of articles seem to consider "simple terms" to be paired down definitions that are still, alas, filled with technical nomenclature and jargon. A "simple" intro that still has four or five blue-colored (linked) jargon-words that a lay person would have to look up is not really that simple. The definition may be simple to you and me, but I don't get the sense that it would be for most people. The article, Pell number, is an example of an Wiki entry whose intro ought to be clearer for lay people. Now this isn't always possible, and, often, an introduction will try its best to be intelligible to a wide audience but will inevitably leave some readers scratching their heads. But, if possible, simplification of introductions should be achieved. If others agree, perhaps, this instruction can be added to the Manual of Style for mathematics. In the end, the more people that understand Wikipedia's mathematics articles, the better it is for the math as a whole, no? ask123 ( talk) 15:45, 26 November 2008 (UTC)
I just read the first three paragraphs of Pell number, and I think reasonable high-school students would understand. (But "lay person" usually means someone who doesn't know high-school math.) Michael Hardy ( talk) 23:29, 26 November 2008 (UTC)
I draw an analogy to this page over at WT:Layout#Proposal; if my analogy is wrong, let me know (either there or here, depending on where you want the thread). - Dan Dank55 ( send/receive) 18:19, 12 December 2008 (UTC)
continuous function is...a function from one topological space to another that preserves open sets? That is loosely speaking? That DO is wrong. It is open map.-- 刻意 21:14, 20 December 2008 (UTC)
I've tried to revive the discussion on different styles of proof over at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mathematics/Proofs - please come join the discussion! I was torn as whether to put it here or there... SetaLyas ( talk) 11:18, 28 December 2008 (UTC)
I and another editor disagree over the phrase "square, symmetric, positive definite matrix" in the Matrix decomposition article. I am of the opinion that squareness is implied by symmetric and therefore redundant. He takes the point of view that "some readers may not notice that symmetric implies square, so the redundancy makes it clearer". I disagree with that too but that's not really relevant to my current posting. (It's not really an argument between us as there has only been one revert but it raised for the first time for me an important question about Wikipedia's approach to these type of situations.) Obviously the Wikipedia:Use common sense guideline is always in effect but in this case it's not so clear which makes more sense. Could somebody point more to a section of the MoS that advises on redundancy issues? I skimmed Wikipedia:Manual of Style (mathematics) but did not find a section that addresses this problem specifically. Advice appreciated too. Jason Quinn ( talk) 14:00, 20 February 2009 (UTC)
User:CBM and I are having a discussion (
User talk:CBM#MSE) about the use of \scriptstyle
to adjust symbol size. Symbols with decorations (hat or tilde, for example) automatically display as PNG, and those without, or with simple super/sub scripts, displayed as HTML. When I was working on the
Maximum spacing estimation article, I used \ss to make many of the decorated symbols appear "normalized" (in my opinion) with the in-line HTML, as I had my settings set as per the MoS (HTML if simple, PNG otherwise). CBM believes that they should always be shown as displaystyle, and the simple ones forced to display using \,. I pointed out that this was not in agreement with the Math MoS, and he suggested that we bring this for discussion here, as scriptstyle is too small in his opinion. Here is how the scriptstyle looks on my browser (FF 3.0 under WindowsXP)
[10]. Here is a comparison on CBM's browser
[11]. The article as it stands now has CBM's changes in it. What is the opinion of the greater WP:MATH community on this? Thank you. --
Avi (
talk)
18:57, 6 March 2009 (UTC)
I agree with the top post in this discussion page. I just came here to say exactly that, and noticed that somebody already had. I'd like to extend the notion a little bit to say that, even if Wikipedia is not *obligated* (ethically, or according to its own policies) to provide layman's explanations, it would really be nice if there were such an encyclopedia mathematica for laymen somewhere, and what better medium than Wikipedia to be that.
The problem with explaining mathematical ideas in jargon terms is that the learning curve for people who aren't already highly educated in mathematics to learn about a concept this way is ridiculously steep, maybe not even practical. Perhaps you might argue that someone not highly educated in mathematics wouldn't need to look up things like, for example, 4-d rotation, or how to make a Bezier spline, but I've found myself in this position *often*. Wikipedia could be a great portal between the layman's and the mathematician's worlds.
I'm sure those who *do* know their maths could argue that they shouldn't have to wade through descriptions put into layman's terms where a more concise terminology would suit them better, but I'm not proposing that the layman's-terms descriptions act as a replacement for the concise definitions - just that writing additional sections where things are thoroughly (or even summarily) explained in simple terms in a guiding way could be encouraged.
Also I'd like to see more algorithms posted for how to arrive at mathematical results. That's usually what I basically need, and having an algorithm there would be 1000x easier for me than trying to understand an abstract mathematical description and then coming up with my own algorithm. And even to people who understand these terms, I would think a formal definition alone doesn't necessarily imply some highly efficient algorithm for arriving at the given result that some mathematician may have come up with.
Maybe not every article can guide a layman to an understanding of the mathematical concept in a self-contained manner without including an entire lecture series in higher maths, but between having links to other articles and striking a good balance between generality and specificity, I think a very informative middle-ground could often be reached.
Inhahe ( talk) 19:21, 20 April 2009 (UTC)
Is there a consensus as to when it's appropriate to use blackboard bold and when not? Right now, the MOS has a section, WP:MOSMATH#Common_sets_of_numbers, which, in my opinion, can be read to endorse either bold or blackboard bold for, e.g., the real numbers R, the complex numbers C, or the quaternions H. My own opinion is that blackboard bold is ugly and hard to read in print: The two vertical lines create a sharp, distracting contrast between whitespace and ink. For this reason I prefer to use blackboard bold only on blackboards. But we don't seem to have a policy. This became an issue recently at quaternion when an anonymous user switched boldface to blackboard bold and User:Virginia-American and I disagreed over which we should use. Does anyone have an argument for one or the other? Ozob ( talk) 14:44, 2 June 2009 (UTC)
Is there a preference with respect to the usage of "proper" Unicode angle brackets versus "faking" them with less than/greater than signs? Apparently, the angle brackets in an expression like 〈v,w〉 (using ⟨ and ⟩) are not displayed properly for many users. Should one write this expression as <v,w> instead? — Tobias Bergemann ( talk) 08:50, 10 June 2009 (UTC)
can be found at http://www.maths.ox.ac.uk/files/study-guide/index.shtml, esp. part II. I found this info out far too late to be of any use to me, but I felt good knowing that someone made explicit the process of writing theorems (or I was away at the lecture they told everyone else)...
Perhaps this should be basic knowledge for anyone actually writing a maths article on WP. Otherwise a link to it may be helpful. 118.90.74.32 ( talk) 02:22, 16 July 2009 (UTC)
The Greek letter pi is italicized in some parts of the Pi article, and roman in others. That needs to be fixed, but which is correct?
67.171.43.170 ( talk) 02:37, 17 September 2008 (UTC)
WRONG. π should always be italic, for the following reasons..
“ | These traditions are hundreds of years old. Italics help distinguish between variables and other things like numbers and operators. For instance cosine of x is written "cos ". (This issue comes up in other symbolic systems; programmers need that distinction too, but today almost universally use color coding instead.) But like any centuries-old tradition, there are a lot of quirks, for example vector variables are sometimes bold, non-italic. Also which letters you use for which variables is important. A lot of today's traditions were introduced by Descartes, like using the end of the alphabet for unknowns and the beginning for known quantities. At one point people used vowels vs. consonants, I think, but no longer. | ” |
“ | One of the things that Euler did that is quite famous is to popularize the letter for pi--a notation that had originally been suggested by a character called William Jones, who thought of it as a shorthand for the word perimeter. | ” |
I believe this article should follow mathematical convention, so I would prefer to italicize the π's. Any objections? ~~ Ropata ( talk) 05:38, 17 June 2009 (UTC)
The Greek alphabet doesn't distinguish between italic and roman types; Greek letters themselves are usually printed slightly inclined to the right, especially in fonts used for Ancient Greek rather than Modern Greek. (Modern Greek fonts are often assimilated to the Latin alphabet, having completely vertical lines and distinguishing between serif and sans-serif fonts.) At any rate, even though the Greek will look slightly italicized to people used to the Latin alphabet, it shouldn't be set as italics.
π should be italicized in a math context because that matches TeX style, and obviously we do use TeX. If writing words in Greek, then one follows different rules outside of the jurisdiction of the WP:MOSMATH policy page. Clearly "sin θ" looks different from "sin θ".
It is not clear that Angr was writing about mathematical typesetting! (If so, he was wrong because TeX italicizes the lower-case π. If not, then he shouldn't get quoted as an authority in this discussion.) Michael Hardy ( talk) 00:10, 29 July 2009 (UTC)
(moved from Talk:Torque)
So, apparently inline LaTeX is discouraged, but not prohibited. From the guidelines it is seen that you still can use LaTeX without getting the full size PNG, which keeps the height of the line almost the same as when using text. For example, is obtained using LaTeX but it is not as big as . I think both symbols are better than using the text symbol τ, which is nowhere close to the symbol from the equation. So, I am asking for people's opinion on this matter. How do you want the article to look like: with inline equations using text or LaTeX? sanpaz ( talk) 04:06, 17 July 2009 (UTC)
Is there some reason you bolded the tau in your text symbol example? Either the regular τ or the italic τ looks better, I think. On my browser, all your TeX-formatted examples are significantly larger than the size of the text. My opinion: text wiki formatting of math is ugly but mis-sized inline bitmap images are even uglier. So I prefer the wiki formatting. — David Eppstein ( talk) 00:15, 18 July 2009 (UTC)
Some articles (such as Z-transform) needlessly use j instead of i for imaginary unit, which can confuse readers. Can there be any addition in this Manual of Style (or maybe somewhere else) that will encourage the usage of i as imaginary unit? -- 93.136.201.179 ( talk) 13:31, 19 July 2009 (UTC)
How come those electrical engineers don't mix up current density j with their imaginary unit j? And why do they have to use lowercase i for electric current while it is standardized to use the uppercase I? -- 78.0.225.197 ( talk) 10:13, 21 August 2009 (UTC)
Why does this page say one should write
<math>\sin x \,\!</math>
when
<math>\sin x \, </math>
would do the same thing? The purpose of the spacing character is to force png rendering, and one is enough. It does not actually affect the appearance to the reader unless something inside the math tags comes after the spacing characters. It's better to keep things simple when complicating them would do nothing except to complicate them. Michael Hardy ( talk) 00:02, 29 July 2009 (UTC)
The whole point is that \, by itself does not force PNG rendering if math preferences are set to "HTML if possible or else PNG", whereas \,\! always does. — Emil J. 14:40, 29 July 2009 (UTC)
Shouldn't the plural form of formula be formulae? The article uses formulas. ~~ Dr Dec ( Talk) ~~ 19:28, 3 August 2009 (UTC)
Ozob, formula itself has a Latin root! If this is English Wikipedia then maybe we should stop using formula too? My dictionary lists eight meanings for formula:
Here's the key: my dictionary says that the plural form in senses 1 and 2 is formulae, and the plural form in senses 3 to 8 is formulas. This is backed up by the fact that in every published mathematical article I have ever read the word used is formulae. Also, Avi, "to be picky" it should be formulae and not formulæ, the latter is the exact Latin word, the former is the English language derivative. ~~ Dr Dec ( Talk) ~~ 10:32, 4 August 2009 (UTC)
(←) Hmm. I find the objections presented here quite interesting. So, my point about English plurals versus Latin plurals runs, in more detail, like this:
There are, of course, several assertions here that can be debated. But even if you were to knock down every one of those assertions, I'd still vote for "formulas", and for reasons that are admittedly subjective and aesthetic. My taste is guided mostly by my own professional experience: I, in my life as a professional mathematician, use "formulas" exclusively, and so does everyone else I know. "Formulae" sounds pretentious to me; you might be able to convince me that it's grammatically correct, but it crashes, discordant, against my ear. Ozob ( talk) 23:40, 4 August 2009 (UTC)
I also commonly read and use "formulas" as a mathematician. I see on google books that Paul Halmos, Stephen Cole Kleene, Donald Knuth, and Nicolas Bourbaki used "formulas" as well; so does the Chicago Manual of Style. This points to the issue being one of style rather than correctness. In such matters, we usually simply stick with the convention first established in each article. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 02:40, 5 August 2009 (UTC)
I am not inclined to believe that formulae (or formulæ) is significantly more prevalent that formulas in mathematical writing, but if someone can produce data to the contrary I will gladly support an addition to WP:MSM recommending formulae. Strad ( talk) 00:46, 6 August 2009 (UTC)
(<-)In my opinion, for what it is worth, I would like to reiterate that this is wikipedia, not Encyclopædia Mathematicæ; it is written by many, many different people. As long as individual articles are consistent with a correct usage (-as, -ae, -æ), I do not see the need to force uniformity across articles. -- Avi ( talk) 01:23, 6 August 2009 (UTC)
I don’t feel very comfortable hearing people say things like “formulae is the Latin plural, we speak English, so we should use formulas.” Well, what exactly is the
English language? The indigenous tribes of what is now the
British Isles spoke a
Gaelic language
Brythonic language, a language very like
modern day Welsh. The along came the
Angles and the
Saxons from what is now Germany speaking an ancient
Germanic language. Then the
Romans came to settle, bringing with them
Latin. The Vikings made the British Isles their home bringing with them ancient
Scandinavian dialects. Finally the
Normans came with a language not dissimilar to modern day
French. All of these languages and cultures mixed to give rise to the English language and the British people. To say that “We are speaking English, and that’s not Latin!” is like saying, “We are eating an omelette, and that’s not eggs!” Also, we always use the Latin plural form many words. For example, do you say basises, or bases? The Latin plural of basis is bases. ~~
Dr Dec (
Talk) ~~
13:45, 6 August 2009 (UTC)
Minima or minimums? Media or mediums? Bases or basises? I'm sure you would agree that the latter options are quite ugly and most uncommon; the traditional forms seems to win the day. Then what about formulae or formulas? ~~ Dr Dec ( Talk) ~~ 00:15, 9 August 2009 (UTC)
Someone said above that formulae is BE and formulas is AE. Actually, I am pretty sure it's the other way round in my field (model theory): formulae is AE and formulas is BE. This would also be in accordance with what an older (British) colleague told me about topoi (AE) vs. toposes (BE), and with the general principle that AE is more conservative than BE except for (1) Noah Webster's reforms such as theater, which were not followed in the UK, and (2) some spellings such as -ise, where BE remains closer to French. (Actually (1) can also be seen as a special case of (2).)
Model theory literature is currently dominated by Europeans, and within the field formulas is standard for this technical term (see well-formed formula), outnumbering formulae by at least 2:1 according to my Google Scholar tests. Note that for such tests one needs to put even the single words formula or formulae into quotation marks. I believe Google changed their algorithm recently. Hans Adler 10:50, 21 August 2009 (UTC)
I am wanting to create a new template for dental formulas, but I keep getting a "Failed to parse (lexing error)" whenever I try it out. The code I'm using is:
<math alt="Upper: {{{upper}}} / Lower: {{{lower}}}{{#if: {{{total|}}} |, Total teeth = {{{total}}}|}}">\tfrac{ {{{upper}}}}{ {{{lower}}}}{{#if: {{{total|}}} | \times 2 = {{{total}}}|}}</math>
Admittedly, this is the first complicated template I've ever written, although I have read Help:Template. If I take the \tfrac part out, and leave <math>...</math>, no errors are generated and the alt text comes out correctly. If I leave the 1 & 2 variables in the \tfrac, but remove the conditional statement, it works fine. For some reason, it objects to the conditional statement, which will allow me to either show a general dental formula or show the formula along with the total number of teeth. Is there something I'm doing wrong, or do I have to create two separate templates? – Visionholder ( talk) 16:12, 15 September 2009 (UTC)
Yesterday I edited this page - ok. But today I could not edit this page via IE: "Internet Explorer has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience." I wrote this message via Konqueror under Linux. At the same time, other pages I had tested is ok.-- Tim32 ( talk) 11:06, 24 February 2010 (UTC)
Mathematically, a circle is a curve and a disk is the region enclosed by it. The same distinctions hold for sphere vs. ball, torus vs. toroid, and I'm not sure if there are different names for square (interior) vs. square (perimeter). While mathematically accurate, these distinctions fly in the face of common usage, for example the area of a circle is actually 0, it's the area of a disk that's πr2. In light of this, I think it would be better to merge corresponding articles together. I've already proposed a merge between Torus and toroid and it occurred to me that this idea could be applied more generally.-- RDBury ( talk) 17:31, 22 October 2009 (UTC)
This section seems to be routinely misunderstood to give free license to write mathematics as inline LaTeX, regardless of whether it displays as inline PNG (and thus conflicts with other parts of the guideline). I suggest emphasizing that this is not what is intended by changing the sentence:
to read
Second of all, the sentence
also seems to be very gameable. I think this sentence should be removed, since it is definitely not acceptable to change inline formulas to TeX if that will force them to display as PNG (unless there is an overriding necessity to do so). 173.75.159.210 ( talk) 15:05, 1 November 2009 (UTC)
I was just told on
my talk page that my use of (A^\top
) for transpose wasn't kosher; that I should be using :
From the histories, it looks like this came from rolling in old content from
Wikipedia:WikiProject_Mathematics/Conventions. That topic saw only
limited discussion on that talk page. While I'm all for consistency, I think I see in more textbooks. Personally, I find it clearer that it's an operator rather than just raising something to the Tth power. Finally, typographically it seems more consistent to use a symbol than a letter, to go along with for
conjugate transpose and for the
Moore–Penrose pseudoinverse.
Orthogonally, is there any way to add a definition of \transpose
to the "global preamble" so that it is available in all of Wikipedia's <math>
? That would separate the typography from the semantics and would make it involve a lot less ugly curly braces in the source.
—Ben FrantzDale (
talk)
03:29, 18 November 2009 (UTC)
There is a good reason for using \top , or a roman T, or something other than a standard T: it frees up T to be a variable name. — David Eppstein ( talk) 15:44, 18 November 2009 (UTC)
\transpose
defined universally to be whatever we agree upon? Is this technically feasible?
—Ben FrantzDale (
talk)
17:29, 18 November 2009 (UTC)
Does anyone have a published style guide dedicated to mathematics handy? I don't have any at present and I am curious to know what they say on this issue. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 13:05, 19 November 2009 (UTC)
Is there a favored way to number equations? I would think LaTeX supports putting numbers like "(1)", "(2)", etc., aligned on the right side of the page, but I can't find any documentation for it. I have seen multiple methods in articles here, all of them ugly. It would be nice to document the "right" way here and/or on WP:MATH. Thanks in advance; I would love to know how to do this. CosineKitty ( talk) 18:30, 20 February 2010 (UTC)
\begin{equation}
or anything like that; there's nothing to distinguish any use of <math>
from any other, and in particular no way to distinguish which uses should be numbered. Another issue is that math tags are processed individually, not collectively; there is no way for any tag to know where it is relative to other tags, and hence no way to number. I can't imagine this problem ever going away, either. But it's not all bad; I find that rewriting my prose to avoid equation numbers often makes it better.
Ozob (
talk)
05:25, 21 February 2010 (UTC)Yep, use {{ NumBLK}}, {{ EquationRef}}, and {{ EquationNote}}. Unfortunately, there seems to be no way to have them automatically number the equations. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 20:26, 23 February 2010 (UTC)