Please see Wikipedia:Featured_list_candidates#Nominations.
I have nominated list of lists of mathematical topics (not to be confused with list of mathematical topics) to be a featured list. Please go to that nomination page to vote for or against it. Michael Hardy 01:22, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Again: why are the latex images so big anyway? I generally have my browser text set pretty large, yet the latexs still often look rather silly. Is there some kind of preference setting to adjust the rendering size? If not, is it technically possibly for somebody to do that? Dmharvey 17:45, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)
OK, let's try something:
Consider the integral which is blah blah blah .....
(1) Look at this here equation: So there!
(2) Look at this here equation: AX2 + B = 0. So there!
(3) This renders all right: So ereht!
I generally use the format (2) rather than (1) for two reasons: the math notation in (1) is ridiculously too big, and it gets mis-aligned. Possibly this could be overcome by using a different browser or altering my preferences. I have long said that TeX looks good on Wikipedia when it is "displayed", but often looks terrible when embedded in lines of text. Note also: 1+2 does not look as good as 1 + 2; n + 2 is better than n + 2; and also better than n + 2. Michael Hardy 00:57, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)
(3) looks exactly identical to (1) from my browser. Michael Hardy 01:43, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)
<span class="texhtml"><i>A</i><i>X</i><sup>2</sup> + <i>B</i> = 0.</span>
Interestingly, the font in the TeX output is smaller on Wikicities. See example at [1]. Would this look better on Wikipedia? One problem is that it may be harder to read. - Fredrik | talk 01:49, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)
For me, the LaTeX images are slightly smaller than the surrounding text. But then, I'm using a 12pt font at 132DPI. Since most Windows boxes are at 96DPI (since a lot of Windows programs look weird if you try to change it), I can see how it can look huge. -- cesarb 02:23, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)
You will never get text in images and text not in images to mesh well for everyone. Saying it should be done one way or another because "it looks better" is just nonsense. It looks better to you on your screen, maybe; that says nothing about how it looks to everyone else. (BTW, I must interject at this point that the font used in the TeX images changed several months ago and I really preferred the old font!) The best solution, perhaps, would be to add a preference setting to scale LaTeX images to a (user-) specified relative size — for example, "80%" or "110%", etc. — so that each user could, if they cared, have the images scaled to match the size of the regular text in their own browser (I guess this would also have to include a vertical-shift option, as well, if that's possible to implement). The only problems I can see with this plan would be: (1) server load, since every (TeX) image would have to be tagged with height and width calculated using the user's scaling preference; and (2) readability since some browsers probably have terrible algorithms for scaling images. - dcljr ( talk) 11:11, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)
(3) is the best, because I think using images for any kind of text is not a good thing to do.-- Reubot 10:19, 5 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Thanks everyone for your comments and examples. I think I now understand a little better why this is such a complicated issue.
I have a question: how good is MathML at rendering inline equations (as opposed to displayed equations)? Does it handle things as well as LaTeX, like line wrapping?
Dmharvey Talk 12:56, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I think the previous suggestion of a user-definable relative size attribute is quite nice. Note also that CSS (I don't know if this is true for "old style HTML attribs") allows for sizes given in "ex", e.i. the height of an "x" in the current font. maybe this could also used to fix the problem. But I also agree that (maybe unless you have a 1600x1200 screen, which is still rather exceptional - maybe wiki has statistics on screen resolution...) the images are always way too big w.r.t. the text, so a fix should definetly be provided. (Maybe also alternate style files (at worst through user prefs) could allow to cope with this issue.) — MFH: Talk 22:32, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I would really like to know your opinion on what these articles should be about. Since the tangent bundle is basically the collection of vector fields, it would be useful to make it clear what info should go where. -- MarSch 14:26, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)
So what is happening there? The tag has been taken down from tensor, which was current. I don't see another nomination has been made. Charles Matthews 16:00, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I'm sorry if this is the wrong place, but I wonder if there's copyright on proofs? Can I copy some proof from my lecture notes (in my own words)? Hugo 08:30, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC) (Moved from Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Proofs by Oleg Alexandrov)
There are some interesting discussions going on at Wikipedia talk:How to write a Wikipedia article on Mathematics. I believe as many of us should be involved in that as possible, as that article is the main document defining how math is to be written. So, comments welcome. Oleg Alexandrov 22:25, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)
According to newly created polygon sum conjecture article,
I almost put it in Category:Conjectures, when I realized conjectures in elementary geometry do not happen that often... :)
Anyway, see Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Polygon sum conjecture. Oleg Alexandrov 01:21, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Dear all, I have added the fascinating fact concerning e^(pi sqrt(163)) to the article on complex multiplication. It doesn't really fit very well at the moment, but hopefully one day that will change. The only reason I mention this here is that I'm not sure if this formula appears anywhere else in WP, perhaps it is already stated elsewhere. Thanks peoples. Dmharvey Talk 01:32, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)
(copied from the talk page of Charles. This is an interesting discussion, and I wonder what others would like to say Oleg Alexandrov 04:37, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC))
I am wondering what your opinion is of the possible long-term future of maths in wikipedia? In particular, do you think that wikipedia (or some other wiki-based medium) has the capacity to (eventually) become an authoritative source on well-understood material? I guess 'authoritative' and 'well-understood' are somewhat rubbery terms. For an arbitrary starting point, perhaps 'well-understood' might mean "material that has made it into book form by 2005", and 'authoritative' might mean that a professional mathematician might consider making WP their first port of call for learning material they are unfamiliar with. I appreciate your insight, you seem to have had a lot of experience on WP. Dmharvey 17:21, 30 May 2005 (UTC)
WP can do some good, no question. Trying to audit quite how much progress is interesting, taxing and sometimes chastening. The first five years, for mathematics, is going to look like 10000 pages with much 'core' material. Chronologically the solid coverage can get us into the 1950s, mostly; but not past 1960. I would project, that in 2010 it would look more like 1970 rather than 1960; and even that is ambitious and would require much more expertise in the 'rarer' topics (algebraic geometry and topology, for example) than we currently command. I'm quite upbeat, but it is still very easy to find the gaps. Charles Matthews 10:13, 31 May 2005 (UTC)
As far as I'm concerned, I'm not saying anything private - go ahead, Paul. Charles Matthews 15:27, 31 May 2005 (UTC)
Wow, yes, agree with both Charles and Dmharvey. Realistically speaking, WP has huge gaps in just about any topic, and will need to grow at least 50-fold to fill these gaps in. It will take many many years for this to happen. But I also agree with Dmharvey in that it seeems inevitable that WP will become the authoritative reference in a decade if not sooner; its already beyond mathworld.com in many areas.
But please note that we will have to tackle many serious structural issues first; and if these are not solved, then it will make growth harder. For example: Charles "survey" articles are already outnumbered by more "mundane" articles that mostly list facts. (I myself generate "mundane" articles because I'm not knowledgable enough to write surveys in any but a few fields, and those fields bore me...). I would like to see some system that somehow makes the survey articles more visible, more prominent. They tend to be lost in the mire.
I don't know how to fix this. Maybe have different classes of articles? This is kind of like the "proofs" discussion, but in reverse. With proofs, the problem is how to hide this third-tier material so that it doesn't impede article flow. With "survey articles", the problem is how to highlight them above and beyond the rest of the bulk.
Note also the existing tension between "simple" and "advanced" treatments of the same material is going to get worse. We'll need to devise some mechanism for dealing with this, as I wonder if the current ad-hoc approach can last. I've had Oleg delete some of my edits because they were too advanced, I've had Fropuff delete some of my edits because they were too trivial. I'm not complaining, I'm rather trying to make note that this is a potential problem area that will recur in WP and is worthy of attention. linas 00:19, 4 Jun 2005 (UTC)
In the context of Wikipedia, I think I have come to the opinion that the issues being discussed do not really raise any problems.
Suppose that we have an article X that discusses topic Y. There are lots of people who might end up looking at page X. A priori, they might be arriving there with a huge range of different levels of mathematical experiences. However, I claim that the gap between
is actually not that large. It may seem large, but there's some kind of "logarithmic scale" operating here. I think it is possible to have a well-written introduction that can simultaneously branch off to cover many different levels of pre-experience. Obviously, not everyone will be able to write that introduction, since some people simply don't have the background to see it all in context. But, almost by definition, someone will have that context, and will (eventually) supply it. Dmharvey Talk 11:34, 4 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I would also like to mention something else about "authoritativeness" of WP. It seems to be widely acknowledged that there are issues with reliability in WP, and that this seems an insurmountable barrier to WP becoming useful to the academic community (in the present discussion, the academic mathematical community). I agree with the first half of the sentence but not the second half. Something can be useful even if it's inaccurate. And it seems that WP has a strong tendency to become more accurate over time, at least on topics that are not too sparsely covered. In the real world, no one source is enough anyway. When I want to learn about a maths topic I don't know much about, I don't just get a book out of the library. If I really want to learn something, I get at least three books or journal articles, and talk to my colleagues, asking them what their point of view is on the whole subject area, and where they think is a good place to read about it. Dmharvey Talk 11:34, 4 Jun 2005 (UTC)
On the other hand, on the more general topic of "long-term future of mathematics in WP", I have some other concerns. My first concern regards typesetting. I summarise by saying that in the present situation, I don't think WP has sufficiently sophisticated typesetting for serious mathematical work. This may become a long term problem, because one important group of people we would like to attract to write articles, serious mathematicians, will be put off by something that visually looks amateurish. For those who don't believe me, I suggest trying to write a complete paper in LaTeX. It's incredible how LaTeX is able to make even completely incoherent babble look like the most brilliant piece of mathematics written since the 16th century. This might improve if browsers improve, I'm not sure.
A second concern is that there are other interesting things that a WP-like system could conceivably do, but which the current software does not support. For example, it would be lovely for WP to support a parallel development of some kind of formal proof system; i.e. symbolic manipulation software where people could enter formal proofs which are checked automatically for correctness. I don't believe such a system exists yet, except in fairly primitive forms. I think there have been a fair number of attempts, but I haven't heard of any that have scaled up well. I think in time, the collaborative nature of something like WP will solve the scaling-up problem. Then, if you believe the axioms that the system is founded on, and you believe that WP is doing its proof checking correctly, then you can be happy that the theorem you are looking at is OK. (Please don't take this paragraph too seriously; there are ENORMOUS problems, both theoretical and practical, with automated proof systems, and I just wanted to throw it up as a random thought.)
OK I've really chewed up enough bandwidth now. Dmharvey Talk 11:34, 4 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Dear peoples, I have spent quite a number of hours the last few days working on Wallpaper groups. It looks almost completely different now, and I hope it is an improvement.
The only thing I plan to do with it for the next few days is finish labelling the pretty pictures. Apart from that it is in all of your capable hands.
Then I need to take a break from wikipedia, so I can do some other things.
I will return in a few weeks.
Dmharvey Talk 17:09, 4 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I've just come across a nice template slapped onto talk pages of chemistry ({{ chemistry}}):
WikiProject on Chemistry | This article is supported by the WikiProject on Chemistry, which gives a central approach to Chemistry and related subjects on Wikipedia. Please participate by editing the article WikiProject Mathematics/Archive/2005/Jun-Jul, or visit the project page for more details on the projects. |
Should/do we want to have something similar? Might bring more people to the project. -- MarSch 18:06, 5 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Personally, I hate banners. Ditto for topic templates, and such. I suggest that you just watch a lot of pages. If you see the same person making good edits on a number of pages, invite them here. I made hundreds of edits before I even bothered to look at this page, and am deeply suspicious of anyone who would be interested in process who hadn't been an active editor first. linas 04:16, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)
There is a proposal at Talk:List of lists of mathematical topics to reformat that list according to subdivisions of math. Comments welcome. Oleg Alexandrov 19:51, 5 Jun 2005 (UTC)
There has been a recent addition to Pythagorean theorem by 67.86.108.32 which although appears to be in good faith, I feel is unnecessary. I tried for a while to think of a way to rephrase it so that it would fit, but eventually decided it just shouldn't be there. What's the best thing to do in a case like that? Thanks Dmharvey Talk 11:59, 6 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Write to the talk page explaining your reasoning and why you're going to delete it. Then be bold and delete it. Be firm but polite. If the editor clarifies or suggests alternative wording, be reasonable. -- Tony Sidaway| Talk 12:45, 6 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Is my brain broken, or is this theorem just silly? It seems to be saying that the definition of the carmichael function is, in fact, identical to the definition of the carmichael function. Surely the theorem should instead say something like, "the recursive formula given for the carmichael function is correct, i.e. satisfies the property alluded to in carmichael's theorem"? Really these should go into the same article with a redirect on one of them. (And then one day I'll write something about larger examples of carmichael numbers, and of its relevance to primality testing, and fix up some nasty markup.) Dmharvey Talk 23:57, 6 Jun 2005 (UTC)
(NOT to be confused with list of mathematical topics)
User:Samohyl Jan has completely re-written this list of lists, with some input from me as well.
Please vote on list of lists of mathematical topics at Wikipedia:Featured_list_candidates#Nominations. Michael Hardy 00:23, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)
What about a specialized wikify template for mathematics articles? This might make it easier to keep our to-do-lists recent. See also the discussion at TFD about some of these templates: Wikipedia:Templates_for_deletion#Template:Foo-wikify -- MarSch 10:58, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I nominated topic-based vector space model for deletion because this is a method proposed in a paper in 2003 (see the external link in the article), so it is very new and too early to say if it is proeminent. So I think it is not yet something to be included in an encyclopedia. But I am not 100% sure. I wonder if other mathematicians would visit that article, then post their opinions on the VfD page. Oleg Alexandrov 03:37, 10 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Encouraged by User:Paul August on Talk:Aristotelian logic, I'm posting an invitation to comment on the idea for a WikiProject for Logic. I have a draft proposal at User:Chalst/WikiProject Logic proposal, and I am interested in:
Many thanks in advance for your comments. --- Charles Stewart 15:59, 10 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Related articles with similar content and unclear interrelations are the biggest problem I am facing. A mild version of this is the group, group theory combo which can usually be sorted out, although I think this has often not happened yet, but what to think about: vector (spatial), vector field, vector space, tangent bundle, tangent space, and the also to these related scalar, scalar field, tensor, tensor field, Tensor_(intrinsic_definition), Intermediate_treatment_of_tensors, Classical_treatment_of_tensors and maybe more. What I would like to know is which you think the possible content of these articles should be in. Possibly using templates subarticleof}} and seesubarticle}}. I would welcome any ideas. -- MarSch 14:00, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Yes, well, be careful. These articles treat similar topics, but not the same topic. Vector bundles are not vector spaces; and the former links to the later in the introductory sentence. Vector bundles are a kind-of fiber bundle ... I discovered early on that attempting to make large re-organizational edits can often sink a lot of time, while failing to improve quality. I'm surprised you're not sensing this yet ... Personally, I prefer smaller articles, with a given topic spread out across multiple articles, than trying to jam everything into one article. As to some repetition, that's OK, too. I'd prefer to see articles grow "organically" by accretion. After lots of accretion, they may look poor, in which case they can be restructured. However, trying to optimize content across multiple articles makes me very nervous. In particular, such a re-organization implies that you are trying to impose your world view on something that had evolved quite differently to begin with. Catholics and Protestants are both Christians, but neither would agree to the restructuring suggested by the other. linas 04:02, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I ran into this article, and don't know what to do about it. Any opinions? Oleg Alexandrov 05:25, 16 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Vector space example 1 and Vector space example 2 and Vector space example 3 are really horrid. They are complete verbosity. Maybe we should delete them. -- MarSch 15:48, 16 Jun 2005 (UTC)
The article pulation square, which in my opinion is a perfectly fine math stub, has been nominated for deletion here. Please share your thought there. Thanks. Paul August ☎ 15:30, Jun 18, 2005 (UTC)
We're currently having a brain storm on Category_talk:Physics about the following questions:
You're cordially invited. — Sebastian (talk) 07:50, 2005 Jun 20 (UTC)
An excessively original believer in this piece of social science questions the following observation, which seems trivial to me:
(... The proper odds to judge a set of data which satisfies a theory deriving its parameters from that [identical] data is the chance that the data would satisfy the theory using, not those particular parameters, but any possible parameters.)
If one of you can think of an exact source, contact me or comment on the article's talk page. Now at bottom. user:Pmanderson
So far I'm still finding this very vaguely expressed. I'm not sure what Septentrionalis a.k.a. user:Pmanderson, is trying to say. Michael Hardy 01:48, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)
<sigh>
Allright, let me say some things. I think what we are talking about here is not a theory at all, since it has no predictive power, but just a statement of fact. The fact that if you define liberal democracy so and so, then there is so and so much war. If you define it somewhat differently you may get a different picture. For an informed picture you should present a few of these statements ranging from a restrictive to a broad def. If you don't like that picture then you can leave out some data (a few statements) thereby deceiving people into thinking what you want them (and possibly yourself also) to think. This you might call fitting the parameters. Looking at a single set of parameters is surely better than this, but also leaves much to be desired, as I explained.-- MarSch 10:56, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I ran into this article today. From what I see, this article is the thoughts of a certain Andy Morton about poker posted on rec.gambling.poker ( Usenet) around 1997. It seems that his post was rather word for word pasted in this article, and that this article is not encyclopedic. How about voting it for deletion? Oleg Alexandrov 19:53, 25 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Here's another article on which input is needed. Probabilists out there, do you think this is rescuable? So far, it looks like a table of data obtained by using a paper from 1981. Oleg Alexandrov 20:13, 25 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Any objections to moving Proof of Leibniz formula to Leibniz formula and Proof of Viète formula to Viète formula? I moved Proof of Wallis product earlier, but didn't notice these two. Are there any other proof of X articles without a main X article that should be handled similarly? - Fredrik | talk 21:22, 25 Jun 2005 (UTC)
A badly written article should not be deleted, rather cleaned up. That is the conventional wisdom, but this particular article is trying my patience. Could anyboyd knowing this stuff take a look and say if this at all makes sence? Thanks. Oleg Alexandrov 22:07, 25 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Wurzel is proposing here that the imaginary unit be represented using a non-italic i, and has been changing articles accordingly. The first seven books I've just pulled from off my shelves, all use an italic i. Please share your thoughts on the appropriate talk page(s). Paul August ☎ 17:04, Jun 26, 2005 (UTC)
There's an interesting discussion going on at Talk:Derivative concerning the scope/audience of the article. I'd be interested if anyone supports what I have to say. Alternatively, if you disagree with me, please add your voice. When I hear enough I'll shut up :-) Dmharvey Talk 00:25, 27 Jun 2005 (UTC)
For those who don't know, the Mathematics Collaboration of the Week has been re-launched. Please nominate and vote for articles to focus on each fortnight. Both stubs and articles that are not stubs, but are confusing or poorly written, are acceptable. NatusRoma 29 June 2005 05:42 (UTC)
Please vote at Wikipedia:Featured picture candidates/Ford.circles.gif. The selection criterion includes the following:
and stated that merely being a spectacular picture is not a sufficient qualification. This picture will probably not be considered spectacular; it's very simple. But it can make clear to ordinary laypersons the concept explained in Ford circle that would otherwise probably be understood by few other than mathematicians. <hubris> Thus in "illustrat[ing] an ... article in such a way as to add significantly to that article" I think it excels. </hubris> Michael Hardy 30 June 2005 23:10 (UTC)
There is a proposal at Talk:Derivative#move to differentiable function to move that article to Derivative (high school version) or some other similar sounding title. The reason seems to be that the derivative article as now written is not representative about what derivative is in mathematics, rather, it focusses on the most elementary calculus definition. Comments welcome. Oleg Alexandrov 1 July 2005 02:20 (UTC)
I found this article about a rather elementary fact in number theory. Anybody heard it called that way? Google yields nothing about this particular theorem. Oleg Alexandrov 1 July 2005 03:04 (UTC)
I don't understand what the "theorem" or elementary fact aspect is. It just looks like a property possessed by three particular numbers. Can anyone elaborate? (Google no help to me either) Kinser 1 July 2005 03:50 (UTC)
I don't know if this is the right place to comment on this; please move if you know a better place.
About 3 months ago, I added an intentional error to the page about "Distribution", date/time "21:33, 31 March 2005 82.157.131.133 (→Formal definition)". Of course the type of convergence is weak, not strong. Jitse Niesen was so kind to move the error part in the text, and has been unnoticed until now.
If such a major error in a basic mathematical article can survive this long, how much errors will there be in the more advanced subjects? For me this is enough proof not to trust Wikipedia articles. Hugo 1 July 2005 11:37 (UTC)
Perhaps you might be polite enough to fix the error, now that it has been spotted, and now that the point has been made :-) (Although I see that there would be additional mileage gained by not fixing the error, since then you could point out that the error has not been fixed even after explicitly pointing it out in a discussion forum like this....)
But seriously... I agree that this is a problem, but probably not as big of a problem as you are making it out to be. You said: "For me this is enough proof not to trust Wikipedia articles." I agree: you shouldn't trust wikipedia articles. That should have been clear from the first moment you heard of the concept of wikipedia. And I don't think it is at all a non-argument to say "don't trust your sources". I genuinely believe in that argument. Trust is not black and white. It is possible to have a spectrum of trust in things you read, and a lot of it depends who wrote it and what your opinion is of them.
You also said: "With such an argument there is no need to make a precise encyclopedia." In my opinion, this is a vacuous statement; it is impossible to make a precise encyclopaedia. Precision is an ideal; I think generally wikipedians strive towards it, and they do a reasonable job, but I'm under no illusions of it being completely attained. However, it is possible to make a useful encyclopedia. And I think wikipedia is already such an object, and becomes more useful every day. An article can still be useful, even if it contains errors. (And I think most articles do not contain deliberate errors – the most insidious kind). For this reason, I still welcome your contributions, as long as the bulk of them are useful :-) Dmharvey Talk 2 July 2005 12:48 (UTC)
Lets get real. It appears that User:Hugo doesn't understand the process by which mathematics is actually done, and how research is published, much less how WP articles are written and corrected. A WP article can only be corrected when someone who is knowledgable and interested in a topic spots an error and corrects it. The error was presumably not corrected because there were no readers who were capable and interested in pursuing the particular claim. There's two ways to spot the error: one way is to be extremely knowledgable on the topic, and spot it instantly when the vandalism occurs. Clearly, there is no such person watching this article. The other way is for someone who is weak on the topic, but is interested in it, to be engaged in the processes of performing research, to eventually notice the error. Seems that was not the case, either. There is a third class of readers; those who didn't notice and didn't care. I think the above analysis shows that what Hugo really discovered is something about the quantity and type of readers of WP math articles, and not about the quality of the articles themselves.
If User:Hugo was actually performing research, and actually using WP as a source, then if there were errors in the articles that Hugo was reading, he would have eventually found them. I presume that he'd eventually find them, since I presume he double- and triple-checks his work. If not, and he publishes his work with errors and erroneous conclusions, then he is a fool, and has only himself to blame and not WP.
Ethical norms are such that anyone who is intentionally misleading, such as Hugo was, has crossed an ethical boundary, going in the wrong direction. Equally, if someone was deceived by his deceptions, they can blame Hugo. But, on the other hand, if WP contains honest mistakes (which it does), and someone is lead astray by these errors, then they are unfortunate or dumb or both. Hugo has only demonstrated that one can fool some of the people some of the time; this is hardly new.
If Hugo is interested in refereed math referneces, he should perhaps engage in thinking a bit about the WP and PlanetMath Exchange. We've talked about this here, before.
Everyone who has done research has found errors in published articles and books; some minor, some major. Errors on WP have the opportunity to be corrected, those on the printed page do not. Take a look a look at Talk:Bessel function for a real-world example of an error in a famous and highly-respected book that failed to propagate into WP. We actually have a chance to do better. linas 3 July 2005 00:04 (UTC)
I've been teaching myself how to make pretty graphs in gnuplot and maxima. Is there a guide to this somewhere? If not, there should be. I will gladly contribute what I have learned today and yesterday. See commons:Image:Weighting curves.png and commons:Image:Hilbert_transform.png for examples. - July 2, 2005 17:48 (UTC)
A guide would be great; but don't make it into a guide for gnuplot, make it rather a set of "suggested" line weights, styles, etc. for WP, and how to set those things. I note that the above graph looks very nice, whereas the gnuplot default settings look quite poor on WP. linas 2 July 2005 23:12 (UTC)
We have been trying to standardize plots for probability distributions. A summary of the latest definition of a "standardized plot" is at Template talk:probability distribution#Standard Plots. See normal distribution for an example. A basic trick is to make the plot very large, like 6000 pixels on a side, using size 48-64 font size and 17 pixel line thickness, then reduce down to about 1000 pixels on a side using bicubic interpolation. This give a plot with no jagged lines. It is, however, big enough so that someone could download it and use it for projection purposes without pixellation. The display size for the plot is about 325 pixels for the Wikipedia article. Plots are as language free as possible, and uploaded to Wikimedia commons, so that they may be used in any language version of Wikipedia. PAR 3 July 2005 00:01 (UTC)
What do people think of framing important formulas as in this example encountered at differintegral
I myself find it not very pleasing. Oleg Alexandrov 3 July 2005 01:09 (UTC)
No I can't say I like it much either. Paul August ☎ July 3, 2005 03:51 (UTC)
Not a fan. Doesn't look especially nice, plus it adds extra formatting, which I consider a Bad Thing unless absolutely necessary. Isomorphic 3 July 2005 06:18 (UTC)
I don't care for that particular example either. But as it happens, I have been mulling over introducing equationbox templates for my project of improving the General relativity articles. See the talk page for exact solutions of Einstein's field equations. I would be grateful if anyone has any ideas. Also, I just used a table in the section on Lie algebra of the Lorentz group in my new revision of the article on the Lorentz group. I think the information there is useful in an encyclopedic way, but it would be nice if the table could be shrunk a bit. This problem exhibits the problem I am having in devising equationbox templates; existing infoboxes display some kinds of data in a generally vertically stacked way, but for equations one typically needs a more horizontal array which someone avoids interrupting the main flow of text. Maybe my notion is too quioxitic to be worth pursuing, but if you have any ideas, please add them to the above cited talk page. TIA--- CH (talk) 3 July 2005 06:27 (UTC)
What do people think about the recent move of Paul Erdős to Pál Erdős? Paul August ☎ July 3, 2005 04:14 (UTC)
I can understand why Russian names are not at their original name, although they probably shold be, but I cannot understand this at all. What's worng with Pál? -- MarSch 3 July 2005 13:37 (UTC)
Anyone who publishes scientific articles is urged to choose one name, and one name only, under which to publish, so as not to confuse readers and in order to make bibliographies easier to assemble. Under what name did Paul Erdos publish? Shouldn't the article be under the name he himself chose? -- linas 3 July 2005 15:46 (UTC)
I took a quick search on MathSciNet. Everywhere I saw Paul. The only exception is
So, even the Hungarians call him Pál only to emphasize that he is their guy, while the formal name is Paul. Oleg Alexandrov 3 July 2005 16:17 (UTC)
As mentioned above, we are witnessing an attempt to revive the Mathematics Collaboration of the Week (which should probably be renamed to Collaboration of the Fortnight since it seems to run over two week periods). I am pleased that manifold was chosen to be the target of the collaboration and I'd like to invite all of you to contribute to this article. Note that we are currently rewriting the article at manifold/rewrite. Please put further comments on Talk:manifold/rewrite. -- Jitse Niesen ( talk) 4 July 2005 13:26 (UTC)
What people think of the article tangent bundle having on top the notice that it is a subarticle of differentiable manifold? Or of the planned topological manifold article being thought as a subarticle of the manifold article? I find this terminology introduced by MarSch a bit unusual. It implies that some articles are subordinate to others.
Also, I am not a native speaker of English, but doesn't the phrase
imply the former is a chunck of text contained in the latter, rather than a standalone article is it is now? Oleg Alexandrov 4 July 2005 15:43 (UTC)
With few exceptions, no article should be subordinate to any other article. I can imagine some kind of "subarticle of" relationship perhaps being useful, but I don't think it should be a hierarchical parent-child relationship. We would certainly want an article to possibly be a "subarticle of" more than one article, and perhaps even two articles to be "subarticles of" each other, both of which however run counter to the usual notion of "subness". In short I don't think it is probably a very good idea. Paul August ☎ July 4, 2005 21:06 (UTC)
Wikipedia is not heirarchal. If you start building linked lists and trees into the software through templates, you are breaking the design of Wikipedia. It has purposfully been designed NOT to be heirarchal. This discussion has been gone over many times allready in the past 4 years and there are rules against it. If you want to draw attention to another article, you do what every one else does: write it into the text of the article, explain why, and provide context for the reader.
Keep in mind, articles can be copied anywhere, in any format, including paper, it has to be assumed that the reader is not reading the article using software and a computer, and thus does not have access to links. Thats why Wikipedia style guidelines are the way they are, articles are self-contained units with no dependencies or heirarchies. Stbalbach 5 July 2005 03:11 (UTC)
Since the word subarticle seems to cause problems. What about two other templates
Please discuss at Wikipedia:Templates_for_Deletion#Other_wording -- MarSch 5 July 2005 13:41 (UTC)
I'd like to point out that there are already some projects which can be described as subprojects of this one, and to suggest some new ones:
The goal of the proposed themes of mathematics subproject could be to ensure that any reader who comes to the math pages here will be likely to encounter at least one of these "big ideas", and will be encouraged to read more about it. At present, many articles adequatley describe a concept but fail to point out that this concept exhibits certain themes, an oversight which I think should be systematically rectified. For some examples of how big ideas can be incorporated into articles, see my discussion in the talk page for the manifold/rewrite article.
Categorification seems to be a notion some mathematicians hate with a passion, but what I have in mind for the categorification subproject is something I expect we could all agree on: many articles describe concepts but fail to point out that they are examples of categorical notions, and these often arise from an attempt to capture in formal language some theme. So the categorification subproject could have two complementary goals:
By the way, the article on Thurston's classification theorem should clarify the relation with uniformitization. It should probably cite the little book by Andrew Casson.
-- CH (talk) 4 July 2005 20:41 (UTC)
Several articles on puzzles such as burr puzzle, mechanical puzzle and packing problem are up for deletion in two mass listings on VfD here and here. — Blotwell 5 July 2005 00:31 (UTC)
In a magic country far far away, there lived four templates, explaining what math is all about. They were named "quantity", "space", "change", and "structure" (note that "quantity" is actually about numbers). Here they are in full glory.
This article may be in need of reorganization to comply with Wikipedia's
layout guidelines. |
I would like to generate some discussion on whether these templates are useful, whether they should be trimmed, or even eliminated, replaced by categories. Wonder what people think. Oleg Alexandrov 03:23, 13 July 2005 (UTC)
(From talk:Transcendental number, copied here by Oleg Alexandrov 03:23, 13 July 2005 (UTC))
I nominated the templates {quantity} and {strucutre} which have a lot of articles and which are not very related, for deletion. See Wikipedia:Templates_for_deletion#Template:Quantity and Wikipedia:Templates_for_deletion#Template:Structure. Oleg Alexandrov 23:09, 14 July 2005 (UTC)
I recently saw for the first time the {{mathematics-footer}} template
in my opinion, that's all the template we need for mathematics for consistency. Right? - Lethe | Talk 03:32, July 16, 2005 (UTC)
Kill 'em all. -- Dominus 04:55, 16 July 2005 (UTC)
Well, I got embolded and nominated for deletion the other two of the four templates. See Wikipedia:Templates_for_deletion#Template:Change and Wikipedia:Templates_for_deletion#Template:Space. Oleg Alexandrov 06:43, 16 July 2005 (UTC)
Fwiw, see also {{ mathematics}}. — msh210 00:22, 26 July 2005 (UTC)
Recently I moved Infinite tree (graph theory) to Tree (set theory), because the trees in question don't have to be infinite and don't have much to do with graph-theoretic trees. For the same reasons I have proposed that the two redirects, infinite tree and infinite tree (graph theory), be deleted. -- Trovatore 04:19, 13 July 2005 (UTC)
I'm having a great argument with myself on the above-named page, and it'd be great if one/some of y'all would come referee. -- Trovatore 04:38, 15 July 2005 (UTC)
In fact please do come look at it, particularly the Alternative definition section on the Talk page. Opinions solicited on which definition is clearer/better. -- Trovatore 02:52, 16 July 2005 (UTC)
Template:Quantity and Template:Structure have both been listed for deletion at Templates for deletion. I don't know enough about mathmatical topics to know how coherent the topics are in either template, so I am requesting that some editors with some math knowledge visit TFD and offer their input to the discussion. BlankVerse ∅ 07:25, 15 July 2005 (UTC)
Hello. The article H numbers looks like original research to me. Article links to this web site [6]. Mathworld hasn't heard of H numbers and I can't find any relevant Google hits. Comments? Thanks for your help, Wile E. Heresiarch 08:32, 16 July 2005 (UTC)
I've just completed a major revision of the absolute value article. I've described the changes I've made here. I'd appreciate any comments/criticisms anyone might have. (Please respond here) And a good proofread would be greatly appreciated (my eyes now glaze over when I attempt to read it). Paul August ☎ 19:56, July 16, 2005 (UTC)
Hmm I'll have a look. I forgot to say that any comments (specific to that article) should probably be directed to that talk page. Paul August ☎ 20:58, July 16, 2005 (UTC)
It works ok for me in Safari, Firefox And IE on a MacOS 10.3. Paul August ☎ 21:02, July 16, 2005 (UTC)
Same problem in Netscape 7.1 (Windows XP). I've noted it on the talk page for the article. -- Trovatore 21:21, 16 July 2005 (UTC)
Has anybody noticed the new Category:Mathematics? -- R.Koot 19:54, 17 July 2005 (UTC)
Nice job, visually. I'm a bit concerned, though, that the formalist view is presented in a way that might suggest it's the default. This may not have been the intent, but possibly should be addressed. -- Trovatore 20:30, 17 July 2005 (UTC)
By the bye, it led me to an interesting discussion that I hadn't seen before, and I cast my "yes" votes on math being a science and emperical. See Talk:Mathematics#Is Mathematics a science? and Talk:Mathematics#Is Mathematics empirical?. -- Trovatore 20:30, 17 July 2005 (UTC)
I redirected Wikipedia:Wikiportal/Mathematics to Category:Mathematics now that the contents has been merged. I do agree that the latter is more visible, as there is a link to it from the main Wikipedia page. I also put a note on Wikipedia talk:Wikiportal/Mathematics saying that the math talk usually takes place on this page, Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mathematics, and not there. I plan to put the same note on Category talk:Mathematics. Oleg Alexandrov 17:51, 18 July 2005 (UTC)
I've put Template:MathematicsCOTW on TfD as is superseded by Template:Wikiportal:Mathematics/Opentask]. -- R.Koot 18:41, 18 July 2005 (UTC)
The definable number article is in pretty bad shape. Whatever it is that the article is talking about, it makes some true and useful assertions about--but it's very unclear what it's talking about. See the talk page. -- Trovatore 04:40, 19 July 2005 (UTC)
BTW why isn't there a template for "math accuracy disputes" or "math articles needing attention" or some such? I put the {{accuracy}} tag on it and believe I'm completely justified--but that only puts it in the "Accuracy disputes" category, where it could wait forever for a mathematician to notice it. It would be nice to put it in a more specific needs-attention category. But then again I suppose that's part of what this page is for. -- Trovatore 04:40, 19 July 2005 (UTC)
OK, I think I'm done with it for now. Anyone here who knows about forcing is invited to check my proof that it's consistent with ZFC that there are only countably many OD reals (or better, find a reference). -- Trovatore 03:10, 22 July 2005 (UTC)
The article isn't perfect but at least it no longer gives the false impression that there's a univocal, mathematically well-understood notion of what it means to be a not-further-specified "definable" real. Unfortunately there are lots of pages that link to the page, and some of them do give that impression. Not sure what to do about that yet. -- Trovatore 03:10, 22 July 2005 (UTC)
Anybody here heard of mnenta? It's the only contribution from some IP address, I cannot find it in MathSciNet or OED, and none of the 14 pages returned by Google is relevant, so unless somebody speaks up it will go to VfD. -- Jitse Niesen ( talk) 19:39, 19 July 2005 (UTC)
This is a dicdef at best without some relevance to the rest of mathematics; I say VFD. -- Kinser 23:16, 19 July 2005 (UTC)
If someone knows Pickover well enough to e-mail him, I say go for it; maybe the article can be brought up to a level worth keeping. But if there's no serious, immediate prospect of improvement, I'll vote delete--the article as it stands is very uninformative. -- Trovatore 23:52, 19 July 2005 (UTC)
Without a source, this is unverifiable and should be deleted. Paul August ☎ 03:47, July 20, 2005 (UTC)
Sounds like a mini-consensus. Jitse, why don't you put it on VfD and get the ball rolling? If the article has defenders, that'll concentrate their minds. -- Trovatore 04:12, 20 July 2005 (UTC)
Went ahead and did it myself--hope you don't mind. -- Trovatore 05:48, 21 July 2005 (UTC)
The puzzle articles are under renewed attack.
I am concerned that these VfD's are being pushed by someone who has it in for puzzles. I am concerned that the people voting to delete never actually contribute to math or physics articles. In a moment of heated anger, were I to actually get that heated, then I would say that these people are anti-social vandals, and should be treated as such. But everyone knows I'm not a hot-head, right? linas 15:38, 20 July 2005 (UTC)
It should be noted that the articles are up for VFD as neologistic categorisation by Karl Scherer. Coupled with a distinct lack of non-categorisation content, existing only to fluff the categorisation enough to have an article for each class. The 100+ that have already been VFD'd were done so for predominantly the same reason.
Wikipedia is meant to be an encyclopedia, and not something to push your POV of how things should be categorised. Neither is it a collection of all information under the sun. ~~~~ 22:10, 20 July 2005 (UTC)
I nominated Template:ImportantLabeledEquation up for deletion (this was a bit discussed above, see Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mathematics#Dotted framebox around formulas). I myself think that dotted box looks ugly, and indenting should be enough to display a math equation or defintion. Oleg Alexandrov 18:43, 20 July 2005 (UTC)
The vote for deletion is at Wikipedia:Templates for deletion#Template:ImportantLabeledEquation. Oleg Alexandrov 18:44, 20 July 2005 (UTC)
I notice you recently recategorised quasiperfect number to 'integer sequences', but it seems odd to mark it as such given that no such numbers are known to exist. Do you see the categorisation as extending to any boolean property defined on integers (or maybe the naturals)? (I ask in all humility - it isn't clear to me whether the categorisation is appropriate or not.) Either way, it may also merit a clarification on Category::Integer_sequences. Hv 16:30, 24 July 2005 (UTC)
Something in the spirit of Category:Properties of natural numbers looks good to me. But can one shorten this in some way? Oleg Alexandrov 21:08, 24 July 2005 (UTC)
Well, there are 75 articles in Category:Integer sequences; and it would be appropriate to introduce some subcategories, such as Category:Divisor-related numbers and Category:Totient-related numbers. The first seems to be a category over at mathworld, the second a neologism. I was fishing for a commonly-used, commonly-accepted name for these two cats. In all cases, I assume that the category will also contain "theorems pertaining to divisor-related numbers" and "properties of numbers that are in the divisor-related number category". I think we can add wording stating this explicitly,once we know the correct, commonly accepted cat names. linas 02:20, 25 July 2005 (UTC)
The article for this number is up for deletion at Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/3.14. Uncle G 02:01:35, 2005-07-25 (UTC)
User: Cruise ( talk · contribs) has recently added a number of links to Visualstatistics.net and vstat.net. A number of the pages on this site about social science topics (e.g. slavery) are a mix of facts and patent nonsense, and I have thus removed them. I have no idea about the quality of the math and statistics pages linked, e.g. at multiple correlation, but it would be a good idea if someone double checked them. - SimonP 03:20, July 25, 2005 (UTC)
I have a disagreement over at cardinal number about using inline TeX which becomes HTML. I argue against it (that is, use HTML if TeX gives PNG), while the other opinion seems to be that if one really want HTML then one should set up the browser settings that way. Wonder what people think on this issue. Thanks. Oleg Alexandrov 22:40, 26 July 2005 (UTC)
The aforementioned articles are all up for deletion. Uncle G 02:18:02, 2005-07-27 (UTC)
I noticed that there is no Category:Symmetry. Should there be? Charles Matthews 10:13, 27 July 2005 (UTC)
Axis of symmetry -- Broken symmetry -- Circular symmetry -- Freiling's axiom of symmetry -- Homological mirror symmetry -- Mirror symmetry -- P-symmetry -- Plane of symmetry -- Rotational symmetry -- Spacetime symmetries -- Spontaneous symmetry breaking -- Symmetry -- Symmetry group
I agree about not including Freiling's axiom of symmetry. Let us keep this geometric/physical. So for example, the article symmetry of second derivatives should not be there either. Oleg Alexandrov 17:24, 27 July 2005 (UTC)
The word Math (as opposed to Maths) is quite jarring for many Brits, and to me it feels somewhat too informal for a category title anyway. How about moving articles in this category to Category:Mathematical lists? This is a task which bots can perform fairly easily, I believe. L upin 23:32, 27 July 2005 (UTC)
I think Category:Math lists better be renamed to Category:Mathematics lists, rather than Category:Mathematical lists. Any objections to that? :) Oleg Alexandrov 15:29, 28 July 2005 (UTC)
I see your point about mathematical instead of mathematics (and I agree). Lupin, I think you will need to submit a formal request at CfD for Category:Math lists to be deleted, and the articles moved to Category:Mathematical lists. I expect no problems with that, and then I can start the move. Oleg Alexandrov 22:06, 28 July 2005 (UTC)
Someone called "kate" once said to me:
I took her advice. Following a few weeks of down-and-dirty coding, I would like to announce blahtex version 0.1, a LaTeX to MathML converter designed specifically for Wikipedia (or more generally for the MediaWiki environment).
You can try it out interactively here. You can also see some samples extracted from Wikipedia here.
Important note: Your mileage may vary depending on OS/browser. I will get back to this in a moment. For now, I'll just say that your best bet is Mozilla/Firefox on Windows; if you're on a Mac then I'm afraid the world of MathML is rather inaccessible right now; if you're on Linux or another Unix then I really have no idea, I'm guessing Mozilla will be your best bet.
Before getting to more details, let's just check out this screenshot of blahtex plugged into MediaWiki:
Here's the wiki markup I used for this:
'''Archimedes''' was a [[Greek]] [[mathematician]] who is best known for the myriad mathematical [[notation]]s that he invented, most of which are still in use today. His earliest work included devising simple [[inline equation]]s such as <math>\sin x = \cos^2(y+t)</math> and <math>x^2 + y^2 = -e^{-\theta}</math>. He pioneered the use of greek symbols such as <math>\alpha</math> in English writing. While performing complicated calculations such as <math>\sum_{i=1}^3 i^2 = 47</math>, he noticed that despite the baseline of the equation lining up nicely with the surrounding text, the so-called [[displayed equation]] : <math>\displayed\sum_{i=1}^3 i = 46, \qquad \textrm{unless} 46 \not= 47</math> was probably better value. A similar effect occurred for integrals such as <math>\int_0^1 \sin^2 x \, dx</math>. He marked this up using the kludgy "\displayed" command, although he suspected that later and greater thinkers would come up with something better. When he couldn't make up his mind he would write : <math>\displayed F(x) = \begin{cases} \left\uparrow\frac{\partial^2 G}{\partial u \partial v}\right\} & \textrm{if the sky was \bf blue}, \\ A_0 + \cdots + A_k & \textit{if Troy was on the attack.} \end{cases}</math> He also invented the polynomial rings <math>\mathbf{R}[x]</math>, <math>\mathcal{C}[y]</math> and <math>\boldsymbol{\mathcal{C}[z]}</math>, and being fluent in Chinese he was comfortable writing things like :<math>\displayed 钱 = \sqrt{不好},</math> although historians have debated whether his Chinese really was all that good.
How did I get this screenshot? I installed MediaWiki on my laptop (an iBook G3), and fiddled around with a few bits of the code to change the MIME type etc, and redirected the math code so that it fed into blahtex instead of texvc. A rather ugly hack. It doesn't really work. I don't recommend it. But it's enough to get something like the image above. The browser was Mozilla running on a Windows XP machine.
In other words, all the equations already present on Wikipedia won't break.
Hmmm. A big claim. Probably not entirely true. In any case, a proposition capable of empirical testing.
Here's how I tried to test it. First, I downloaded a database dump of the current content of the English Wikipedia, from http://download.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/pages_current.xml.gz. (I got the file dated 14th July 2005. It's 3.4 GB uncompressed, 1GB compressed.) Then I wrote some code to suck out everything surrounded by <math> tags. After throwing out some junk caused by people enclosing <math> tags inside nowiki tags :-), and discarding duplicates, we are left with 50193 distinct equations (71561 including duplicates; we lost about 80 "equations" as junk). If you want to play with them, you can get the full list here, one line for each equation. I set my poor laptop the task of running texvc on all 50193 equations, which took about nine hours. (About 1800 of them failed to work with texvc; casual inspection suggests these are things in people's personal sandboxes, and markup being discussed on talk pages.) Then I ran blahtex on all the equations as well (under ten minutes :-)). Actually I did this several times during development, to gauge progess.
For ease of comparison, I have collected the result together here (36 MB). Uncompress it and load up "index.xml" in your browser. You'll find the entire corpus of English Wikipedia equations, divided up pseudo-randomly into 256 pages (each containing about 200 equations), with the LaTeX, PNG output from texvc, and MathML output side-by-side for handy comparison. As mentioned earlier, I've put one sample page up on the web here.
(Warning: there are about 50000 small files in there, so if your filesystem is anything like the one on my mac, it could take up to 200 MB of hard drive space, even though there's only about 100 MB of data.)
So you can have a look yourself to see what blahtex's strengths and weaknesses are.
I should mention that I studied portions of the texvc code quite carefully to work out exactly what it was doing, and which LaTeX commands it accepts.
Blahtex has command line options for choosing either inline equations (for use in running text) or displayed equations.
In my opinion, Wikipedia's greatest math rendering weakeness at the moment is the inability to do inline equations well. You can do simple stuff with HTML (although it renders inconsistenly with the displayed PNGs), and you can sure try to do PNGs inline, but they look pretty awful. In contrast, one of MathML's wonderful features is that it automatically lines up baselines and fonts with the surrounding text.
As you can see from the markup I gave above, I used the "\displayed" command to get displayed mode. This is just a temporary fix because I don't know enough about MediaWiki internals to make up another math tag (e.g. <mth>, or something like that). If blahtex is ever plugged into MediaWiki on a real site, I don't expect "\displayed" to be used.
You might point out that the font sizes don't match properly in the screenshot above, but I'm pretty sure this is more a result of my complete ignorance about CSS and stylesheets and MediaWiki internals, rather than any fault in MathML or the browser's rendering. As soon as someone who understands these things gets involved, the font size matching problem will go away.
As you can also see from the screenshot, blahtex is quite happy to accept Unicode characters. Try typing some chinese characters into the interactive form, either in math mode or inside text blocks (like \textrm). I'm sure that our friends at the non-English Wikipedias will find this very pleasant. Since MathML is based on XML, which in turn uses Unicode, it seems a bit silly not to support it.
Blahtex accepts input in UTF-8, and output is pure ASCII, but all internals are done with wide 32-bit characters, so it should be trivial to implement different input/output encodings if necessary.
I will be releasing the code under the GNU GPL, probably in the next week or so. I just need to remove various profanities from the code and generally clean it up. Stay tuned.
Except for a yacc parser, it's all written in C++, with a healthy dose of STL. Probably C++ isn't the best choice of language from a technical point of view, but it has the advantage that I know it, and so do lots of other people. I think this will encourage collaborative hacking in a way that is not possible for texvc, which is written in OCaml, which not many people know.
So far all is well and good. Now we come to the hard stuff.
There are actually two completely separate questions concerning browser compatibility.
The first question is: how does the browser know that it should be trying to translate MathML tags? In an ideal world, the following would happen. Joe loads up a Wikipedia page with equations on it. If he's running Mozilla or Firefox, everything just works. If he's running internet explorer and has MathPlayer installed, then everything just works. If he doesn't have MathPlayer installed, he gets a dialog box telling him that he should install MathPlayer; if he chooses not to, he gets the next best alternative (e.g. PNGs). If he's running a completely MathML-unaware browser (like Safari), then he should just get the PNGs again (perhaps with a message telling him to get a different browser!!)
I don't know how to make this happen. For various technical reasons that I don't understand very well, it seems like a very difficult problem. I will leave this to the experts to sort out.
The second question is: assuming our browser does understand MathML and knows that it should be doing so, how does its rendering look? Does it render things "correctly"? Do different browsers give different renderings?
Let me summarise my current understanding of the situation here. Overall, I think the best browser I've played with is Mozilla/Firefox on Windows. It does have a bunch of bugs (which I will say more about on another day), but it does give the best overall effect. You'll notice that there is a radio button for "Mozilla tweaks" on the interactive site. This activates a bunch of tweaks to the output to compensate for some of Mozilla's bugs. Almost all of my testing has been on Windows Mozilla. MathPlayer for Internet Explorer is occasionally competitive, but its pixelation doesn't get corrected by XP, which is a major disadvantage, and sometimes it does some really weird stuff with spacing.
(NB: if you're on Windows and your equations look pixelated in Mozilla, you might want to try turning on ClearType. On XP, go right-click on desktop, then Properties, then Appearance, then Effects, then "Smooth edges of screen fonts" should be set to "ClearType".)
Sadly, on the Mac, you don't really have anything very good. Mozilla's support got broken a few versions ago. I'm not sure why they're taking so long to fix it. You could try running an old version (I think 1.3 is ok), but it doesn't look that great. Despite being a big mac fan, I concede that currently Windows kills the Mac in this department — you have no idea how hard it was for me to admit that :-)
As for other OSes, I'm pretty ignorant. Maybe someone else can report on the situation.
You could also try Amaya. It's a bit frustrating to work with (the mac version anyway), but sometimes helpful for debugging.
I need your help. Play with blahtex and help me find and squish all those evil bugs.
Of course it would be fantastic if a MediaWiki developer knows how to plug blahtex into MediaWiki (at least the "MathML - experimental" option). Drop me a line if that's you.
I am going to run a blahtex development page at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Blahtex. Probably the best place to continue this discussion is over there. In particular you can report bugs there.
Goodnight guys and gals, I hope you enjoy playing with blahtex.
Dmharvey Talk 02:17, 28 July 2005 (UTC)
"If he doesn't have MathPlayer installed, he gets a dialog box telling him that he should install MathPlayer"
Very promising. Almost all formulas are understandable in my browser at work (Firefox 1.0 on Linux with Fedora Core release 2), though the spacing is often wrong; almost certainly the browser fault. Re 99d1d9133a0a5551e047a9560783aedc, there is a special latex code which should have been used, I think \ll, so it's not blahtex's fault. I hope dmharvey forgives me for saying that my personal opinion is that translating latex to mathml is the easy part and there is a lot that needs to be done, but as I said, it's a very promising start. I poked a bit around in the mediawiki code lately, going through some of the texmf bugs, and I'd be quite willing to lend a hand (within my time constraints, of course). -- Jitse Niesen ( talk) 12:11, 28 July 2005 (UTC)
There are quite a few articles that use "n-th", "n-th", and/or "nth" (similarly for "ith", etc). All of the literature I checked uses "nth" (and occasionally "nth"). The only justification for "-th" that I can see today is if you don't have italics available, such as in a newsgroup. Based on the articles I've seen, I think that "nth" is more common in Wikipedia than "n-th" and "n-th", but I didn't do a formal count.
I think the standard style should be "nth". Bubba73 22:14, July 28, 2005 (UTC)
I prefer nth; but I could understand an editor deciding that it was unclear. A standard, but not a mandatory one?
But then, I spent today watching the anti-Communist revert wars and the &^$%&$ AD/CE revert wars, so I'm a little more laissez-faire than usual. Septentrionalis 22:40, 28 July 2005 (UTC)
I think n-th is marginally easier to read. I think i-th, for example, is definitely easier to read than ith. I think (n − 1)th is not a sensible piece of notation, for example; and the sort of thing that shows we should mostly aim to be clear and readable. Charles Matthews 16:34, 29 July 2005 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Votes_for_deletion/Log/2005_July_29#Arc_Sine -- R.Koot 14:24, 29 July 2005 (UTC)
Is this article salvagable; does it even make sense? Law of information -- R.Koot 15:18, 31 July 2005 (UTC)
Please see Wikipedia:Featured_list_candidates#Nominations.
I have nominated list of lists of mathematical topics (not to be confused with list of mathematical topics) to be a featured list. Please go to that nomination page to vote for or against it. Michael Hardy 01:22, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Again: why are the latex images so big anyway? I generally have my browser text set pretty large, yet the latexs still often look rather silly. Is there some kind of preference setting to adjust the rendering size? If not, is it technically possibly for somebody to do that? Dmharvey 17:45, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)
OK, let's try something:
Consider the integral which is blah blah blah .....
(1) Look at this here equation: So there!
(2) Look at this here equation: AX2 + B = 0. So there!
(3) This renders all right: So ereht!
I generally use the format (2) rather than (1) for two reasons: the math notation in (1) is ridiculously too big, and it gets mis-aligned. Possibly this could be overcome by using a different browser or altering my preferences. I have long said that TeX looks good on Wikipedia when it is "displayed", but often looks terrible when embedded in lines of text. Note also: 1+2 does not look as good as 1 + 2; n + 2 is better than n + 2; and also better than n + 2. Michael Hardy 00:57, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)
(3) looks exactly identical to (1) from my browser. Michael Hardy 01:43, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)
<span class="texhtml"><i>A</i><i>X</i><sup>2</sup> + <i>B</i> = 0.</span>
Interestingly, the font in the TeX output is smaller on Wikicities. See example at [1]. Would this look better on Wikipedia? One problem is that it may be harder to read. - Fredrik | talk 01:49, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)
For me, the LaTeX images are slightly smaller than the surrounding text. But then, I'm using a 12pt font at 132DPI. Since most Windows boxes are at 96DPI (since a lot of Windows programs look weird if you try to change it), I can see how it can look huge. -- cesarb 02:23, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)
You will never get text in images and text not in images to mesh well for everyone. Saying it should be done one way or another because "it looks better" is just nonsense. It looks better to you on your screen, maybe; that says nothing about how it looks to everyone else. (BTW, I must interject at this point that the font used in the TeX images changed several months ago and I really preferred the old font!) The best solution, perhaps, would be to add a preference setting to scale LaTeX images to a (user-) specified relative size — for example, "80%" or "110%", etc. — so that each user could, if they cared, have the images scaled to match the size of the regular text in their own browser (I guess this would also have to include a vertical-shift option, as well, if that's possible to implement). The only problems I can see with this plan would be: (1) server load, since every (TeX) image would have to be tagged with height and width calculated using the user's scaling preference; and (2) readability since some browsers probably have terrible algorithms for scaling images. - dcljr ( talk) 11:11, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)
(3) is the best, because I think using images for any kind of text is not a good thing to do.-- Reubot 10:19, 5 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Thanks everyone for your comments and examples. I think I now understand a little better why this is such a complicated issue.
I have a question: how good is MathML at rendering inline equations (as opposed to displayed equations)? Does it handle things as well as LaTeX, like line wrapping?
Dmharvey Talk 12:56, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I think the previous suggestion of a user-definable relative size attribute is quite nice. Note also that CSS (I don't know if this is true for "old style HTML attribs") allows for sizes given in "ex", e.i. the height of an "x" in the current font. maybe this could also used to fix the problem. But I also agree that (maybe unless you have a 1600x1200 screen, which is still rather exceptional - maybe wiki has statistics on screen resolution...) the images are always way too big w.r.t. the text, so a fix should definetly be provided. (Maybe also alternate style files (at worst through user prefs) could allow to cope with this issue.) — MFH: Talk 22:32, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I would really like to know your opinion on what these articles should be about. Since the tangent bundle is basically the collection of vector fields, it would be useful to make it clear what info should go where. -- MarSch 14:26, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)
So what is happening there? The tag has been taken down from tensor, which was current. I don't see another nomination has been made. Charles Matthews 16:00, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I'm sorry if this is the wrong place, but I wonder if there's copyright on proofs? Can I copy some proof from my lecture notes (in my own words)? Hugo 08:30, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC) (Moved from Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Proofs by Oleg Alexandrov)
There are some interesting discussions going on at Wikipedia talk:How to write a Wikipedia article on Mathematics. I believe as many of us should be involved in that as possible, as that article is the main document defining how math is to be written. So, comments welcome. Oleg Alexandrov 22:25, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)
According to newly created polygon sum conjecture article,
I almost put it in Category:Conjectures, when I realized conjectures in elementary geometry do not happen that often... :)
Anyway, see Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Polygon sum conjecture. Oleg Alexandrov 01:21, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Dear all, I have added the fascinating fact concerning e^(pi sqrt(163)) to the article on complex multiplication. It doesn't really fit very well at the moment, but hopefully one day that will change. The only reason I mention this here is that I'm not sure if this formula appears anywhere else in WP, perhaps it is already stated elsewhere. Thanks peoples. Dmharvey Talk 01:32, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)
(copied from the talk page of Charles. This is an interesting discussion, and I wonder what others would like to say Oleg Alexandrov 04:37, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC))
I am wondering what your opinion is of the possible long-term future of maths in wikipedia? In particular, do you think that wikipedia (or some other wiki-based medium) has the capacity to (eventually) become an authoritative source on well-understood material? I guess 'authoritative' and 'well-understood' are somewhat rubbery terms. For an arbitrary starting point, perhaps 'well-understood' might mean "material that has made it into book form by 2005", and 'authoritative' might mean that a professional mathematician might consider making WP their first port of call for learning material they are unfamiliar with. I appreciate your insight, you seem to have had a lot of experience on WP. Dmharvey 17:21, 30 May 2005 (UTC)
WP can do some good, no question. Trying to audit quite how much progress is interesting, taxing and sometimes chastening. The first five years, for mathematics, is going to look like 10000 pages with much 'core' material. Chronologically the solid coverage can get us into the 1950s, mostly; but not past 1960. I would project, that in 2010 it would look more like 1970 rather than 1960; and even that is ambitious and would require much more expertise in the 'rarer' topics (algebraic geometry and topology, for example) than we currently command. I'm quite upbeat, but it is still very easy to find the gaps. Charles Matthews 10:13, 31 May 2005 (UTC)
As far as I'm concerned, I'm not saying anything private - go ahead, Paul. Charles Matthews 15:27, 31 May 2005 (UTC)
Wow, yes, agree with both Charles and Dmharvey. Realistically speaking, WP has huge gaps in just about any topic, and will need to grow at least 50-fold to fill these gaps in. It will take many many years for this to happen. But I also agree with Dmharvey in that it seeems inevitable that WP will become the authoritative reference in a decade if not sooner; its already beyond mathworld.com in many areas.
But please note that we will have to tackle many serious structural issues first; and if these are not solved, then it will make growth harder. For example: Charles "survey" articles are already outnumbered by more "mundane" articles that mostly list facts. (I myself generate "mundane" articles because I'm not knowledgable enough to write surveys in any but a few fields, and those fields bore me...). I would like to see some system that somehow makes the survey articles more visible, more prominent. They tend to be lost in the mire.
I don't know how to fix this. Maybe have different classes of articles? This is kind of like the "proofs" discussion, but in reverse. With proofs, the problem is how to hide this third-tier material so that it doesn't impede article flow. With "survey articles", the problem is how to highlight them above and beyond the rest of the bulk.
Note also the existing tension between "simple" and "advanced" treatments of the same material is going to get worse. We'll need to devise some mechanism for dealing with this, as I wonder if the current ad-hoc approach can last. I've had Oleg delete some of my edits because they were too advanced, I've had Fropuff delete some of my edits because they were too trivial. I'm not complaining, I'm rather trying to make note that this is a potential problem area that will recur in WP and is worthy of attention. linas 00:19, 4 Jun 2005 (UTC)
In the context of Wikipedia, I think I have come to the opinion that the issues being discussed do not really raise any problems.
Suppose that we have an article X that discusses topic Y. There are lots of people who might end up looking at page X. A priori, they might be arriving there with a huge range of different levels of mathematical experiences. However, I claim that the gap between
is actually not that large. It may seem large, but there's some kind of "logarithmic scale" operating here. I think it is possible to have a well-written introduction that can simultaneously branch off to cover many different levels of pre-experience. Obviously, not everyone will be able to write that introduction, since some people simply don't have the background to see it all in context. But, almost by definition, someone will have that context, and will (eventually) supply it. Dmharvey Talk 11:34, 4 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I would also like to mention something else about "authoritativeness" of WP. It seems to be widely acknowledged that there are issues with reliability in WP, and that this seems an insurmountable barrier to WP becoming useful to the academic community (in the present discussion, the academic mathematical community). I agree with the first half of the sentence but not the second half. Something can be useful even if it's inaccurate. And it seems that WP has a strong tendency to become more accurate over time, at least on topics that are not too sparsely covered. In the real world, no one source is enough anyway. When I want to learn about a maths topic I don't know much about, I don't just get a book out of the library. If I really want to learn something, I get at least three books or journal articles, and talk to my colleagues, asking them what their point of view is on the whole subject area, and where they think is a good place to read about it. Dmharvey Talk 11:34, 4 Jun 2005 (UTC)
On the other hand, on the more general topic of "long-term future of mathematics in WP", I have some other concerns. My first concern regards typesetting. I summarise by saying that in the present situation, I don't think WP has sufficiently sophisticated typesetting for serious mathematical work. This may become a long term problem, because one important group of people we would like to attract to write articles, serious mathematicians, will be put off by something that visually looks amateurish. For those who don't believe me, I suggest trying to write a complete paper in LaTeX. It's incredible how LaTeX is able to make even completely incoherent babble look like the most brilliant piece of mathematics written since the 16th century. This might improve if browsers improve, I'm not sure.
A second concern is that there are other interesting things that a WP-like system could conceivably do, but which the current software does not support. For example, it would be lovely for WP to support a parallel development of some kind of formal proof system; i.e. symbolic manipulation software where people could enter formal proofs which are checked automatically for correctness. I don't believe such a system exists yet, except in fairly primitive forms. I think there have been a fair number of attempts, but I haven't heard of any that have scaled up well. I think in time, the collaborative nature of something like WP will solve the scaling-up problem. Then, if you believe the axioms that the system is founded on, and you believe that WP is doing its proof checking correctly, then you can be happy that the theorem you are looking at is OK. (Please don't take this paragraph too seriously; there are ENORMOUS problems, both theoretical and practical, with automated proof systems, and I just wanted to throw it up as a random thought.)
OK I've really chewed up enough bandwidth now. Dmharvey Talk 11:34, 4 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Dear peoples, I have spent quite a number of hours the last few days working on Wallpaper groups. It looks almost completely different now, and I hope it is an improvement.
The only thing I plan to do with it for the next few days is finish labelling the pretty pictures. Apart from that it is in all of your capable hands.
Then I need to take a break from wikipedia, so I can do some other things.
I will return in a few weeks.
Dmharvey Talk 17:09, 4 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I've just come across a nice template slapped onto talk pages of chemistry ({{ chemistry}}):
WikiProject on Chemistry | This article is supported by the WikiProject on Chemistry, which gives a central approach to Chemistry and related subjects on Wikipedia. Please participate by editing the article WikiProject Mathematics/Archive/2005/Jun-Jul, or visit the project page for more details on the projects. |
Should/do we want to have something similar? Might bring more people to the project. -- MarSch 18:06, 5 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Personally, I hate banners. Ditto for topic templates, and such. I suggest that you just watch a lot of pages. If you see the same person making good edits on a number of pages, invite them here. I made hundreds of edits before I even bothered to look at this page, and am deeply suspicious of anyone who would be interested in process who hadn't been an active editor first. linas 04:16, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)
There is a proposal at Talk:List of lists of mathematical topics to reformat that list according to subdivisions of math. Comments welcome. Oleg Alexandrov 19:51, 5 Jun 2005 (UTC)
There has been a recent addition to Pythagorean theorem by 67.86.108.32 which although appears to be in good faith, I feel is unnecessary. I tried for a while to think of a way to rephrase it so that it would fit, but eventually decided it just shouldn't be there. What's the best thing to do in a case like that? Thanks Dmharvey Talk 11:59, 6 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Write to the talk page explaining your reasoning and why you're going to delete it. Then be bold and delete it. Be firm but polite. If the editor clarifies or suggests alternative wording, be reasonable. -- Tony Sidaway| Talk 12:45, 6 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Is my brain broken, or is this theorem just silly? It seems to be saying that the definition of the carmichael function is, in fact, identical to the definition of the carmichael function. Surely the theorem should instead say something like, "the recursive formula given for the carmichael function is correct, i.e. satisfies the property alluded to in carmichael's theorem"? Really these should go into the same article with a redirect on one of them. (And then one day I'll write something about larger examples of carmichael numbers, and of its relevance to primality testing, and fix up some nasty markup.) Dmharvey Talk 23:57, 6 Jun 2005 (UTC)
(NOT to be confused with list of mathematical topics)
User:Samohyl Jan has completely re-written this list of lists, with some input from me as well.
Please vote on list of lists of mathematical topics at Wikipedia:Featured_list_candidates#Nominations. Michael Hardy 00:23, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)
What about a specialized wikify template for mathematics articles? This might make it easier to keep our to-do-lists recent. See also the discussion at TFD about some of these templates: Wikipedia:Templates_for_deletion#Template:Foo-wikify -- MarSch 10:58, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I nominated topic-based vector space model for deletion because this is a method proposed in a paper in 2003 (see the external link in the article), so it is very new and too early to say if it is proeminent. So I think it is not yet something to be included in an encyclopedia. But I am not 100% sure. I wonder if other mathematicians would visit that article, then post their opinions on the VfD page. Oleg Alexandrov 03:37, 10 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Encouraged by User:Paul August on Talk:Aristotelian logic, I'm posting an invitation to comment on the idea for a WikiProject for Logic. I have a draft proposal at User:Chalst/WikiProject Logic proposal, and I am interested in:
Many thanks in advance for your comments. --- Charles Stewart 15:59, 10 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Related articles with similar content and unclear interrelations are the biggest problem I am facing. A mild version of this is the group, group theory combo which can usually be sorted out, although I think this has often not happened yet, but what to think about: vector (spatial), vector field, vector space, tangent bundle, tangent space, and the also to these related scalar, scalar field, tensor, tensor field, Tensor_(intrinsic_definition), Intermediate_treatment_of_tensors, Classical_treatment_of_tensors and maybe more. What I would like to know is which you think the possible content of these articles should be in. Possibly using templates subarticleof}} and seesubarticle}}. I would welcome any ideas. -- MarSch 14:00, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Yes, well, be careful. These articles treat similar topics, but not the same topic. Vector bundles are not vector spaces; and the former links to the later in the introductory sentence. Vector bundles are a kind-of fiber bundle ... I discovered early on that attempting to make large re-organizational edits can often sink a lot of time, while failing to improve quality. I'm surprised you're not sensing this yet ... Personally, I prefer smaller articles, with a given topic spread out across multiple articles, than trying to jam everything into one article. As to some repetition, that's OK, too. I'd prefer to see articles grow "organically" by accretion. After lots of accretion, they may look poor, in which case they can be restructured. However, trying to optimize content across multiple articles makes me very nervous. In particular, such a re-organization implies that you are trying to impose your world view on something that had evolved quite differently to begin with. Catholics and Protestants are both Christians, but neither would agree to the restructuring suggested by the other. linas 04:02, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I ran into this article, and don't know what to do about it. Any opinions? Oleg Alexandrov 05:25, 16 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Vector space example 1 and Vector space example 2 and Vector space example 3 are really horrid. They are complete verbosity. Maybe we should delete them. -- MarSch 15:48, 16 Jun 2005 (UTC)
The article pulation square, which in my opinion is a perfectly fine math stub, has been nominated for deletion here. Please share your thought there. Thanks. Paul August ☎ 15:30, Jun 18, 2005 (UTC)
We're currently having a brain storm on Category_talk:Physics about the following questions:
You're cordially invited. — Sebastian (talk) 07:50, 2005 Jun 20 (UTC)
An excessively original believer in this piece of social science questions the following observation, which seems trivial to me:
(... The proper odds to judge a set of data which satisfies a theory deriving its parameters from that [identical] data is the chance that the data would satisfy the theory using, not those particular parameters, but any possible parameters.)
If one of you can think of an exact source, contact me or comment on the article's talk page. Now at bottom. user:Pmanderson
So far I'm still finding this very vaguely expressed. I'm not sure what Septentrionalis a.k.a. user:Pmanderson, is trying to say. Michael Hardy 01:48, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)
<sigh>
Allright, let me say some things. I think what we are talking about here is not a theory at all, since it has no predictive power, but just a statement of fact. The fact that if you define liberal democracy so and so, then there is so and so much war. If you define it somewhat differently you may get a different picture. For an informed picture you should present a few of these statements ranging from a restrictive to a broad def. If you don't like that picture then you can leave out some data (a few statements) thereby deceiving people into thinking what you want them (and possibly yourself also) to think. This you might call fitting the parameters. Looking at a single set of parameters is surely better than this, but also leaves much to be desired, as I explained.-- MarSch 10:56, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I ran into this article today. From what I see, this article is the thoughts of a certain Andy Morton about poker posted on rec.gambling.poker ( Usenet) around 1997. It seems that his post was rather word for word pasted in this article, and that this article is not encyclopedic. How about voting it for deletion? Oleg Alexandrov 19:53, 25 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Here's another article on which input is needed. Probabilists out there, do you think this is rescuable? So far, it looks like a table of data obtained by using a paper from 1981. Oleg Alexandrov 20:13, 25 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Any objections to moving Proof of Leibniz formula to Leibniz formula and Proof of Viète formula to Viète formula? I moved Proof of Wallis product earlier, but didn't notice these two. Are there any other proof of X articles without a main X article that should be handled similarly? - Fredrik | talk 21:22, 25 Jun 2005 (UTC)
A badly written article should not be deleted, rather cleaned up. That is the conventional wisdom, but this particular article is trying my patience. Could anyboyd knowing this stuff take a look and say if this at all makes sence? Thanks. Oleg Alexandrov 22:07, 25 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Wurzel is proposing here that the imaginary unit be represented using a non-italic i, and has been changing articles accordingly. The first seven books I've just pulled from off my shelves, all use an italic i. Please share your thoughts on the appropriate talk page(s). Paul August ☎ 17:04, Jun 26, 2005 (UTC)
There's an interesting discussion going on at Talk:Derivative concerning the scope/audience of the article. I'd be interested if anyone supports what I have to say. Alternatively, if you disagree with me, please add your voice. When I hear enough I'll shut up :-) Dmharvey Talk 00:25, 27 Jun 2005 (UTC)
For those who don't know, the Mathematics Collaboration of the Week has been re-launched. Please nominate and vote for articles to focus on each fortnight. Both stubs and articles that are not stubs, but are confusing or poorly written, are acceptable. NatusRoma 29 June 2005 05:42 (UTC)
Please vote at Wikipedia:Featured picture candidates/Ford.circles.gif. The selection criterion includes the following:
and stated that merely being a spectacular picture is not a sufficient qualification. This picture will probably not be considered spectacular; it's very simple. But it can make clear to ordinary laypersons the concept explained in Ford circle that would otherwise probably be understood by few other than mathematicians. <hubris> Thus in "illustrat[ing] an ... article in such a way as to add significantly to that article" I think it excels. </hubris> Michael Hardy 30 June 2005 23:10 (UTC)
There is a proposal at Talk:Derivative#move to differentiable function to move that article to Derivative (high school version) or some other similar sounding title. The reason seems to be that the derivative article as now written is not representative about what derivative is in mathematics, rather, it focusses on the most elementary calculus definition. Comments welcome. Oleg Alexandrov 1 July 2005 02:20 (UTC)
I found this article about a rather elementary fact in number theory. Anybody heard it called that way? Google yields nothing about this particular theorem. Oleg Alexandrov 1 July 2005 03:04 (UTC)
I don't understand what the "theorem" or elementary fact aspect is. It just looks like a property possessed by three particular numbers. Can anyone elaborate? (Google no help to me either) Kinser 1 July 2005 03:50 (UTC)
I don't know if this is the right place to comment on this; please move if you know a better place.
About 3 months ago, I added an intentional error to the page about "Distribution", date/time "21:33, 31 March 2005 82.157.131.133 (→Formal definition)". Of course the type of convergence is weak, not strong. Jitse Niesen was so kind to move the error part in the text, and has been unnoticed until now.
If such a major error in a basic mathematical article can survive this long, how much errors will there be in the more advanced subjects? For me this is enough proof not to trust Wikipedia articles. Hugo 1 July 2005 11:37 (UTC)
Perhaps you might be polite enough to fix the error, now that it has been spotted, and now that the point has been made :-) (Although I see that there would be additional mileage gained by not fixing the error, since then you could point out that the error has not been fixed even after explicitly pointing it out in a discussion forum like this....)
But seriously... I agree that this is a problem, but probably not as big of a problem as you are making it out to be. You said: "For me this is enough proof not to trust Wikipedia articles." I agree: you shouldn't trust wikipedia articles. That should have been clear from the first moment you heard of the concept of wikipedia. And I don't think it is at all a non-argument to say "don't trust your sources". I genuinely believe in that argument. Trust is not black and white. It is possible to have a spectrum of trust in things you read, and a lot of it depends who wrote it and what your opinion is of them.
You also said: "With such an argument there is no need to make a precise encyclopedia." In my opinion, this is a vacuous statement; it is impossible to make a precise encyclopaedia. Precision is an ideal; I think generally wikipedians strive towards it, and they do a reasonable job, but I'm under no illusions of it being completely attained. However, it is possible to make a useful encyclopedia. And I think wikipedia is already such an object, and becomes more useful every day. An article can still be useful, even if it contains errors. (And I think most articles do not contain deliberate errors – the most insidious kind). For this reason, I still welcome your contributions, as long as the bulk of them are useful :-) Dmharvey Talk 2 July 2005 12:48 (UTC)
Lets get real. It appears that User:Hugo doesn't understand the process by which mathematics is actually done, and how research is published, much less how WP articles are written and corrected. A WP article can only be corrected when someone who is knowledgable and interested in a topic spots an error and corrects it. The error was presumably not corrected because there were no readers who were capable and interested in pursuing the particular claim. There's two ways to spot the error: one way is to be extremely knowledgable on the topic, and spot it instantly when the vandalism occurs. Clearly, there is no such person watching this article. The other way is for someone who is weak on the topic, but is interested in it, to be engaged in the processes of performing research, to eventually notice the error. Seems that was not the case, either. There is a third class of readers; those who didn't notice and didn't care. I think the above analysis shows that what Hugo really discovered is something about the quantity and type of readers of WP math articles, and not about the quality of the articles themselves.
If User:Hugo was actually performing research, and actually using WP as a source, then if there were errors in the articles that Hugo was reading, he would have eventually found them. I presume that he'd eventually find them, since I presume he double- and triple-checks his work. If not, and he publishes his work with errors and erroneous conclusions, then he is a fool, and has only himself to blame and not WP.
Ethical norms are such that anyone who is intentionally misleading, such as Hugo was, has crossed an ethical boundary, going in the wrong direction. Equally, if someone was deceived by his deceptions, they can blame Hugo. But, on the other hand, if WP contains honest mistakes (which it does), and someone is lead astray by these errors, then they are unfortunate or dumb or both. Hugo has only demonstrated that one can fool some of the people some of the time; this is hardly new.
If Hugo is interested in refereed math referneces, he should perhaps engage in thinking a bit about the WP and PlanetMath Exchange. We've talked about this here, before.
Everyone who has done research has found errors in published articles and books; some minor, some major. Errors on WP have the opportunity to be corrected, those on the printed page do not. Take a look a look at Talk:Bessel function for a real-world example of an error in a famous and highly-respected book that failed to propagate into WP. We actually have a chance to do better. linas 3 July 2005 00:04 (UTC)
I've been teaching myself how to make pretty graphs in gnuplot and maxima. Is there a guide to this somewhere? If not, there should be. I will gladly contribute what I have learned today and yesterday. See commons:Image:Weighting curves.png and commons:Image:Hilbert_transform.png for examples. - July 2, 2005 17:48 (UTC)
A guide would be great; but don't make it into a guide for gnuplot, make it rather a set of "suggested" line weights, styles, etc. for WP, and how to set those things. I note that the above graph looks very nice, whereas the gnuplot default settings look quite poor on WP. linas 2 July 2005 23:12 (UTC)
We have been trying to standardize plots for probability distributions. A summary of the latest definition of a "standardized plot" is at Template talk:probability distribution#Standard Plots. See normal distribution for an example. A basic trick is to make the plot very large, like 6000 pixels on a side, using size 48-64 font size and 17 pixel line thickness, then reduce down to about 1000 pixels on a side using bicubic interpolation. This give a plot with no jagged lines. It is, however, big enough so that someone could download it and use it for projection purposes without pixellation. The display size for the plot is about 325 pixels for the Wikipedia article. Plots are as language free as possible, and uploaded to Wikimedia commons, so that they may be used in any language version of Wikipedia. PAR 3 July 2005 00:01 (UTC)
What do people think of framing important formulas as in this example encountered at differintegral
I myself find it not very pleasing. Oleg Alexandrov 3 July 2005 01:09 (UTC)
No I can't say I like it much either. Paul August ☎ July 3, 2005 03:51 (UTC)
Not a fan. Doesn't look especially nice, plus it adds extra formatting, which I consider a Bad Thing unless absolutely necessary. Isomorphic 3 July 2005 06:18 (UTC)
I don't care for that particular example either. But as it happens, I have been mulling over introducing equationbox templates for my project of improving the General relativity articles. See the talk page for exact solutions of Einstein's field equations. I would be grateful if anyone has any ideas. Also, I just used a table in the section on Lie algebra of the Lorentz group in my new revision of the article on the Lorentz group. I think the information there is useful in an encyclopedic way, but it would be nice if the table could be shrunk a bit. This problem exhibits the problem I am having in devising equationbox templates; existing infoboxes display some kinds of data in a generally vertically stacked way, but for equations one typically needs a more horizontal array which someone avoids interrupting the main flow of text. Maybe my notion is too quioxitic to be worth pursuing, but if you have any ideas, please add them to the above cited talk page. TIA--- CH (talk) 3 July 2005 06:27 (UTC)
What do people think about the recent move of Paul Erdős to Pál Erdős? Paul August ☎ July 3, 2005 04:14 (UTC)
I can understand why Russian names are not at their original name, although they probably shold be, but I cannot understand this at all. What's worng with Pál? -- MarSch 3 July 2005 13:37 (UTC)
Anyone who publishes scientific articles is urged to choose one name, and one name only, under which to publish, so as not to confuse readers and in order to make bibliographies easier to assemble. Under what name did Paul Erdos publish? Shouldn't the article be under the name he himself chose? -- linas 3 July 2005 15:46 (UTC)
I took a quick search on MathSciNet. Everywhere I saw Paul. The only exception is
So, even the Hungarians call him Pál only to emphasize that he is their guy, while the formal name is Paul. Oleg Alexandrov 3 July 2005 16:17 (UTC)
As mentioned above, we are witnessing an attempt to revive the Mathematics Collaboration of the Week (which should probably be renamed to Collaboration of the Fortnight since it seems to run over two week periods). I am pleased that manifold was chosen to be the target of the collaboration and I'd like to invite all of you to contribute to this article. Note that we are currently rewriting the article at manifold/rewrite. Please put further comments on Talk:manifold/rewrite. -- Jitse Niesen ( talk) 4 July 2005 13:26 (UTC)
What people think of the article tangent bundle having on top the notice that it is a subarticle of differentiable manifold? Or of the planned topological manifold article being thought as a subarticle of the manifold article? I find this terminology introduced by MarSch a bit unusual. It implies that some articles are subordinate to others.
Also, I am not a native speaker of English, but doesn't the phrase
imply the former is a chunck of text contained in the latter, rather than a standalone article is it is now? Oleg Alexandrov 4 July 2005 15:43 (UTC)
With few exceptions, no article should be subordinate to any other article. I can imagine some kind of "subarticle of" relationship perhaps being useful, but I don't think it should be a hierarchical parent-child relationship. We would certainly want an article to possibly be a "subarticle of" more than one article, and perhaps even two articles to be "subarticles of" each other, both of which however run counter to the usual notion of "subness". In short I don't think it is probably a very good idea. Paul August ☎ July 4, 2005 21:06 (UTC)
Wikipedia is not heirarchal. If you start building linked lists and trees into the software through templates, you are breaking the design of Wikipedia. It has purposfully been designed NOT to be heirarchal. This discussion has been gone over many times allready in the past 4 years and there are rules against it. If you want to draw attention to another article, you do what every one else does: write it into the text of the article, explain why, and provide context for the reader.
Keep in mind, articles can be copied anywhere, in any format, including paper, it has to be assumed that the reader is not reading the article using software and a computer, and thus does not have access to links. Thats why Wikipedia style guidelines are the way they are, articles are self-contained units with no dependencies or heirarchies. Stbalbach 5 July 2005 03:11 (UTC)
Since the word subarticle seems to cause problems. What about two other templates
Please discuss at Wikipedia:Templates_for_Deletion#Other_wording -- MarSch 5 July 2005 13:41 (UTC)
I'd like to point out that there are already some projects which can be described as subprojects of this one, and to suggest some new ones:
The goal of the proposed themes of mathematics subproject could be to ensure that any reader who comes to the math pages here will be likely to encounter at least one of these "big ideas", and will be encouraged to read more about it. At present, many articles adequatley describe a concept but fail to point out that this concept exhibits certain themes, an oversight which I think should be systematically rectified. For some examples of how big ideas can be incorporated into articles, see my discussion in the talk page for the manifold/rewrite article.
Categorification seems to be a notion some mathematicians hate with a passion, but what I have in mind for the categorification subproject is something I expect we could all agree on: many articles describe concepts but fail to point out that they are examples of categorical notions, and these often arise from an attempt to capture in formal language some theme. So the categorification subproject could have two complementary goals:
By the way, the article on Thurston's classification theorem should clarify the relation with uniformitization. It should probably cite the little book by Andrew Casson.
-- CH (talk) 4 July 2005 20:41 (UTC)
Several articles on puzzles such as burr puzzle, mechanical puzzle and packing problem are up for deletion in two mass listings on VfD here and here. — Blotwell 5 July 2005 00:31 (UTC)
In a magic country far far away, there lived four templates, explaining what math is all about. They were named "quantity", "space", "change", and "structure" (note that "quantity" is actually about numbers). Here they are in full glory.
This article may be in need of reorganization to comply with Wikipedia's
layout guidelines. |
I would like to generate some discussion on whether these templates are useful, whether they should be trimmed, or even eliminated, replaced by categories. Wonder what people think. Oleg Alexandrov 03:23, 13 July 2005 (UTC)
(From talk:Transcendental number, copied here by Oleg Alexandrov 03:23, 13 July 2005 (UTC))
I nominated the templates {quantity} and {strucutre} which have a lot of articles and which are not very related, for deletion. See Wikipedia:Templates_for_deletion#Template:Quantity and Wikipedia:Templates_for_deletion#Template:Structure. Oleg Alexandrov 23:09, 14 July 2005 (UTC)
I recently saw for the first time the {{mathematics-footer}} template
in my opinion, that's all the template we need for mathematics for consistency. Right? - Lethe | Talk 03:32, July 16, 2005 (UTC)
Kill 'em all. -- Dominus 04:55, 16 July 2005 (UTC)
Well, I got embolded and nominated for deletion the other two of the four templates. See Wikipedia:Templates_for_deletion#Template:Change and Wikipedia:Templates_for_deletion#Template:Space. Oleg Alexandrov 06:43, 16 July 2005 (UTC)
Fwiw, see also {{ mathematics}}. — msh210 00:22, 26 July 2005 (UTC)
Recently I moved Infinite tree (graph theory) to Tree (set theory), because the trees in question don't have to be infinite and don't have much to do with graph-theoretic trees. For the same reasons I have proposed that the two redirects, infinite tree and infinite tree (graph theory), be deleted. -- Trovatore 04:19, 13 July 2005 (UTC)
I'm having a great argument with myself on the above-named page, and it'd be great if one/some of y'all would come referee. -- Trovatore 04:38, 15 July 2005 (UTC)
In fact please do come look at it, particularly the Alternative definition section on the Talk page. Opinions solicited on which definition is clearer/better. -- Trovatore 02:52, 16 July 2005 (UTC)
Template:Quantity and Template:Structure have both been listed for deletion at Templates for deletion. I don't know enough about mathmatical topics to know how coherent the topics are in either template, so I am requesting that some editors with some math knowledge visit TFD and offer their input to the discussion. BlankVerse ∅ 07:25, 15 July 2005 (UTC)
Hello. The article H numbers looks like original research to me. Article links to this web site [6]. Mathworld hasn't heard of H numbers and I can't find any relevant Google hits. Comments? Thanks for your help, Wile E. Heresiarch 08:32, 16 July 2005 (UTC)
I've just completed a major revision of the absolute value article. I've described the changes I've made here. I'd appreciate any comments/criticisms anyone might have. (Please respond here) And a good proofread would be greatly appreciated (my eyes now glaze over when I attempt to read it). Paul August ☎ 19:56, July 16, 2005 (UTC)
Hmm I'll have a look. I forgot to say that any comments (specific to that article) should probably be directed to that talk page. Paul August ☎ 20:58, July 16, 2005 (UTC)
It works ok for me in Safari, Firefox And IE on a MacOS 10.3. Paul August ☎ 21:02, July 16, 2005 (UTC)
Same problem in Netscape 7.1 (Windows XP). I've noted it on the talk page for the article. -- Trovatore 21:21, 16 July 2005 (UTC)
Has anybody noticed the new Category:Mathematics? -- R.Koot 19:54, 17 July 2005 (UTC)
Nice job, visually. I'm a bit concerned, though, that the formalist view is presented in a way that might suggest it's the default. This may not have been the intent, but possibly should be addressed. -- Trovatore 20:30, 17 July 2005 (UTC)
By the bye, it led me to an interesting discussion that I hadn't seen before, and I cast my "yes" votes on math being a science and emperical. See Talk:Mathematics#Is Mathematics a science? and Talk:Mathematics#Is Mathematics empirical?. -- Trovatore 20:30, 17 July 2005 (UTC)
I redirected Wikipedia:Wikiportal/Mathematics to Category:Mathematics now that the contents has been merged. I do agree that the latter is more visible, as there is a link to it from the main Wikipedia page. I also put a note on Wikipedia talk:Wikiportal/Mathematics saying that the math talk usually takes place on this page, Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mathematics, and not there. I plan to put the same note on Category talk:Mathematics. Oleg Alexandrov 17:51, 18 July 2005 (UTC)
I've put Template:MathematicsCOTW on TfD as is superseded by Template:Wikiportal:Mathematics/Opentask]. -- R.Koot 18:41, 18 July 2005 (UTC)
The definable number article is in pretty bad shape. Whatever it is that the article is talking about, it makes some true and useful assertions about--but it's very unclear what it's talking about. See the talk page. -- Trovatore 04:40, 19 July 2005 (UTC)
BTW why isn't there a template for "math accuracy disputes" or "math articles needing attention" or some such? I put the {{accuracy}} tag on it and believe I'm completely justified--but that only puts it in the "Accuracy disputes" category, where it could wait forever for a mathematician to notice it. It would be nice to put it in a more specific needs-attention category. But then again I suppose that's part of what this page is for. -- Trovatore 04:40, 19 July 2005 (UTC)
OK, I think I'm done with it for now. Anyone here who knows about forcing is invited to check my proof that it's consistent with ZFC that there are only countably many OD reals (or better, find a reference). -- Trovatore 03:10, 22 July 2005 (UTC)
The article isn't perfect but at least it no longer gives the false impression that there's a univocal, mathematically well-understood notion of what it means to be a not-further-specified "definable" real. Unfortunately there are lots of pages that link to the page, and some of them do give that impression. Not sure what to do about that yet. -- Trovatore 03:10, 22 July 2005 (UTC)
Anybody here heard of mnenta? It's the only contribution from some IP address, I cannot find it in MathSciNet or OED, and none of the 14 pages returned by Google is relevant, so unless somebody speaks up it will go to VfD. -- Jitse Niesen ( talk) 19:39, 19 July 2005 (UTC)
This is a dicdef at best without some relevance to the rest of mathematics; I say VFD. -- Kinser 23:16, 19 July 2005 (UTC)
If someone knows Pickover well enough to e-mail him, I say go for it; maybe the article can be brought up to a level worth keeping. But if there's no serious, immediate prospect of improvement, I'll vote delete--the article as it stands is very uninformative. -- Trovatore 23:52, 19 July 2005 (UTC)
Without a source, this is unverifiable and should be deleted. Paul August ☎ 03:47, July 20, 2005 (UTC)
Sounds like a mini-consensus. Jitse, why don't you put it on VfD and get the ball rolling? If the article has defenders, that'll concentrate their minds. -- Trovatore 04:12, 20 July 2005 (UTC)
Went ahead and did it myself--hope you don't mind. -- Trovatore 05:48, 21 July 2005 (UTC)
The puzzle articles are under renewed attack.
I am concerned that these VfD's are being pushed by someone who has it in for puzzles. I am concerned that the people voting to delete never actually contribute to math or physics articles. In a moment of heated anger, were I to actually get that heated, then I would say that these people are anti-social vandals, and should be treated as such. But everyone knows I'm not a hot-head, right? linas 15:38, 20 July 2005 (UTC)
It should be noted that the articles are up for VFD as neologistic categorisation by Karl Scherer. Coupled with a distinct lack of non-categorisation content, existing only to fluff the categorisation enough to have an article for each class. The 100+ that have already been VFD'd were done so for predominantly the same reason.
Wikipedia is meant to be an encyclopedia, and not something to push your POV of how things should be categorised. Neither is it a collection of all information under the sun. ~~~~ 22:10, 20 July 2005 (UTC)
I nominated Template:ImportantLabeledEquation up for deletion (this was a bit discussed above, see Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mathematics#Dotted framebox around formulas). I myself think that dotted box looks ugly, and indenting should be enough to display a math equation or defintion. Oleg Alexandrov 18:43, 20 July 2005 (UTC)
The vote for deletion is at Wikipedia:Templates for deletion#Template:ImportantLabeledEquation. Oleg Alexandrov 18:44, 20 July 2005 (UTC)
I notice you recently recategorised quasiperfect number to 'integer sequences', but it seems odd to mark it as such given that no such numbers are known to exist. Do you see the categorisation as extending to any boolean property defined on integers (or maybe the naturals)? (I ask in all humility - it isn't clear to me whether the categorisation is appropriate or not.) Either way, it may also merit a clarification on Category::Integer_sequences. Hv 16:30, 24 July 2005 (UTC)
Something in the spirit of Category:Properties of natural numbers looks good to me. But can one shorten this in some way? Oleg Alexandrov 21:08, 24 July 2005 (UTC)
Well, there are 75 articles in Category:Integer sequences; and it would be appropriate to introduce some subcategories, such as Category:Divisor-related numbers and Category:Totient-related numbers. The first seems to be a category over at mathworld, the second a neologism. I was fishing for a commonly-used, commonly-accepted name for these two cats. In all cases, I assume that the category will also contain "theorems pertaining to divisor-related numbers" and "properties of numbers that are in the divisor-related number category". I think we can add wording stating this explicitly,once we know the correct, commonly accepted cat names. linas 02:20, 25 July 2005 (UTC)
The article for this number is up for deletion at Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/3.14. Uncle G 02:01:35, 2005-07-25 (UTC)
User: Cruise ( talk · contribs) has recently added a number of links to Visualstatistics.net and vstat.net. A number of the pages on this site about social science topics (e.g. slavery) are a mix of facts and patent nonsense, and I have thus removed them. I have no idea about the quality of the math and statistics pages linked, e.g. at multiple correlation, but it would be a good idea if someone double checked them. - SimonP 03:20, July 25, 2005 (UTC)
I have a disagreement over at cardinal number about using inline TeX which becomes HTML. I argue against it (that is, use HTML if TeX gives PNG), while the other opinion seems to be that if one really want HTML then one should set up the browser settings that way. Wonder what people think on this issue. Thanks. Oleg Alexandrov 22:40, 26 July 2005 (UTC)
The aforementioned articles are all up for deletion. Uncle G 02:18:02, 2005-07-27 (UTC)
I noticed that there is no Category:Symmetry. Should there be? Charles Matthews 10:13, 27 July 2005 (UTC)
Axis of symmetry -- Broken symmetry -- Circular symmetry -- Freiling's axiom of symmetry -- Homological mirror symmetry -- Mirror symmetry -- P-symmetry -- Plane of symmetry -- Rotational symmetry -- Spacetime symmetries -- Spontaneous symmetry breaking -- Symmetry -- Symmetry group
I agree about not including Freiling's axiom of symmetry. Let us keep this geometric/physical. So for example, the article symmetry of second derivatives should not be there either. Oleg Alexandrov 17:24, 27 July 2005 (UTC)
The word Math (as opposed to Maths) is quite jarring for many Brits, and to me it feels somewhat too informal for a category title anyway. How about moving articles in this category to Category:Mathematical lists? This is a task which bots can perform fairly easily, I believe. L upin 23:32, 27 July 2005 (UTC)
I think Category:Math lists better be renamed to Category:Mathematics lists, rather than Category:Mathematical lists. Any objections to that? :) Oleg Alexandrov 15:29, 28 July 2005 (UTC)
I see your point about mathematical instead of mathematics (and I agree). Lupin, I think you will need to submit a formal request at CfD for Category:Math lists to be deleted, and the articles moved to Category:Mathematical lists. I expect no problems with that, and then I can start the move. Oleg Alexandrov 22:06, 28 July 2005 (UTC)
Someone called "kate" once said to me:
I took her advice. Following a few weeks of down-and-dirty coding, I would like to announce blahtex version 0.1, a LaTeX to MathML converter designed specifically for Wikipedia (or more generally for the MediaWiki environment).
You can try it out interactively here. You can also see some samples extracted from Wikipedia here.
Important note: Your mileage may vary depending on OS/browser. I will get back to this in a moment. For now, I'll just say that your best bet is Mozilla/Firefox on Windows; if you're on a Mac then I'm afraid the world of MathML is rather inaccessible right now; if you're on Linux or another Unix then I really have no idea, I'm guessing Mozilla will be your best bet.
Before getting to more details, let's just check out this screenshot of blahtex plugged into MediaWiki:
Here's the wiki markup I used for this:
'''Archimedes''' was a [[Greek]] [[mathematician]] who is best known for the myriad mathematical [[notation]]s that he invented, most of which are still in use today. His earliest work included devising simple [[inline equation]]s such as <math>\sin x = \cos^2(y+t)</math> and <math>x^2 + y^2 = -e^{-\theta}</math>. He pioneered the use of greek symbols such as <math>\alpha</math> in English writing. While performing complicated calculations such as <math>\sum_{i=1}^3 i^2 = 47</math>, he noticed that despite the baseline of the equation lining up nicely with the surrounding text, the so-called [[displayed equation]] : <math>\displayed\sum_{i=1}^3 i = 46, \qquad \textrm{unless} 46 \not= 47</math> was probably better value. A similar effect occurred for integrals such as <math>\int_0^1 \sin^2 x \, dx</math>. He marked this up using the kludgy "\displayed" command, although he suspected that later and greater thinkers would come up with something better. When he couldn't make up his mind he would write : <math>\displayed F(x) = \begin{cases} \left\uparrow\frac{\partial^2 G}{\partial u \partial v}\right\} & \textrm{if the sky was \bf blue}, \\ A_0 + \cdots + A_k & \textit{if Troy was on the attack.} \end{cases}</math> He also invented the polynomial rings <math>\mathbf{R}[x]</math>, <math>\mathcal{C}[y]</math> and <math>\boldsymbol{\mathcal{C}[z]}</math>, and being fluent in Chinese he was comfortable writing things like :<math>\displayed 钱 = \sqrt{不好},</math> although historians have debated whether his Chinese really was all that good.
How did I get this screenshot? I installed MediaWiki on my laptop (an iBook G3), and fiddled around with a few bits of the code to change the MIME type etc, and redirected the math code so that it fed into blahtex instead of texvc. A rather ugly hack. It doesn't really work. I don't recommend it. But it's enough to get something like the image above. The browser was Mozilla running on a Windows XP machine.
In other words, all the equations already present on Wikipedia won't break.
Hmmm. A big claim. Probably not entirely true. In any case, a proposition capable of empirical testing.
Here's how I tried to test it. First, I downloaded a database dump of the current content of the English Wikipedia, from http://download.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/pages_current.xml.gz. (I got the file dated 14th July 2005. It's 3.4 GB uncompressed, 1GB compressed.) Then I wrote some code to suck out everything surrounded by <math> tags. After throwing out some junk caused by people enclosing <math> tags inside nowiki tags :-), and discarding duplicates, we are left with 50193 distinct equations (71561 including duplicates; we lost about 80 "equations" as junk). If you want to play with them, you can get the full list here, one line for each equation. I set my poor laptop the task of running texvc on all 50193 equations, which took about nine hours. (About 1800 of them failed to work with texvc; casual inspection suggests these are things in people's personal sandboxes, and markup being discussed on talk pages.) Then I ran blahtex on all the equations as well (under ten minutes :-)). Actually I did this several times during development, to gauge progess.
For ease of comparison, I have collected the result together here (36 MB). Uncompress it and load up "index.xml" in your browser. You'll find the entire corpus of English Wikipedia equations, divided up pseudo-randomly into 256 pages (each containing about 200 equations), with the LaTeX, PNG output from texvc, and MathML output side-by-side for handy comparison. As mentioned earlier, I've put one sample page up on the web here.
(Warning: there are about 50000 small files in there, so if your filesystem is anything like the one on my mac, it could take up to 200 MB of hard drive space, even though there's only about 100 MB of data.)
So you can have a look yourself to see what blahtex's strengths and weaknesses are.
I should mention that I studied portions of the texvc code quite carefully to work out exactly what it was doing, and which LaTeX commands it accepts.
Blahtex has command line options for choosing either inline equations (for use in running text) or displayed equations.
In my opinion, Wikipedia's greatest math rendering weakeness at the moment is the inability to do inline equations well. You can do simple stuff with HTML (although it renders inconsistenly with the displayed PNGs), and you can sure try to do PNGs inline, but they look pretty awful. In contrast, one of MathML's wonderful features is that it automatically lines up baselines and fonts with the surrounding text.
As you can see from the markup I gave above, I used the "\displayed" command to get displayed mode. This is just a temporary fix because I don't know enough about MediaWiki internals to make up another math tag (e.g. <mth>, or something like that). If blahtex is ever plugged into MediaWiki on a real site, I don't expect "\displayed" to be used.
You might point out that the font sizes don't match properly in the screenshot above, but I'm pretty sure this is more a result of my complete ignorance about CSS and stylesheets and MediaWiki internals, rather than any fault in MathML or the browser's rendering. As soon as someone who understands these things gets involved, the font size matching problem will go away.
As you can also see from the screenshot, blahtex is quite happy to accept Unicode characters. Try typing some chinese characters into the interactive form, either in math mode or inside text blocks (like \textrm). I'm sure that our friends at the non-English Wikipedias will find this very pleasant. Since MathML is based on XML, which in turn uses Unicode, it seems a bit silly not to support it.
Blahtex accepts input in UTF-8, and output is pure ASCII, but all internals are done with wide 32-bit characters, so it should be trivial to implement different input/output encodings if necessary.
I will be releasing the code under the GNU GPL, probably in the next week or so. I just need to remove various profanities from the code and generally clean it up. Stay tuned.
Except for a yacc parser, it's all written in C++, with a healthy dose of STL. Probably C++ isn't the best choice of language from a technical point of view, but it has the advantage that I know it, and so do lots of other people. I think this will encourage collaborative hacking in a way that is not possible for texvc, which is written in OCaml, which not many people know.
So far all is well and good. Now we come to the hard stuff.
There are actually two completely separate questions concerning browser compatibility.
The first question is: how does the browser know that it should be trying to translate MathML tags? In an ideal world, the following would happen. Joe loads up a Wikipedia page with equations on it. If he's running Mozilla or Firefox, everything just works. If he's running internet explorer and has MathPlayer installed, then everything just works. If he doesn't have MathPlayer installed, he gets a dialog box telling him that he should install MathPlayer; if he chooses not to, he gets the next best alternative (e.g. PNGs). If he's running a completely MathML-unaware browser (like Safari), then he should just get the PNGs again (perhaps with a message telling him to get a different browser!!)
I don't know how to make this happen. For various technical reasons that I don't understand very well, it seems like a very difficult problem. I will leave this to the experts to sort out.
The second question is: assuming our browser does understand MathML and knows that it should be doing so, how does its rendering look? Does it render things "correctly"? Do different browsers give different renderings?
Let me summarise my current understanding of the situation here. Overall, I think the best browser I've played with is Mozilla/Firefox on Windows. It does have a bunch of bugs (which I will say more about on another day), but it does give the best overall effect. You'll notice that there is a radio button for "Mozilla tweaks" on the interactive site. This activates a bunch of tweaks to the output to compensate for some of Mozilla's bugs. Almost all of my testing has been on Windows Mozilla. MathPlayer for Internet Explorer is occasionally competitive, but its pixelation doesn't get corrected by XP, which is a major disadvantage, and sometimes it does some really weird stuff with spacing.
(NB: if you're on Windows and your equations look pixelated in Mozilla, you might want to try turning on ClearType. On XP, go right-click on desktop, then Properties, then Appearance, then Effects, then "Smooth edges of screen fonts" should be set to "ClearType".)
Sadly, on the Mac, you don't really have anything very good. Mozilla's support got broken a few versions ago. I'm not sure why they're taking so long to fix it. You could try running an old version (I think 1.3 is ok), but it doesn't look that great. Despite being a big mac fan, I concede that currently Windows kills the Mac in this department — you have no idea how hard it was for me to admit that :-)
As for other OSes, I'm pretty ignorant. Maybe someone else can report on the situation.
You could also try Amaya. It's a bit frustrating to work with (the mac version anyway), but sometimes helpful for debugging.
I need your help. Play with blahtex and help me find and squish all those evil bugs.
Of course it would be fantastic if a MediaWiki developer knows how to plug blahtex into MediaWiki (at least the "MathML - experimental" option). Drop me a line if that's you.
I am going to run a blahtex development page at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Blahtex. Probably the best place to continue this discussion is over there. In particular you can report bugs there.
Goodnight guys and gals, I hope you enjoy playing with blahtex.
Dmharvey Talk 02:17, 28 July 2005 (UTC)
"If he doesn't have MathPlayer installed, he gets a dialog box telling him that he should install MathPlayer"
Very promising. Almost all formulas are understandable in my browser at work (Firefox 1.0 on Linux with Fedora Core release 2), though the spacing is often wrong; almost certainly the browser fault. Re 99d1d9133a0a5551e047a9560783aedc, there is a special latex code which should have been used, I think \ll, so it's not blahtex's fault. I hope dmharvey forgives me for saying that my personal opinion is that translating latex to mathml is the easy part and there is a lot that needs to be done, but as I said, it's a very promising start. I poked a bit around in the mediawiki code lately, going through some of the texmf bugs, and I'd be quite willing to lend a hand (within my time constraints, of course). -- Jitse Niesen ( talk) 12:11, 28 July 2005 (UTC)
There are quite a few articles that use "n-th", "n-th", and/or "nth" (similarly for "ith", etc). All of the literature I checked uses "nth" (and occasionally "nth"). The only justification for "-th" that I can see today is if you don't have italics available, such as in a newsgroup. Based on the articles I've seen, I think that "nth" is more common in Wikipedia than "n-th" and "n-th", but I didn't do a formal count.
I think the standard style should be "nth". Bubba73 22:14, July 28, 2005 (UTC)
I prefer nth; but I could understand an editor deciding that it was unclear. A standard, but not a mandatory one?
But then, I spent today watching the anti-Communist revert wars and the &^$%&$ AD/CE revert wars, so I'm a little more laissez-faire than usual. Septentrionalis 22:40, 28 July 2005 (UTC)
I think n-th is marginally easier to read. I think i-th, for example, is definitely easier to read than ith. I think (n − 1)th is not a sensible piece of notation, for example; and the sort of thing that shows we should mostly aim to be clear and readable. Charles Matthews 16:34, 29 July 2005 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Votes_for_deletion/Log/2005_July_29#Arc_Sine -- R.Koot 14:24, 29 July 2005 (UTC)
Is this article salvagable; does it even make sense? Law of information -- R.Koot 15:18, 31 July 2005 (UTC)