I find Other_names_of_large_numbers a rather dubious article. Google will only find a lot of the names here inside this article. -- R.Koot 00:02, 1 August 2005 (UTC)
Has anyone else noticed what's happened at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Formula? Someone has added a whole bunch of stuff which might be reasonable but I don't think it's the right place for it. It's certainly not what people should see when they go looking for help on TeX markup. I'm not really sure where it should go though. Dmharvey Talk 20:50, 1 August 2005 (UTC)
Ed Poor has moved E (mathematical constant) to Euler's number. Is everyone ok with that? I have no strong feelings either way, but the move has created a lot redirects which should be fixed (especially the double redirects). I don't know as yet if Ed intends to to do that. I'd be willing to help with the redirects, but i want to be assured that we have a consensus for the name change first. Please respond on Talk:Euler's number. Thanks, Paul August ☎ 19:55, August 2, 2005 (UTC)
I think it would be best if everyone responded at Talk:Euler's number. Thanks Paul August ☎ 21:08, August 2, 2005 (UTC)
Blahtex is a new LaTeX to MathML converter designed specifically for MediaWiki.
More information is available at m:Blahtex.
At the blahtex download page may be found an interactive demo, samples of equations from Wikipedia, and the source code.
I invite everyone to participate in the discussion on how on earth to make MathML work in MediaWiki.
This message will be cross-posted on Wikipedia:Village pump (technical) and on the Wikitech-l mailing list (as soon as I figure out how it works).
Cheers Dmharvey Talk 13:37, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
This isn't strictly an issue for this project, but I thought it was about such a fundamental part of Wikipedia that it should be widely publicized. It concerns the Vfd process (and as it turns out this page has been involved in several VfDs recently). There has been considerable recent discussion about possibly eliminating VfD see:
Paul August ☎ 15:19, August 3, 2005 (UTC)
There was a discussion right above about PNG-fied TeX vs HTML. It looks to me that the arguments for inline PNGs there were the same as in Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mathematics/Archive4(TeX), but that the consensus nevertheless seemed to be that HTML is preferred to PNG.
However, the issue does not seem to die out, with some kind of silly revert war going on at cardinal number. I would like to see an informal poll to figure out what people think and if there is some consensus about it; and whether the issue is that important at all. I for one prefer HTML formulas inline if the TeX formulas become PNG images, unless HTML is unable to render the formulas correctly. Oleg Alexandrov 15:27, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
Separated from other text, I think TeX looks a lot better than HTML. However it's use inline is problematic. I usually try to avoid inline TeX, and I think there has been a consensus for this view. But to me it is also problematic to mix inline HTML with non-inline TeX, so sometimes when I want to use non-inline TeX, I also sometimes use inline TeX (for example for variable names, see absolute value). I would hate to see a hard and fast "rule" about this. Paul August ☎ 16:39, August 4, 2005 (UTC)
Please see my comments on this issue at: Wikipedia_talk:How_to_write_a_Wikipedia_article_on_Mathematics#Too_much_HTML.3F. - Gauge 03:48, 21 August 2005 (UTC)
The blind, with screen reading software and with some kinds of HTML enabled software, have some hope of making sense of the page if HTML us used. Unless appropriate "alt=" attributes are required, they have no hope with PNG. Nahaj 02:35:26, 2005-09-08 (UTC)
Looking for something to do? WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles has made a list of missing science topics, containing articles on Weisstein's MathWorld that have no corresponding Wikipedia article. There are more than ten thousand entries (but a considerable number is due to different capitalization conventions), including the intriguing Algebra of Chinese Characters (unfortunately, it is just an empty article on MathWorld). On a side note, remember that there is also the PlanetMath exchange. -- Jitse Niesen ( talk) 22:39, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
I've created a template you can use for CiteSeer citations. If they ever change the URL again, only the template needs to be updated.
{{citeseer|View-based and modular Eigenspaces for face recognition|pentland94viewbased}}
{{
citeseer|View-based and modular Eigenspaces for face recognition|pentland94viewbased}}
-- R.Koot 22:28, 4 August 2005 (UTC)
{{mathworld|Register machines|RegisterMachine}}
{{
cite web}}
: Check |url=
value (
help)-- R.Koot 03:33, 5 August 2005 (UTC)
"linearly towards minus infinity" or "linearly towards negative infinity" or "linearly towards −∞"? - Omegatron 22:35, August 4, 2005 (UTC)
I don't know if you noticed, but Jitse Niesen made a bot to output the following page each day: User:Jitse_Niesen/goim. Here, listed are new math articles in the list of mathematical topics and list of mathematicians, new requests for math articles, fulfilled requests for math articles, articles in need of attention/on vfd, etc.
I believe this page should be a very useful resource for math articles editors (that is, us). I would suggest adopting this page to the project, that is, renaming it to Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/recent changes or something, but I can't come up with a good name.
Any ideas of what else such a page can contain or what other things itchy bot writers like Jitse and me could do to improve the math wikiproject? Oleg Alexandrov 00:41, 5 August 2005 (UTC)
To write the script would be very easy. It will not be a bot, rather a perl script analyzing all the math articles which I have stored locally on my machine (and I have all of the articles in the list of mathematical topics, updated daily). But I am not myself sure how helpful that would be. The total number of pairs would be in the tens of thousands. Maybe we should sleep on this idea for a while, and wonder if anything useful will come up. Oleg Alexandrov 00:05, 6 August 2005 (UTC)
hi I'm just wondering if there are math(s) project pages like this in other languages? It sounds like a lot of people who hang around here actually are quite multilingual. I speak only English (and a pathetic amount of mandarin chinese). Dmharvey Talk 01:28, 5 August 2005 (UTC)
Could an admin exchange Random Access Machine and Random access machine for me, please? Thanks, -- R.Koot 02:40, 5 August 2005 (UTC)
Another one: Mathematical reviews should go to Mathematical Reviews as it is the title of a journal, see Talk:Mathematical reviews. -- Jitse Niesen ( talk) 12:25, 7 August 2005 (UTC)
EXTRAPOLATION METHOD I would be grateful if the mathenaticians would be kind enough to look at my extrapolation method on www.AIDSCJDUK.info to determine whether it is suitable for a link from Wikipedia. Copy of earlier E-mails with Wiki. are below. Edward G. Collier MBCS CITP
Unfortunately, it seems that one cannot paste E-mails into this area. My method was devised in 1987 and wasexplained in detail at a Royal Statistical Society special meeting on AIDS forecasting that year. It was briefly written up in the Jornal of that Society Vol 151 Part 1 1988 Although the professors, statisticians and epidemiologists present also explained their proposed methods, my simple (but not simplistic) mathod was the only one that ever produced any viable forecasts and is still being used today as can be seen from the web site. I also have used the method for several years in forecasting variant CJD in the UK. The SEAC sub-committee with responsibility for overseeing the progress of vCJD asked me to get the method published. However, the various mathematical bodies and journals that I approached declined to publish it as I had no references. As a retired engineer and not an academic, I had no way of finding appropriate references and in any case I had not referred to any as the idea came into my own head. I am sure that there are many people who could make use of the method - even in control engineering- if you can publicise it in the excellent Wikipedia. Thank you, Edward G. Collier Edwardhfd@aol.com
As some of you have noticed, partly in honor of Jitse's great new Current activity page — way to go Jitse! — I have created a new section on the project page to list and describe the various project subpages. I know they are all mentioned somewhere else on the page, but I thought it would be good to also list them together. At any rate that got me to thinking about these pages:
Should these also be subpages of this project? I could see some benefit to bringing these all under one banner so to speak. Paul August ☎ 17:38, August 6, 2005 (UTC)
|
I agree with Paul and Jitse about naming it Wikipedia:Manual of Style (mathematics). By the way, I truly hope that the fat style template to the right will not make its way in our manual of style, it is just so long, and not so helpful (for example, why would we need in our manual of style a link to how to write China-related articles).
Oh, and we can make the shortcut WP:MSM point to the new location, to save some typing when referring to it. Oleg Alexandrov 20:30, 8 August 2005 (UTC)
Moved. Oleg Alexandrov 20:37, 9 August 2005 (UTC)
Blahtex 0.2.1 has been released. It now compiles and runs on Linux thanks to Jitse Niesen.
Jitse has had some initial success with integrating blahtex into mediawiki: check it out.
Source code, online demo and samples here.
More info and bug reports at m:Blahtex.
Dmharvey Talk 01:53, 9 August 2005 (UTC)
I was editing the *-algebra, B*-algebra, C*-algebra etc. pages for consistency of style and I noticed some pages had <sup> tags around the * in these expressions, thus giving (e.g.) C* rather than C*. This looks horrible (and increases leading) on my browser (Netscrape 7) and the majority of pages didn't have it, so I took out those I found. But I assume someone had a reason for putting them in: is there any browser for which this looks better? Our proposed style guide should address this one way or the other. (This is different from the superscripting issues discussed at Wikipedia:How to write a Wikipedia article on Mathematics already because it relies on the * character appearing superscripted by default.)
And while I'm here: our preferred spelling seems to be C*-algebra (not C* algebra, C-star algebra, C star algebra, etc.) The exception is that our page on *-algebras is currently at star-algebra. Is there any reason for this, for example, is it usually spelled this way in the literature? — Blotwell 04:58, 9 August 2005 (UTC)
I wrote the section on morphisms in the article on projective spaces, and it occurred to me that while using the language of category theory to describe maps between projective spaces is extremely convenient, it might be off-putting for the undergrad who's never studied any category theory, and just wants to know about projective spaces. - Lethe | Talk 07:13, August 9, 2005 (UTC)
But the thing is, for the example I'm thinking of, there aren't "two versions". I just say "in the category of ____ the morphisms are ____". there really isn't any category theory there that can be separated out. just some terminology that can be used or not used. - Lethe | Talk 22:07, August 9, 2005 (UTC)
I've requested that markup be added to simplify entering sub and superscript at Bug 3080. It's just TeX markup with mandatory brackets. I think it will clean up the markup and be a lot easier to type than HTML.
Examples:
x^{3}
→ x3 (powers)CO_{2}
→ CO2 (carbon dioxide symbol)1^{st}
→ 1st (ordinals)^{2}H_{2}O
→ 2H2O (isotopes)I can't think of anything this would conflict with, can you? Vote for it if you like it. Suggest a different syntax if you don't. Other syntaxes were suggested, which I really don't like. - Omegatron 19:39, August 9, 2005 (UTC)
FWIW, I like it, seems like a good idea. As to the stray-markup issue, what about articles that contain sample source code? I thought I saw an article that showed how to compute factorials in 18 different programming languages. linas 00:00, 10 August 2005 (UTC)
Testing testing 12 3<sup>4</sup> 5^{6} 7^{8}
I've expanded the article with information about the algorithm itself, and some detail about the proof. I'm not happy with the look of the <math> sections though - this is my first attempt at a significant amount of mathematical markup - so some help in cleanup would be appreciated.
Eventually this article should probably include the full algorithm in programming terms (rather than only in mathematical terms), and describe the complete proof. But I need to learn a bit more about finite fields and group theory before I can hope to do that myself.
As far as I can see, the only markup forcing things to PNG are the use of \sqrt(r) and \equiv. Hv 13:39, 10 August 2005 (UTC)
I am proposing moving Inclusion (mathematics) to Inclusion map. For my reasons and how I plan to go about it see Talk:Inclusion (mathematics). If you have any thoughts on this move please comment on that talk page. Thanks. Paul August ☎ 18:42, August 10, 2005 (UTC)
Over at the Talk:Space#On arranging stuff in this article page there's a discussion about whether the section on Mathematics and space could be rewritten to contain a brief summary of how space works in maths, as at the moment it is pretty much a list of links. Could someone take a look at Space, which it is hoped will be a big picture article taking in the various uses of the concept of space, and see if work can be done on the Mathematics and space section. Thanks for any help or thoughts. Hiding talk 07:58, 11 August 2005 (UTC)
The article Mathematics and God is up for deletion. I voted to keep, here's the VfD page: Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Mathematics and God. — Paul August ☎ 19:36, August 11, 2005 (UTC)
I created Category:Mathematician Wikipedians as a subcategory in Category:Wikipedians by profession and categorized myself in there. Company is welcome. :) Oleg Alexandrov 23:28, 11 August 2005 (UTC)
Will people list themselves there or can anyone list them there? If the former, the list may be so incomplete as to be useless. Michael Hardy 21:28, 18 August 2005 (UTC)
There must be only one. If we do not merge these now, someone will do it later and more clumsily, and with much more work. There seems to be no standard, and Category:Wikipedian mathematicians is more idiomatic to my ear, so I propose we use that one. Septentrionalis 14:01, 19 August 2005 (UTC)
According to this, WP is not a directory. However, many categories for Wikipedians already exist. Since all the listings appear to be voluntary ones, I have no further comment on the subject. Oleg: Sorry about the misinterpretation. =) -- Kooky | Talk 22:32, 19 August 2005 (UTC)
OK, I moved myself to Category:Wikipedian mathematicians. If more people feel to prefer this one, we will need to nominate Category:Mathematician Wikipedians for deletion and move the other people in there to Category:Wikipedian mathematicians. Oleg Alexandrov 05:48, 20 August 2005 (UTC)
I've now nominated Category:Mathematician Wikipedians for deletion. Note that the yokels don't seem too happy about the other page either (as per Koooky's comment above). -- stochata 15:34, 26 August 2005 (UTC)
I would like to announce that I have nominated Jitse for adminship, and I am here shamelessly encouraging everyone to vote (in support I hope ;-). To vote or comment go here: Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/Jitse Niesen. — Paul August ☎ 16:58, August 12, 2005 (UTC)
Maynard Handley has put up a wiki demonstrating some improvements he has made to the LaTeX => PNG rendering process.
With his permission I offer you the URL: http://name99.org/wiki99/. It will disappear within about a week so check it out soon.
In my opinion, some of the improvements are great (Wikipedia should definitely use them), some are so-so, and some are, let's say, ambitious.
I'd like to hear some opinions. Dmharvey Talk 21:39, 12 August 2005 (UTC)
The aforementioned article is up for deletion. Uncle G 15:42:27, 2005-08-16 (UTC)
I've added a new section: "Mathematics featured articles" to the project page. I might expand it a bit with some information on "Featured articles" and the FAC process. It might also be nice to track down and add the date when each article became an FA. Comments? Paul August ☎ 18:48, August 16, 2005 (UTC)
Ok I've made some changes to the "featured articles" section. In particular I:
Paul August ☎ 20:28, August 18, 2005 (UTC)
I'm new here, and I'd like clarification about use of mathematical notation, specifically in set theory and mathematical logic. For example, my new stub of Transitive set uses the ∈ (∈) symbol, which the guidelines suggest should be replaced by the text "is in". Arthur Rubin 00:29, 17 August 2005 (UTC)
I've been trying to improve on what Maynard Handley did with the PNGs.
There are still severe problems (mostly relating to Windows), and it's not good enough for deployment, but I think it's starting to get somewhere, and I'd appreciate some opinions.
Check out User:Dmharvey/Inline_PNG_discussion.
Dmharvey Talk 17:15, 17 August 2005 (UTC)
Could an admin move Menelaus theorem to Menelaus' theorem? Note that the page's principal author User:Tokek has left a note on talk:Menelaus theorem regarding the choice of title, but as I read it it doesn't seem that Tokek would find this change objectionable. — Blotwell 06:57, 20 August 2005 (UTC)
Yesterday I removed with my bot framed boxes around formulas wherever I could find them. I mean, boxes of the form:
This is a theorem, or a formula.
I based my reasoning on the discussions at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Mathematics/Archive10#Dotted_framebox_around_formulas and Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Mathematics/Archive6#A_little_note_on_using_purple_dotted_boxes but Paul rightly pointed out that a preliminary discusion would have been good. So, belately, I wonder, what do people think of these boxes? Thanks. Oleg Alexandrov 18:46, 20 August 2005 (UTC)
Hi all, I am a non-member dropping by to alert you all to an ongoing VfD discussion.
The issue is: which mathematicians should have biographies in the Wikipedia? I think a simple and common sense rule of thumb (the title is a joke; of course I don't expect a mathematically precise criterion) should be:
I am no doubt hardly the first to point out that with thousands of person obtaining a Ph.D. in math every year, and gadzillions of math professors around the world, and tens of thousands of members of SIAM, AMS, MAA, and other mathematical societies around the world, simply earning a Ph.D. or publishing some research papers probably shouldn't qualify one for a biography.
Here is a more bizarre possibility: suppose the article claims that M is notable because he won the Y Prize, it should link to the formal English language Y prize citation for M. If that doesn't exist (in English), at the Y Foundation website, and if there is no other grounds for M's alleged notability, I question whether M should have an entry in the English language Wikipedia.
No, I didn't make that up. This is exactly the argument some nonmathematician made in a VfD. (Quick now: has anyone here ever heard of the Zois Prize? Before reading the preceding sentence?)
Yesterday, I happened across several biographies listed in Category:Algebraic graph theory which I think violate my simple rule:
I have nominated them for deletion as non-notable. I think the first two are clear cases, the third maybe a bit less clear. Just to be clear, in each case, I would be equally happy with either of the following outcomes:
I hope many of you will drop by those pages and vote one way or the other, but I'd also like to see any comments on the bigger issue raised in the subject line: how can one characterize which mathematicians are notable?
In retrospect, I probably should have considered trying to contact authors/editors of these articles before making my VfD nominations. Has anyone had some good experiences along these lines to share? Or advice on how to proceed if a similar situation arises in the future?
Someone raised another issue: these three men all happen to appear on a List of Slovenian mathematicians, so there might be some, er, patriotic rationale for creating these biographies. I don't want to get involved in Balkan politics, so I'd just say that I did recognize one name on that list, Josef Stefan, and I would certainly agree that Stefan is notable and should have a biography here. I'd like to see the others include an explanation of some clearly notable mathematical accomplishment, or else I think they should probably go.--- CH (talk) 21:50, 22 August 2005 (UTC)
Oh dear: to forestall misunderstanding, of course I did not mean to imply that whether or not I recognize a name is an adequate criterion for mathematical notability. But if none of the members of this project know anything about mathematician M, and the biography doesn't help, I would say that biography should probably go.
Another thing: I overlooked another name I recognize: Josip Plemelj. Ironic I missed that, because I am gearing up to write about something he was involved with.--- CH (talk) 22:04, 22 August 2005 (UTC)
P.S. Someone commented in the VfD to the effect that the fact that some towering figure doesn't yet have a biography, while some lesser figures already have ones, is not by itself grounds for deleting anything. I agree; clearly, Wikipedia's growth is haphazard so this will be a not infrequent occurrence. The balance issue raised in these three cases goes far beyond that, I think, but all I am really trying to say is that, IMO, the average reader of a biography on Wikipedia should not be left with serious doubt that the subject is indeed notable, as I was after reading these three biographies. Again, I'd be happy if someone who knows more than I do about them can convince me I am wrong by telling us all (by expanding the biographies) about some clearly notable accomplishment. But some prize I have never heard of? Doesn't help me. Some very rough analogies (not very serious):
(I should confess that I don't know much at all about baseball, I'm just trying to, er, play along with a favoriate analogy among Wikipedians.)--- CH (talk) 23:58, 22 August 2005 (UTC)
JYolkowski has suggested several times (if I understand him correctly) that the mere verifiability of stated facts in an biography is sufficient grounds for keeping it (see my talk page). This doesn't make sense to me: name person X, birthdate, and birthplace, and someone can probably verify that information. Does that alone qualify X for inclusion? I think it should be rather the notable substance of stated facts (or lack thereof) which qualifies X (or not) for having a biography here.
I seem to be trying to summarize, er, notable comments recieved elsewhere. I have to take the blame for this. Due to the accidental way I got into this (and my inexperience in Wiki discussions of this kind), various useful (or bizarre) comments are now scattered over the talk pages of the three articles, my user talk page, and the vfd pages. Sorry for the confusion!--- CH (talk) 00:35, 23 August 2005 (UTC)
Jitse actually found the citation (in Slovenian, I guess) of some obscure award to Marusic :-) So I did the obvious thing and awarded the very first Biographical Barnstar for Brain-numbingly Obscure Web Research to Jitse Niesen. Congrajulations, Jitse! This is such an obscure award that until a few minutes ago it didn't even come with a bronze plated pewter star. But you can verify that Jitse won it!-- just look here! Anyway, if some kind person can translate this well enough, maybe I will change my own vote. Even better, said kind person can add a description (in English) of Marusic's notable achievement in the original article.--- CH (talk) 01:02, 23 August 2005 (UTC)
OK, some anon has translated the now notorious Zois prize citation of Marusic, which led me to guess that if he is internationally recognized, some papers by him would appear in a review paper I happened to have at hand. This turned out to be the case, so I changed my own vote in the VfD to a lukewarm keep.
I'd like to try to summarize a few more valuable points which came up:
Paul August: up above I think I expressed my take on inclusion; fine by me as long as it doesn't intrude upon the learning experience of the generic user. My concern is to keep that from happening. A mixture of discouraging cruft (hopefully by the art of gentle persuasion) and segregating it is probably the best answer.
Linas: OK, I'm adding back my name, but I need to focus on the GR WikiProject at least for the rest of this year, because I promised to get some serious work done on that. Yes, I'm talking to you, and all is forgiven, but Linas, I really hope that in the future, you in particular will pay attention to clues that you might be getting on my nerves (or keep an eye on the wikistress meter on my user page), OK? If that happens, I'm sure I'll try to tell you, so if you just remember to be a good listener when interacting with me all should be fine.--- CH (talk) 22:27, 23 August 2005 (UTC)
I have a question/problem/something-I-don't-understand that has been bugging me for years. I have posted it at the bottom of Talk:Infinity. Thank you already to Paul August. -- Lord Voldemort (Dark Mark) 17:20, 23 August 2005 (UTC)
There have been some rather strange edits to Galois theory in the last few weeks, all emanating from IP address 64.136.26.235, just deletions of large random chunks of text. What is especially odd is that this IP address appears to be making genuine edits to other articles. Any ideas? Dmharvey Talk 18:49, 25 August 2005 (UTC)
Take a look at Tav (number). Is this valid? Salvageable? The original article is credited to an IP (which has no other math-related edits), and subsequent edits by others have left the basic text unchanged. Obviously, this article needs either a rewrite or deletion. — Nowhither 13:50, 26 August 2005 (UTC)
The notations used by the cluster of articles close to sigma-algebra are inconsistent with one-another; I'd like to fix this, but only after some agreement on a unified notation. Please see Talk:Sigma-algebra for details. linas 13:58, 26 August 2005 (UTC)
Almost a million (well, nearly) pages still point to sheaf rather than to the moved sheaf (mathematics). There were good reasons not to move it. Charles Matthews 20:33, 26 August 2005 (UTC)
Agree to move it back to sheaf. Oleg Alexandrov 16:03, 27 August 2005 (UTC)
Some of you may remember that in August 2003 a user began adding a huge number of missing math topics to Requested articles. There were well over a thousand requests added, but through the labour of our math people all but seven of them have now been filled. These last few requests are now listed on Articles requested for more than two years. Since they have taken so long to be filled they are probably very obscure and difficult to write about, and certainly need some expert knowledge. It would be great if some math people could take a look at Articles requested for more than two years and try to clear these final relics. - SimonP 23:28, August 26, 2005 (UTC)
I've just made a comment on the category deletion pages for Category:Mathematician Wikipedians about a Math version of the Babel project. Then I realised it's actually only an extension of the Babel project. Below are some sample categories for discussion, and we could make up a pretty box template like the babblers:
If we preferred it could be a proper equivalent of Babel, where statisticians, applied mathematicians and pure mathematicians have their own boxes, and people like me can be Pure Math-1! -- stochata 11:12, 27 August 2005 (UTC)
The article sigma additivity used to be a redirect to measure (mathematics). As part of the PlanetMath Exchange project I copied over the article "additive" to sigma additivity, replacing the redirect. User:Blotwell is now suggesting that sigma additivity be merged into measure (mathematics). I feel like the topic is deserving of its own article, but this is not my area of expertise, (not that I have one ;-) and I would appreciate if other knowledgeable editors could help decide what the best thing to do is. Please comment here. Thanks — Paul August ☎ 19:21, August 27, 2005 (UTC)
As part of working on categorizing articles copied from PlanetMath — the PlanetMath Exchange project, I noticed that there might be a need for more math categories from subjects listed in the Mathematics Subject Classification (2000 edition). Here's the categories I have in mind:
I am aware that the Mathematics Subject Classification is not directly applicable to Wikipedia math articles, still, probably it can give some inspiration. I am most uneasy about the global analysis and analysis on manifolds thing. Any suggestions and discussion of the above are very welcome. Oleg Alexandrov 22:57, 27 August 2005 (UTC)
(I changed the list to a numbered one, to make referring to it easier). I think (1) and (2) should be under ring theory, as I find it hard to see there being enough articles to justify addiational catergories. Similarly for (3) - I don't think there's enough articles to justify additional catergories. For (4), it seems the seqeunce catergory is broadly equivilant to the catergory you suggest putting it under. On the other hand, I definately agree with doing (5) as you suggested. It is important to remember that the MSC classification is designed to classify maths papers, not maths itself. Tompw 11:50, 28 August 2005 (UTC)
I raised this question on Talk:Fibonacci number a while back, but didn't get any comments, and since this also concerns other articles, I'll bring it up here. The Fibonacci number article uses the notation F(n), but my impression is that Fn is far more common in other works (both versions are used more or less randomly around Wikipedia). Which one should it be? Consistency would be desirable. Fredrik | talk 18:56, 28 August 2005 (UTC)
Both notations are common and should be defined. F(n) notation is better for complex expressions such as F(n-3) or worse I think. For simple expressions I prefer F_n though.-- MarSch 16:01, 30 August 2005 (UTC)
Hello all - In the interest of standardizing and growing wikipedia's coverage of game theory, I have started a WikiProject on game theory. We could use some mathematicians help over there. (For instance, we could use an article on the Kakutani fixed point theorem which is used in the proof of the existence of Nash equilibria.) I hope that some folks will come join in! --best, kevin ··· Kzollman | Talk··· 02:22, August 30, 2005 (UTC)
I've templatized the math FAs, although thanks to Paul it doesn't add much :) Any ideas about this? -- MarSch 15:41, 30 August 2005 (UTC)
There is an interesting thread at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#Math equations to plain english. Oleg Alexandrov 19:02, 30 August 2005 (UTC)
Based on the feedback above, I created a table listing how Wikipedia categories are in correspondence with the AMS Mathematics Subject Classification. Again, this is needed for automatic categorization of articles imported from PlanetMath but would be a curious thing to look at in general. See link at User:Mathbot/Wikipedia categories and AMS MSC classification. Any feedback welcome. Oleg Alexandrov 23:22, 30 August 2005 (UTC)
There is a discussion going at Talk:Boolean algebra about rewriting it, or perhaps writing a new article. Several people think the article is too technical and difficult to understand, and User:Plugwash (who says he doesn't understand the current article at all) has made an attempt at rewriting it & mdash; that has been reverted (by me!). Please join in the discussion ;-) Paul August ☎ 17:12, August 31, 2005 (UTC)
It is my personal belief that all of the "product" articles collectively are in a confusing and sorry shape. Some things are misnamed, some articles have no apparent reason for their content organisation, other things aren't clarified enough, etc. At the heart of the matter seems to be a failure to organise, name, and clarify topics by keeping in mind their category theory meaning. This doesn't mean you have to know category theory to understand anything, but category theory does point a clear direction of how things should be organised, and it's not the direction we're going.
There are 4 major ideas going on in all these articles, based on 2 criteria with 2 options each: first, product or coproduct/sum; second, external or internal. That makes
A lot of things are named "sum" that are really products, and a few things that are "internal" aren't clearly identified that way (so could be confused with the "default" external case). For example, direct sum of groups is not about the (external) direct sum, or free product, it's actually about the internal weak direct products of groups. Also, in many cases, you can form the product/sum like you do the sum/product, as objects, but it's not a universal object. Similarly, you can take the "abelian" sum of arbitrary groups, but it's not universal. This is sometimes called the "weak direct product" or "restricted direct product". This distinction between what is an object and what actually is universal is missing in many places. You don't have to mention it directly, but it seems it should guide the presentation. Revolver 21:01, 31 August 2005 (UTC)
I find Other_names_of_large_numbers a rather dubious article. Google will only find a lot of the names here inside this article. -- R.Koot 00:02, 1 August 2005 (UTC)
Has anyone else noticed what's happened at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Formula? Someone has added a whole bunch of stuff which might be reasonable but I don't think it's the right place for it. It's certainly not what people should see when they go looking for help on TeX markup. I'm not really sure where it should go though. Dmharvey Talk 20:50, 1 August 2005 (UTC)
Ed Poor has moved E (mathematical constant) to Euler's number. Is everyone ok with that? I have no strong feelings either way, but the move has created a lot redirects which should be fixed (especially the double redirects). I don't know as yet if Ed intends to to do that. I'd be willing to help with the redirects, but i want to be assured that we have a consensus for the name change first. Please respond on Talk:Euler's number. Thanks, Paul August ☎ 19:55, August 2, 2005 (UTC)
I think it would be best if everyone responded at Talk:Euler's number. Thanks Paul August ☎ 21:08, August 2, 2005 (UTC)
Blahtex is a new LaTeX to MathML converter designed specifically for MediaWiki.
More information is available at m:Blahtex.
At the blahtex download page may be found an interactive demo, samples of equations from Wikipedia, and the source code.
I invite everyone to participate in the discussion on how on earth to make MathML work in MediaWiki.
This message will be cross-posted on Wikipedia:Village pump (technical) and on the Wikitech-l mailing list (as soon as I figure out how it works).
Cheers Dmharvey Talk 13:37, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
This isn't strictly an issue for this project, but I thought it was about such a fundamental part of Wikipedia that it should be widely publicized. It concerns the Vfd process (and as it turns out this page has been involved in several VfDs recently). There has been considerable recent discussion about possibly eliminating VfD see:
Paul August ☎ 15:19, August 3, 2005 (UTC)
There was a discussion right above about PNG-fied TeX vs HTML. It looks to me that the arguments for inline PNGs there were the same as in Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mathematics/Archive4(TeX), but that the consensus nevertheless seemed to be that HTML is preferred to PNG.
However, the issue does not seem to die out, with some kind of silly revert war going on at cardinal number. I would like to see an informal poll to figure out what people think and if there is some consensus about it; and whether the issue is that important at all. I for one prefer HTML formulas inline if the TeX formulas become PNG images, unless HTML is unable to render the formulas correctly. Oleg Alexandrov 15:27, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
Separated from other text, I think TeX looks a lot better than HTML. However it's use inline is problematic. I usually try to avoid inline TeX, and I think there has been a consensus for this view. But to me it is also problematic to mix inline HTML with non-inline TeX, so sometimes when I want to use non-inline TeX, I also sometimes use inline TeX (for example for variable names, see absolute value). I would hate to see a hard and fast "rule" about this. Paul August ☎ 16:39, August 4, 2005 (UTC)
Please see my comments on this issue at: Wikipedia_talk:How_to_write_a_Wikipedia_article_on_Mathematics#Too_much_HTML.3F. - Gauge 03:48, 21 August 2005 (UTC)
The blind, with screen reading software and with some kinds of HTML enabled software, have some hope of making sense of the page if HTML us used. Unless appropriate "alt=" attributes are required, they have no hope with PNG. Nahaj 02:35:26, 2005-09-08 (UTC)
Looking for something to do? WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles has made a list of missing science topics, containing articles on Weisstein's MathWorld that have no corresponding Wikipedia article. There are more than ten thousand entries (but a considerable number is due to different capitalization conventions), including the intriguing Algebra of Chinese Characters (unfortunately, it is just an empty article on MathWorld). On a side note, remember that there is also the PlanetMath exchange. -- Jitse Niesen ( talk) 22:39, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
I've created a template you can use for CiteSeer citations. If they ever change the URL again, only the template needs to be updated.
{{citeseer|View-based and modular Eigenspaces for face recognition|pentland94viewbased}}
{{
citeseer|View-based and modular Eigenspaces for face recognition|pentland94viewbased}}
-- R.Koot 22:28, 4 August 2005 (UTC)
{{mathworld|Register machines|RegisterMachine}}
{{
cite web}}
: Check |url=
value (
help)-- R.Koot 03:33, 5 August 2005 (UTC)
"linearly towards minus infinity" or "linearly towards negative infinity" or "linearly towards −∞"? - Omegatron 22:35, August 4, 2005 (UTC)
I don't know if you noticed, but Jitse Niesen made a bot to output the following page each day: User:Jitse_Niesen/goim. Here, listed are new math articles in the list of mathematical topics and list of mathematicians, new requests for math articles, fulfilled requests for math articles, articles in need of attention/on vfd, etc.
I believe this page should be a very useful resource for math articles editors (that is, us). I would suggest adopting this page to the project, that is, renaming it to Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/recent changes or something, but I can't come up with a good name.
Any ideas of what else such a page can contain or what other things itchy bot writers like Jitse and me could do to improve the math wikiproject? Oleg Alexandrov 00:41, 5 August 2005 (UTC)
To write the script would be very easy. It will not be a bot, rather a perl script analyzing all the math articles which I have stored locally on my machine (and I have all of the articles in the list of mathematical topics, updated daily). But I am not myself sure how helpful that would be. The total number of pairs would be in the tens of thousands. Maybe we should sleep on this idea for a while, and wonder if anything useful will come up. Oleg Alexandrov 00:05, 6 August 2005 (UTC)
hi I'm just wondering if there are math(s) project pages like this in other languages? It sounds like a lot of people who hang around here actually are quite multilingual. I speak only English (and a pathetic amount of mandarin chinese). Dmharvey Talk 01:28, 5 August 2005 (UTC)
Could an admin exchange Random Access Machine and Random access machine for me, please? Thanks, -- R.Koot 02:40, 5 August 2005 (UTC)
Another one: Mathematical reviews should go to Mathematical Reviews as it is the title of a journal, see Talk:Mathematical reviews. -- Jitse Niesen ( talk) 12:25, 7 August 2005 (UTC)
EXTRAPOLATION METHOD I would be grateful if the mathenaticians would be kind enough to look at my extrapolation method on www.AIDSCJDUK.info to determine whether it is suitable for a link from Wikipedia. Copy of earlier E-mails with Wiki. are below. Edward G. Collier MBCS CITP
Unfortunately, it seems that one cannot paste E-mails into this area. My method was devised in 1987 and wasexplained in detail at a Royal Statistical Society special meeting on AIDS forecasting that year. It was briefly written up in the Jornal of that Society Vol 151 Part 1 1988 Although the professors, statisticians and epidemiologists present also explained their proposed methods, my simple (but not simplistic) mathod was the only one that ever produced any viable forecasts and is still being used today as can be seen from the web site. I also have used the method for several years in forecasting variant CJD in the UK. The SEAC sub-committee with responsibility for overseeing the progress of vCJD asked me to get the method published. However, the various mathematical bodies and journals that I approached declined to publish it as I had no references. As a retired engineer and not an academic, I had no way of finding appropriate references and in any case I had not referred to any as the idea came into my own head. I am sure that there are many people who could make use of the method - even in control engineering- if you can publicise it in the excellent Wikipedia. Thank you, Edward G. Collier Edwardhfd@aol.com
As some of you have noticed, partly in honor of Jitse's great new Current activity page — way to go Jitse! — I have created a new section on the project page to list and describe the various project subpages. I know they are all mentioned somewhere else on the page, but I thought it would be good to also list them together. At any rate that got me to thinking about these pages:
Should these also be subpages of this project? I could see some benefit to bringing these all under one banner so to speak. Paul August ☎ 17:38, August 6, 2005 (UTC)
|
I agree with Paul and Jitse about naming it Wikipedia:Manual of Style (mathematics). By the way, I truly hope that the fat style template to the right will not make its way in our manual of style, it is just so long, and not so helpful (for example, why would we need in our manual of style a link to how to write China-related articles).
Oh, and we can make the shortcut WP:MSM point to the new location, to save some typing when referring to it. Oleg Alexandrov 20:30, 8 August 2005 (UTC)
Moved. Oleg Alexandrov 20:37, 9 August 2005 (UTC)
Blahtex 0.2.1 has been released. It now compiles and runs on Linux thanks to Jitse Niesen.
Jitse has had some initial success with integrating blahtex into mediawiki: check it out.
Source code, online demo and samples here.
More info and bug reports at m:Blahtex.
Dmharvey Talk 01:53, 9 August 2005 (UTC)
I was editing the *-algebra, B*-algebra, C*-algebra etc. pages for consistency of style and I noticed some pages had <sup> tags around the * in these expressions, thus giving (e.g.) C* rather than C*. This looks horrible (and increases leading) on my browser (Netscrape 7) and the majority of pages didn't have it, so I took out those I found. But I assume someone had a reason for putting them in: is there any browser for which this looks better? Our proposed style guide should address this one way or the other. (This is different from the superscripting issues discussed at Wikipedia:How to write a Wikipedia article on Mathematics already because it relies on the * character appearing superscripted by default.)
And while I'm here: our preferred spelling seems to be C*-algebra (not C* algebra, C-star algebra, C star algebra, etc.) The exception is that our page on *-algebras is currently at star-algebra. Is there any reason for this, for example, is it usually spelled this way in the literature? — Blotwell 04:58, 9 August 2005 (UTC)
I wrote the section on morphisms in the article on projective spaces, and it occurred to me that while using the language of category theory to describe maps between projective spaces is extremely convenient, it might be off-putting for the undergrad who's never studied any category theory, and just wants to know about projective spaces. - Lethe | Talk 07:13, August 9, 2005 (UTC)
But the thing is, for the example I'm thinking of, there aren't "two versions". I just say "in the category of ____ the morphisms are ____". there really isn't any category theory there that can be separated out. just some terminology that can be used or not used. - Lethe | Talk 22:07, August 9, 2005 (UTC)
I've requested that markup be added to simplify entering sub and superscript at Bug 3080. It's just TeX markup with mandatory brackets. I think it will clean up the markup and be a lot easier to type than HTML.
Examples:
x^{3}
→ x3 (powers)CO_{2}
→ CO2 (carbon dioxide symbol)1^{st}
→ 1st (ordinals)^{2}H_{2}O
→ 2H2O (isotopes)I can't think of anything this would conflict with, can you? Vote for it if you like it. Suggest a different syntax if you don't. Other syntaxes were suggested, which I really don't like. - Omegatron 19:39, August 9, 2005 (UTC)
FWIW, I like it, seems like a good idea. As to the stray-markup issue, what about articles that contain sample source code? I thought I saw an article that showed how to compute factorials in 18 different programming languages. linas 00:00, 10 August 2005 (UTC)
Testing testing 12 3<sup>4</sup> 5^{6} 7^{8}
I've expanded the article with information about the algorithm itself, and some detail about the proof. I'm not happy with the look of the <math> sections though - this is my first attempt at a significant amount of mathematical markup - so some help in cleanup would be appreciated.
Eventually this article should probably include the full algorithm in programming terms (rather than only in mathematical terms), and describe the complete proof. But I need to learn a bit more about finite fields and group theory before I can hope to do that myself.
As far as I can see, the only markup forcing things to PNG are the use of \sqrt(r) and \equiv. Hv 13:39, 10 August 2005 (UTC)
I am proposing moving Inclusion (mathematics) to Inclusion map. For my reasons and how I plan to go about it see Talk:Inclusion (mathematics). If you have any thoughts on this move please comment on that talk page. Thanks. Paul August ☎ 18:42, August 10, 2005 (UTC)
Over at the Talk:Space#On arranging stuff in this article page there's a discussion about whether the section on Mathematics and space could be rewritten to contain a brief summary of how space works in maths, as at the moment it is pretty much a list of links. Could someone take a look at Space, which it is hoped will be a big picture article taking in the various uses of the concept of space, and see if work can be done on the Mathematics and space section. Thanks for any help or thoughts. Hiding talk 07:58, 11 August 2005 (UTC)
The article Mathematics and God is up for deletion. I voted to keep, here's the VfD page: Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Mathematics and God. — Paul August ☎ 19:36, August 11, 2005 (UTC)
I created Category:Mathematician Wikipedians as a subcategory in Category:Wikipedians by profession and categorized myself in there. Company is welcome. :) Oleg Alexandrov 23:28, 11 August 2005 (UTC)
Will people list themselves there or can anyone list them there? If the former, the list may be so incomplete as to be useless. Michael Hardy 21:28, 18 August 2005 (UTC)
There must be only one. If we do not merge these now, someone will do it later and more clumsily, and with much more work. There seems to be no standard, and Category:Wikipedian mathematicians is more idiomatic to my ear, so I propose we use that one. Septentrionalis 14:01, 19 August 2005 (UTC)
According to this, WP is not a directory. However, many categories for Wikipedians already exist. Since all the listings appear to be voluntary ones, I have no further comment on the subject. Oleg: Sorry about the misinterpretation. =) -- Kooky | Talk 22:32, 19 August 2005 (UTC)
OK, I moved myself to Category:Wikipedian mathematicians. If more people feel to prefer this one, we will need to nominate Category:Mathematician Wikipedians for deletion and move the other people in there to Category:Wikipedian mathematicians. Oleg Alexandrov 05:48, 20 August 2005 (UTC)
I've now nominated Category:Mathematician Wikipedians for deletion. Note that the yokels don't seem too happy about the other page either (as per Koooky's comment above). -- stochata 15:34, 26 August 2005 (UTC)
I would like to announce that I have nominated Jitse for adminship, and I am here shamelessly encouraging everyone to vote (in support I hope ;-). To vote or comment go here: Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/Jitse Niesen. — Paul August ☎ 16:58, August 12, 2005 (UTC)
Maynard Handley has put up a wiki demonstrating some improvements he has made to the LaTeX => PNG rendering process.
With his permission I offer you the URL: http://name99.org/wiki99/. It will disappear within about a week so check it out soon.
In my opinion, some of the improvements are great (Wikipedia should definitely use them), some are so-so, and some are, let's say, ambitious.
I'd like to hear some opinions. Dmharvey Talk 21:39, 12 August 2005 (UTC)
The aforementioned article is up for deletion. Uncle G 15:42:27, 2005-08-16 (UTC)
I've added a new section: "Mathematics featured articles" to the project page. I might expand it a bit with some information on "Featured articles" and the FAC process. It might also be nice to track down and add the date when each article became an FA. Comments? Paul August ☎ 18:48, August 16, 2005 (UTC)
Ok I've made some changes to the "featured articles" section. In particular I:
Paul August ☎ 20:28, August 18, 2005 (UTC)
I'm new here, and I'd like clarification about use of mathematical notation, specifically in set theory and mathematical logic. For example, my new stub of Transitive set uses the ∈ (∈) symbol, which the guidelines suggest should be replaced by the text "is in". Arthur Rubin 00:29, 17 August 2005 (UTC)
I've been trying to improve on what Maynard Handley did with the PNGs.
There are still severe problems (mostly relating to Windows), and it's not good enough for deployment, but I think it's starting to get somewhere, and I'd appreciate some opinions.
Check out User:Dmharvey/Inline_PNG_discussion.
Dmharvey Talk 17:15, 17 August 2005 (UTC)
Could an admin move Menelaus theorem to Menelaus' theorem? Note that the page's principal author User:Tokek has left a note on talk:Menelaus theorem regarding the choice of title, but as I read it it doesn't seem that Tokek would find this change objectionable. — Blotwell 06:57, 20 August 2005 (UTC)
Yesterday I removed with my bot framed boxes around formulas wherever I could find them. I mean, boxes of the form:
This is a theorem, or a formula.
I based my reasoning on the discussions at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Mathematics/Archive10#Dotted_framebox_around_formulas and Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Mathematics/Archive6#A_little_note_on_using_purple_dotted_boxes but Paul rightly pointed out that a preliminary discusion would have been good. So, belately, I wonder, what do people think of these boxes? Thanks. Oleg Alexandrov 18:46, 20 August 2005 (UTC)
Hi all, I am a non-member dropping by to alert you all to an ongoing VfD discussion.
The issue is: which mathematicians should have biographies in the Wikipedia? I think a simple and common sense rule of thumb (the title is a joke; of course I don't expect a mathematically precise criterion) should be:
I am no doubt hardly the first to point out that with thousands of person obtaining a Ph.D. in math every year, and gadzillions of math professors around the world, and tens of thousands of members of SIAM, AMS, MAA, and other mathematical societies around the world, simply earning a Ph.D. or publishing some research papers probably shouldn't qualify one for a biography.
Here is a more bizarre possibility: suppose the article claims that M is notable because he won the Y Prize, it should link to the formal English language Y prize citation for M. If that doesn't exist (in English), at the Y Foundation website, and if there is no other grounds for M's alleged notability, I question whether M should have an entry in the English language Wikipedia.
No, I didn't make that up. This is exactly the argument some nonmathematician made in a VfD. (Quick now: has anyone here ever heard of the Zois Prize? Before reading the preceding sentence?)
Yesterday, I happened across several biographies listed in Category:Algebraic graph theory which I think violate my simple rule:
I have nominated them for deletion as non-notable. I think the first two are clear cases, the third maybe a bit less clear. Just to be clear, in each case, I would be equally happy with either of the following outcomes:
I hope many of you will drop by those pages and vote one way or the other, but I'd also like to see any comments on the bigger issue raised in the subject line: how can one characterize which mathematicians are notable?
In retrospect, I probably should have considered trying to contact authors/editors of these articles before making my VfD nominations. Has anyone had some good experiences along these lines to share? Or advice on how to proceed if a similar situation arises in the future?
Someone raised another issue: these three men all happen to appear on a List of Slovenian mathematicians, so there might be some, er, patriotic rationale for creating these biographies. I don't want to get involved in Balkan politics, so I'd just say that I did recognize one name on that list, Josef Stefan, and I would certainly agree that Stefan is notable and should have a biography here. I'd like to see the others include an explanation of some clearly notable mathematical accomplishment, or else I think they should probably go.--- CH (talk) 21:50, 22 August 2005 (UTC)
Oh dear: to forestall misunderstanding, of course I did not mean to imply that whether or not I recognize a name is an adequate criterion for mathematical notability. But if none of the members of this project know anything about mathematician M, and the biography doesn't help, I would say that biography should probably go.
Another thing: I overlooked another name I recognize: Josip Plemelj. Ironic I missed that, because I am gearing up to write about something he was involved with.--- CH (talk) 22:04, 22 August 2005 (UTC)
P.S. Someone commented in the VfD to the effect that the fact that some towering figure doesn't yet have a biography, while some lesser figures already have ones, is not by itself grounds for deleting anything. I agree; clearly, Wikipedia's growth is haphazard so this will be a not infrequent occurrence. The balance issue raised in these three cases goes far beyond that, I think, but all I am really trying to say is that, IMO, the average reader of a biography on Wikipedia should not be left with serious doubt that the subject is indeed notable, as I was after reading these three biographies. Again, I'd be happy if someone who knows more than I do about them can convince me I am wrong by telling us all (by expanding the biographies) about some clearly notable accomplishment. But some prize I have never heard of? Doesn't help me. Some very rough analogies (not very serious):
(I should confess that I don't know much at all about baseball, I'm just trying to, er, play along with a favoriate analogy among Wikipedians.)--- CH (talk) 23:58, 22 August 2005 (UTC)
JYolkowski has suggested several times (if I understand him correctly) that the mere verifiability of stated facts in an biography is sufficient grounds for keeping it (see my talk page). This doesn't make sense to me: name person X, birthdate, and birthplace, and someone can probably verify that information. Does that alone qualify X for inclusion? I think it should be rather the notable substance of stated facts (or lack thereof) which qualifies X (or not) for having a biography here.
I seem to be trying to summarize, er, notable comments recieved elsewhere. I have to take the blame for this. Due to the accidental way I got into this (and my inexperience in Wiki discussions of this kind), various useful (or bizarre) comments are now scattered over the talk pages of the three articles, my user talk page, and the vfd pages. Sorry for the confusion!--- CH (talk) 00:35, 23 August 2005 (UTC)
Jitse actually found the citation (in Slovenian, I guess) of some obscure award to Marusic :-) So I did the obvious thing and awarded the very first Biographical Barnstar for Brain-numbingly Obscure Web Research to Jitse Niesen. Congrajulations, Jitse! This is such an obscure award that until a few minutes ago it didn't even come with a bronze plated pewter star. But you can verify that Jitse won it!-- just look here! Anyway, if some kind person can translate this well enough, maybe I will change my own vote. Even better, said kind person can add a description (in English) of Marusic's notable achievement in the original article.--- CH (talk) 01:02, 23 August 2005 (UTC)
OK, some anon has translated the now notorious Zois prize citation of Marusic, which led me to guess that if he is internationally recognized, some papers by him would appear in a review paper I happened to have at hand. This turned out to be the case, so I changed my own vote in the VfD to a lukewarm keep.
I'd like to try to summarize a few more valuable points which came up:
Paul August: up above I think I expressed my take on inclusion; fine by me as long as it doesn't intrude upon the learning experience of the generic user. My concern is to keep that from happening. A mixture of discouraging cruft (hopefully by the art of gentle persuasion) and segregating it is probably the best answer.
Linas: OK, I'm adding back my name, but I need to focus on the GR WikiProject at least for the rest of this year, because I promised to get some serious work done on that. Yes, I'm talking to you, and all is forgiven, but Linas, I really hope that in the future, you in particular will pay attention to clues that you might be getting on my nerves (or keep an eye on the wikistress meter on my user page), OK? If that happens, I'm sure I'll try to tell you, so if you just remember to be a good listener when interacting with me all should be fine.--- CH (talk) 22:27, 23 August 2005 (UTC)
I have a question/problem/something-I-don't-understand that has been bugging me for years. I have posted it at the bottom of Talk:Infinity. Thank you already to Paul August. -- Lord Voldemort (Dark Mark) 17:20, 23 August 2005 (UTC)
There have been some rather strange edits to Galois theory in the last few weeks, all emanating from IP address 64.136.26.235, just deletions of large random chunks of text. What is especially odd is that this IP address appears to be making genuine edits to other articles. Any ideas? Dmharvey Talk 18:49, 25 August 2005 (UTC)
Take a look at Tav (number). Is this valid? Salvageable? The original article is credited to an IP (which has no other math-related edits), and subsequent edits by others have left the basic text unchanged. Obviously, this article needs either a rewrite or deletion. — Nowhither 13:50, 26 August 2005 (UTC)
The notations used by the cluster of articles close to sigma-algebra are inconsistent with one-another; I'd like to fix this, but only after some agreement on a unified notation. Please see Talk:Sigma-algebra for details. linas 13:58, 26 August 2005 (UTC)
Almost a million (well, nearly) pages still point to sheaf rather than to the moved sheaf (mathematics). There were good reasons not to move it. Charles Matthews 20:33, 26 August 2005 (UTC)
Agree to move it back to sheaf. Oleg Alexandrov 16:03, 27 August 2005 (UTC)
Some of you may remember that in August 2003 a user began adding a huge number of missing math topics to Requested articles. There were well over a thousand requests added, but through the labour of our math people all but seven of them have now been filled. These last few requests are now listed on Articles requested for more than two years. Since they have taken so long to be filled they are probably very obscure and difficult to write about, and certainly need some expert knowledge. It would be great if some math people could take a look at Articles requested for more than two years and try to clear these final relics. - SimonP 23:28, August 26, 2005 (UTC)
I've just made a comment on the category deletion pages for Category:Mathematician Wikipedians about a Math version of the Babel project. Then I realised it's actually only an extension of the Babel project. Below are some sample categories for discussion, and we could make up a pretty box template like the babblers:
If we preferred it could be a proper equivalent of Babel, where statisticians, applied mathematicians and pure mathematicians have their own boxes, and people like me can be Pure Math-1! -- stochata 11:12, 27 August 2005 (UTC)
The article sigma additivity used to be a redirect to measure (mathematics). As part of the PlanetMath Exchange project I copied over the article "additive" to sigma additivity, replacing the redirect. User:Blotwell is now suggesting that sigma additivity be merged into measure (mathematics). I feel like the topic is deserving of its own article, but this is not my area of expertise, (not that I have one ;-) and I would appreciate if other knowledgeable editors could help decide what the best thing to do is. Please comment here. Thanks — Paul August ☎ 19:21, August 27, 2005 (UTC)
As part of working on categorizing articles copied from PlanetMath — the PlanetMath Exchange project, I noticed that there might be a need for more math categories from subjects listed in the Mathematics Subject Classification (2000 edition). Here's the categories I have in mind:
I am aware that the Mathematics Subject Classification is not directly applicable to Wikipedia math articles, still, probably it can give some inspiration. I am most uneasy about the global analysis and analysis on manifolds thing. Any suggestions and discussion of the above are very welcome. Oleg Alexandrov 22:57, 27 August 2005 (UTC)
(I changed the list to a numbered one, to make referring to it easier). I think (1) and (2) should be under ring theory, as I find it hard to see there being enough articles to justify addiational catergories. Similarly for (3) - I don't think there's enough articles to justify additional catergories. For (4), it seems the seqeunce catergory is broadly equivilant to the catergory you suggest putting it under. On the other hand, I definately agree with doing (5) as you suggested. It is important to remember that the MSC classification is designed to classify maths papers, not maths itself. Tompw 11:50, 28 August 2005 (UTC)
I raised this question on Talk:Fibonacci number a while back, but didn't get any comments, and since this also concerns other articles, I'll bring it up here. The Fibonacci number article uses the notation F(n), but my impression is that Fn is far more common in other works (both versions are used more or less randomly around Wikipedia). Which one should it be? Consistency would be desirable. Fredrik | talk 18:56, 28 August 2005 (UTC)
Both notations are common and should be defined. F(n) notation is better for complex expressions such as F(n-3) or worse I think. For simple expressions I prefer F_n though.-- MarSch 16:01, 30 August 2005 (UTC)
Hello all - In the interest of standardizing and growing wikipedia's coverage of game theory, I have started a WikiProject on game theory. We could use some mathematicians help over there. (For instance, we could use an article on the Kakutani fixed point theorem which is used in the proof of the existence of Nash equilibria.) I hope that some folks will come join in! --best, kevin ··· Kzollman | Talk··· 02:22, August 30, 2005 (UTC)
I've templatized the math FAs, although thanks to Paul it doesn't add much :) Any ideas about this? -- MarSch 15:41, 30 August 2005 (UTC)
There is an interesting thread at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#Math equations to plain english. Oleg Alexandrov 19:02, 30 August 2005 (UTC)
Based on the feedback above, I created a table listing how Wikipedia categories are in correspondence with the AMS Mathematics Subject Classification. Again, this is needed for automatic categorization of articles imported from PlanetMath but would be a curious thing to look at in general. See link at User:Mathbot/Wikipedia categories and AMS MSC classification. Any feedback welcome. Oleg Alexandrov 23:22, 30 August 2005 (UTC)
There is a discussion going at Talk:Boolean algebra about rewriting it, or perhaps writing a new article. Several people think the article is too technical and difficult to understand, and User:Plugwash (who says he doesn't understand the current article at all) has made an attempt at rewriting it & mdash; that has been reverted (by me!). Please join in the discussion ;-) Paul August ☎ 17:12, August 31, 2005 (UTC)
It is my personal belief that all of the "product" articles collectively are in a confusing and sorry shape. Some things are misnamed, some articles have no apparent reason for their content organisation, other things aren't clarified enough, etc. At the heart of the matter seems to be a failure to organise, name, and clarify topics by keeping in mind their category theory meaning. This doesn't mean you have to know category theory to understand anything, but category theory does point a clear direction of how things should be organised, and it's not the direction we're going.
There are 4 major ideas going on in all these articles, based on 2 criteria with 2 options each: first, product or coproduct/sum; second, external or internal. That makes
A lot of things are named "sum" that are really products, and a few things that are "internal" aren't clearly identified that way (so could be confused with the "default" external case). For example, direct sum of groups is not about the (external) direct sum, or free product, it's actually about the internal weak direct products of groups. Also, in many cases, you can form the product/sum like you do the sum/product, as objects, but it's not a universal object. Similarly, you can take the "abelian" sum of arbitrary groups, but it's not universal. This is sometimes called the "weak direct product" or "restricted direct product". This distinction between what is an object and what actually is universal is missing in many places. You don't have to mention it directly, but it seems it should guide the presentation. Revolver 21:01, 31 August 2005 (UTC)