My knowledge of Lie algebras is a single course, but this potentially confusing notation was never mentioned. Has anyone else heard of this? Septentrionalis 18:40, 1 June 2006 (UTC)
I have extensively revised and cleaned up Divisibility rule, so please take a look and help to improve it more. As I'm not fully experienced at all the editing tools, I'm sure the formatting and adherence to guidelines and standards could be improved.
I'd like to create a number of other pages related to mental math, so I'd like to get feedback on this one, the first I've heavily edited. (The current mental arithmetic has only the most basic, simple of techniques.
See Wikipedia:Categories_for_deletion#Category:Thousand. Oleg Alexandrov ( talk) 18:57, 3 June 2006 (UTC)
Some Chinese news sources have picked up a story about a recent journal article by Cao and Zhu, experts on the Ricci flow, who have written what they (and the journal editors) claim is a "complete" proof of the geometrization conjecture, by giving more details of Perelman's work. Slashdot has also picked up on this. As a consequence, there has been several editors who have insisted on placing mention of Cao and Zhu's paper in the lead section. I have disagreed (see talk page discussion and also some of my edit summaries for extensive reasons). Please continue discussion there. I would also appreciate if people could pop in and check that things don't get out of control. Thanks. -- C S (Talk) 02:15, 6 June 2006 (UTC)
The article on American Institute of Mathematics has been nominated for deletion by someone. R.e.b. 13:02, 6 June 2006 (UTC)
The PlanetMath Exchange project has today reached a new milestone, with 40% of all PlanetMath articles reviewed.
For those of you who have not been following the project, I thought I would take this opportunity to report on the status of the project, and the progress which has been made to date. The purpose of the project is to review all PlanetMath (PM) articles (which are licensed under GFDL) and to incorporate any appropriate PM content not adequately covered on Wikipedia (WP).
There are over 4800 PM articles listed, of which over 1900 of which have been reviewed so far. Of the reviewed articles, 143 PM articles have been copied to WP, creating entirely new WP articles, and 121 have been merged into already existing WP articles. Additionally, a further 75 PM articles have been identified as needing to be copied, and 349 needing to be merged.
The project maintains 49 lists of PM articles grouped by topic (e.g. 11 Number theory, 26 Real functions, 54 General topology). The entire list of lists is compiled into a "Article lists" table, and statistics are maintained for each topic's list.
19 editors have identified themselves as participants, and 26 have reviewed at least one PM article (see Editor contributions).
Oleg Alexandrov, has provided several excellent tools to facilitate the project. He and Mathbot created the original 49 lists (first created in Feb 2005, and updated with new PM articles in March 2006). They also perform daily updates of statistics in the "Article lists", and "Editor contributions" tables. In addition, Oleg has created a convenient tool to assist in converting a PM article to wiki markup.
I heartily encourage everyone to join the fun.
Paul August ☎ 02:06, 8 June 2006 (UTC)
See Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Direct_logic -Dan 15:36, 8 June 2006 (UTC)
Please vote at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/American Institute of Mathematics. Michael Hardy 23:33, 9 June 2006 (UTC)
Hi, I left a question regarding the correct statement of the Ryll-Nardzewski fixed point theorem at Talk:Ryll-Nardzewski fixed point theorem. Cheers, AxelBoldt 04:10, 11 June 2006 (UTC)
I invite interested parties to make comments at Talk:Poincaré_conjecture#Peer_review. -- C S (Talk) 12:48, 11 June 2006 (UTC)
An anon recently redirected the wikilink in Chaos Theory from the first to the second. Is this legitimite? Are these the same person? — Arthur Rubin | (talk) 15:30, 11 June 2006 (UTC)
I wanted to {{ prod}} this article. But to be sure I thought I'd check. Is this article nonsense or not? I couldn't google the name, but that doesn't always mean anything. Garion96 (talk) 00:20, 12 June 2006 (UTC)
I'm skeptical that the name is very common. I can't imagine the theorem would even have a name amongst mathematicians. So I think the term would only be used in certain kinds of introductory course work. Google gives no results (off Wikipedia), so nobody that has mentioned it, for example, in a course webpage. The only place I can think the term may exist is in some textbooks somewhere. Even in that eventuality, I don't know if it's worth having an article based on that amount of usage. I guess it does no harm, but I'm also hard-pressed to imagine a situation where we would want to link to it. -- C S (Talk) 19:18, 12 June 2006 (UTC)
Over at Talk:Constant of motion, I've been reduced to babling and waving my hands to the effect that a "system of differential equations with constants of motion == integrable system == system with symmetries" and conversely, "non-integrable system == system with no constants of motion". However, it occurs to me that I know of no grand theorems making this claim. Are there any? Is this in fact a collection of small results in narrow fields that have accreted into a grand truth? Guidance? How can one make this clear at a college-math level? It doesn't help that the article integrable system is somewhat foreboding in its current form. linas 01:30, 13 June 2006 (UTC)
You make a good point about the current article being somewhat forbidding. I would go a step further. I don't think integrable system should redirect to integrability conditions. An integrable system usually (?) refers to a Hamiltonian system with a full set of Poisson-commuting flows. Naturally, integrability conditions do play a role, but there is more structure a priori in an integrable system. For the point about conserved quantities for an integrable system, since the Hamiltonian flows commute, there should be loads of conserved quantities. (As you ask, is there a general theorem here? Does Noether apply? etc). Hence a system without "enough" conserved quantities will be non-integrable. I'm not so sure about the converse. Silly rabbit 13:15, 13 June 2006 (UTC)
On Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mathematics/Wikipedia 1.0 there is a request for the most notable mathematicians whos biographies could be included in Wikipedia:Version 0.5 Nominations. Suggestions for celebratity mathematicians welcome. Possible also assesments of the quality of their article also welcome. -- Salix alba ( talk) 07:45, 15 June 2006 (UTC)
Does WP have a glossary that translates the language of probability theory to measure theory? I've got a complaint on my talk page that I'm trying to decipher; I don't understand Score (statistics) and Fisher information, although I suspect I would, if they were restated in terms of measure theory. The root of this interest is the rather astounding edit here, which is so remarkable, I abstract it here:
Surely, the ommission of M-theory and intelligent design is just an oversight? linas 00:38, 17 June 2006 (UTC)
A new user mathisreallycool ( talk · contribs) has made several edits which to my mind betray a fundamental lack of knowledge in certain mathematical topics. I have reverted several additions by this user, and I want to vet some other things by the user. For example, the article Konfisakhar space seems unobjectionable, it's referenced. However I've never heard of this idea, it's not in any of my texts, nor is it in my EDM2, and frankly, I find the idea of a fractal vector space hard to believe. Can someone (maybe with access to the book by Schaeffer) verify this concept? Otherwise, I shall want to AfD is. And maybe also this definition of semidirect products for monoids? - lethe talk + 07:14, 17 June 2006 (UTC)
JA: Hi, could you help sort out the continuing tangles at Propositional calculus? First there was that improper name change last month, and I let it go because the user who did it seemed fairly competent and added some good stuff, but now the word "logic" seems to be inviting anonymous users to take the article out of the mathematical logic designation and add any sort of half-baked exposition that they can cook up. I don't know my way around the procedures well enough to keep dealing with sort of stuff. Much appreciated, Jon Awbrey 05:15, 17 June 2006 (UTC)
Some editors appear to believe that there is a convention which requires the use of "if" in definitions rather than " iff" (short for "if and only if"). A definition is a proposition which equates a new term to a compound expression composed of old terms. So using "if" is wrong. One should use "iff" or an equivalent, such as: "if and only if", "is", "is the same as", "means", "is equivalent to", "when and only when", etc.. JRSpriggs 08:20, 17 June 2006 (UTC)
I strongly support the use of "if" in definitions over either "iff" or "if and only if". By the way this has (of course) been discussed before. I will now provide for your reading pleasure this oldie but goldi, this blast from our past:
Paul August ☎ 18:38, 17 June 2006 (UTC)
In regards to Lambiam's comment on a style reference, a popular one is Nick Higham's "Handbook of Writing for the Mathematical Sciences." On page 20 of the second edition it says:
In my own experience, I cannot recall ever seeing "if and only if" in a definition in formal mathematical writing. Can someone supporting the use of "if and only if" cite a current journal article with this usage or give reference to a style manual that advocates its use? Lunch 20:44, 19 June 2006 (UTC)
If the consensus is that "iff" may be confusing because some lay-persons do not know what it means and it might be mistaken for a misspelling of "if", then I will not object when other editors change "iff" to "if and only if" or an equivalent. However, I still object to using "if" by itself between the definiendum and the definiens. JRSpriggs 03:52, 20 June 2006 (UTC)
"Often ... the definition is a statement that expresses a logical equivalence between the definiendum and the definiens." When we define a mathematical symbol (constant, function, or relation), the definiendum (symbol defined) is a new word being added to our language; and it has no meaning other than that given to it by the definition. The definition is a postulate which gives meaning to the new word. Since it is not normally our intention to add strength to our set of axioms (as the axioms of ZFC), this must be a conservative extension. And we should be able to translate any sentence involving the new word into one which omits it and has the same meaning. If you put a conditonal ("if") rather than a biconditional ("if and only if") between the definiendum and the definiens, then you are doing one of three things:
In conclusion, definitions should not be conditionals. JRSpriggs 03:52, 20 June 2006 (UTC)
Currently we have 12102 articles in the list of mathematics articles. Out of them, 1070 are redirects (see the complete list). Redirects get created in several ways
In my view it is the third which makes for most redirects.
While redirects are very important, I see no good reason for why they should stay listed in the list of mathematics articles (I estimate that there are at least 2000 math redirects which are not there).
I wonder what people think of a big purge, removing all redirects from the list of mathematics articles. Of course, if at some point a redirect becomes back an article, my bot will add it back to the list. Thanks. Oleg Alexandrov ( talk) 22:37, 17 June 2006 (UTC)
Done. The log is at User:Mathbot/Changes mathlist. Oleg Alexandrov ( talk) 02:39, 19 June 2006 (UTC)
Hi people. For those of you who have been watching developments concerning m:blahtex, MathML support on wikipedia, etc, I'm sure you've noticed nothing much has been happening for a while. Well, for the past few months, Jitse and I have been trying pretty damn hard to push buttons in the background to make things happen, but sadly the core developers simply haven't taken the bait. It seems to be a case of "yeah, it looks interesting, but we've got like 10,000 other things we're trying to do, and we just haven't got around to checking out the code yet...". It seems that wikipedia just doesn't have enough engineer-hours to give us the attention we need to get this going, and there's only so much pushing that Jitse and I can do without becoming annoying pains in the arse.
The status now is that I'm certainly not spending any more time on the code until I have some indication that there's a chance wikipedia is going to use it. And I've had enough of all the promotional "hey everyone isn't blahtex wonderful and y'all should be using it". It's tiring and not really my style. I enjoy writing code, not selling it.
So unless the people who hang out on this page somehow band together and make the developers realise that MathML is something that people want, the project is going to die a serene death. I took the initiative about a year ago, and wrote 13,000 lines of code to prove that it was possible. I'm happy to help out some more, and of course I look forward to the day when there is good mathml support in wikipedia. But someone else needs to take the initiative now, because I'm through.
Anyway, I think I'll go to bed now, make sure I'm bright and fresh to watch Australia defeat Brazil 6-0 tomorrow.
Good luck guys. Dmharvey 03:57, 18 June 2006 (UTC)
But so what is the next step? Campaign to get it installed on test.wikipedia.org? What can we do to help? Send messages to mediawiki-l? I notice searching through the archives, that you have previously announced releases of blahtex to that mailing list, and they have never had any response. Have you ever had any dialogue with anyone from mediawiki development about this code? Whom do we talk to? - lethe talk + 10:43, 18 June 2006 (UTC)
At the risk of sounding too critical, how difficult would it be to make things work for the current "bastardized TeX"? The idea of breaking old revisions of articles without it being obvious why that is makes me kind of queasy ...
Is this a major issue? How do things fail after the change? Backwards compatibility is something that needs to be addressed, even if it cannot be guaranteed.
Not that I think this is a huge problem, if the scope is that small.
Otherwise, I'm with lethe. Whom do we talk to, and what's their favourite ice cream flavour (for bribes, you know)?
RandomP 11:00, 18 June 2006 (UTC)
I'd just like to qualify my remarks: it seems that even today, "history" won't get you anything like the old version of an article, at least when that article uses images from the commons.
I think it would be really cool if someone wrote, essentially, a simulated wayback machine for wikipedia, that went back to the wikicode, images, and math layout as they were when the revision was created. I thought that's what history was, but apparently, not so.
So that's not an issue either, and can we please have mathml now?
RandomP 14:09, 18 June 2006 (UTC)
I sent this email to mediawiki-l just now:
From: lethe at charter dot net
Subject: Blahtex: what's the next step
Date: June 18, 2006 8:08:37 AM CDT
To: mediawiki-l@Wikimedia.org
David Harvey and others has been working hard on Blahtex, the next generation in MediaWiki math rendering technology. Visit
http://www.blahtex.org/ for more information and
http://wiki.blahtex.org/go/Main_Page for a running demo hosted by Jitse Niesen.
Harvey suggests that blahtex will afford a significant performance advantage, but the main impetus is the ability to render MathML. Support for MathML is not widespread at the moment, so the need for Blahtex is not urgent, but it is the future, and we have reason to believe that Wikipedia's adoption could goad browser developers to speed their efforts (the answer to the old chicken and egg of who comes first, browser support or use by web pages could be: Wikipedia comes first).
It has to happen someday, and today is as good a day as any. Harvey says the software is ready for the next step, and wants to move forward, but doesn't know whom to talk to in order to make this happen. I'm writing you to voice my full support for Harvey's and Niesen's efforts, to find out what needs to be done to take the next step towards rolling this software out, and to ask if there is anything I can do to help the developers to get this software ready for deployment.
Thanks
lethe
I was hoping that several others of you would chime in on the mailing list. If we had a chorus of complaining voices, we would be harder to ignore. Currently, the developers watching that mailing list have ignored me completely. What should I do? Send another, more plaintive, email? - lethe talk + 11:51, 20 June 2006 (UTC)
I'm not a developer, nor am I Jimbo, but putting myself in their shoes I'd be much more worried about the font issue than about accepting an apparently well-tested huge chunk of outside code. In fact, not being in their shoes this worries me. Many people access Wikipedia from computers they have no control over, and are in no position to download and install fonts for, even if willing to do so. Others may try to and fail. Most wouldn't even try, and miss out on all Wikipedia has to offer that involves formulas. I think it is important to keep blahtex alive, but aim at introduction after the availability of the required fonts has become common. -- Lambiam Talk 13:53, 18 June 2006 (UTC)
See here. I'm not precisely sure about terminology here, but perhaps this makes Jitse a Developer. This is good news, but I don't promise mathml tomorrow. Still some work to do. We'll keep you posted. Thanks guys for your encouragement, and especially lethe for the insistent emails on mediawiki-l :-) Dmharvey 12:00, 22 June 2006 (UTC)
Maybe this is not the place for this (I am aware that this is not un all-purpose forum), but here it goes. I intend to order some math books from Amazon, but I'm not sure what to get. As it seems to me that there are some very good mathematicians here, I think you could help me a lot with some recommendations. Now for some background, to understand what I specifically need: I'm an undergraduate math student (though also an economics graduate and working economist) and I pursue math mostly for my own curiosity and because I truly enjoy it (more than economics :D). I need something mainly appropriate for self-learning, so I'm targeting good classic texts on major fields or other good books. I prefer books that don't shy away from advanced/abstract concepts, but preferably give motivation for concepts and some intuitive explanaition/interpretation. Also, I learn the most from books which include examples worked-out in detail and/or solved relevant problems. Also, note that unfortunately cost is an issue, so don't recommend too many books that are only somewhat helpfull (though by all means recommend books that you consider good, even if they are not very popular). Hope that you will have some advice for me... AdamSmithee 20:48, 18 June 2006 (UTC)
Well, first of all tx for replying! As I said, I know this is not the place (and I'll probably try sci.math, which I didn't know about), but I tried it because I came to trust many of you guys. As for my background and interests: I'm an undergraduate student in math at this time. So far, my exposure was almost entirely to Romanian textbooks, which are very tightly written and unfortunately are generally very good for reference but not for learning (this is somewhat of a characteristic of Romanian academic books). On the other hand, I've read quite a few American graduate level textbooks in economics and I noticed that, generally, they are much better for learning (also, reading some freely available online math books lead me to believe this is also true for math). To give an example, at this time I'm struggling with linear connections and covariant derivative, but my (Romanian) books insist to much on tightely written modern coordinate-free stuff, giving virtually no motivation and no explanation, and I'm having trouble understanding why the stuff is defined that way, what does it mean and what is it good for.
At this moment my interests are rather wide and I just want to get a reasonable background in the main fields. However, I do have a sweet spot for abstract algebra, and I'm interested in probability and statistics (including links to measure theory, numeric analysis etc.) for the aplications to economics. But I'm also very interested in stuff like differential geometry for instance. As an example of one book that I have heard about, and I might get, I know about Jacobson's 'Basic Algebra' (though I don't know how that is), but I have no idea what else is there.
Regarding level, it is hard to say what undergraduate in Romania means compared to other education systems, but it is possibly more advanced than American undergraduate level (?maybe?). AdamSmithee 23:25, 18 June 2006 (UTC)
I have just had a brief look at the page Poussin proof, and apart from being a short stub, at least half of it seems to be mathematical rubbish. I would like to have a go at making this into a sensible article - but about the Dirichlet divsor problem (the first sentence of the Possin page), as I can't find anything about this elsewhere. If I have missed it, and there really is a page about the Dirichlet divisor problem, plase let me know before I waste too much time ... Madmath789 12:11, 19 June 2006 (UTC) (OK, having read it again, it is not total rubbish, but badly worded.)
(I've copied the following from Talk:Mathematics. — Paul August ☎ 16:56, 19 June 2006 (UTC))
I would like to call the communities attention to and personally protest a decision at Wikisource to exclude and delete a significant portion of the material that was part of its original charter. Prior to April 29 of this year, Wikisource:What is Wikisource? listed the following as included material:
"Some things we include are:
On that date the project page was changed to explicitly exclude:
Obviously, this represents a major change in the scope of the project. It is based on a single poll conducted between April 4 and 27, 2006 Wikisource:Scriptorium/Archives/2006/04. Previous discussions had been held with opposite results Wikisource:Wikisource talk:What Wikisource includes. A primary reason given for the new change is that the editors participating do not feel competent to maintain this material and have little interest in it. However apparently no effort was made to notify participants in the previous discussions, nor to recruit new editors that might have an interest. Note that there are many active projects pages in mathematics and the sciences where such people might be found.
There was also no discussion of methods for reducing the load on editors, such as locking material after review. In general, reference material does not need or benefit from frequent edits.
I certainly respect the efforts of the regular editors on Wikisource and agree that their views should be shown some deference. However the process they chose is not sufficient. At the very least, I think there needs to be broader community input into such a massive change in the scope of a Wikimedia project. Even if this material is best excluded from Wikisource, I believe it deserves to be part of an encyclopedia and that any material already contributed should be moved elsewhere rather than be deleted. The simplest solution would be to move mathematical and scientific reference material to Wikipedia, where there are large communities to evaluate and protect this information. An argument could be made that mathematical data belongs in Wikicommons because it is, or potentially can be, language neutral. Or perhaps there should be a new Wikireference project. Computer source code deserves a separate discussion, since there are so many other open source code repositories available.
At this point hundreds of articles have been marked for deletion. See Wikisource:Category:Deletion requests/Reference data Some material has apparently aready been deleted. There is nothing left in Category:Mathematics. I would propose that all article deletions on Wikisource based on this change be frozen until a fuller, community-wide discussion can be held.
I have also posted these comments at Wikisource:Scriptorium, where I think the primary discussion should be held.-- agr 16:01, 19 June 2006 (UTC) -- agr 16:01, 19 June 2006 (UTC)
(end of copied text)
I realize this has been discussed several times in the past, to the agreement of accepting such material. However, the current state of reference data on Wikisource is unacceptable. The community members who are active on this site have little interest, and in some cases understanding, of the data we have been hosting. Although there have been editors that were adamant that this material should be included here, they have not remained active in the organization nor matainance of it. Much of this material is beyond the active administrators ability to even distinguish vandalism from corrections. Because of this current state of affairs there have been nominations for deletion for some of this data. However I feel we need discuss the larger questions of the place of reference material on Wikisource before we make any deletions.
I think [Ec has] hit the nail on the head with "Good rules support existing practice rather than shape it." The problem with the original suggestion is such advertisement would atract people who have no understanding of existing practice. That is my concern. I feel anyone familar with existing practice will be aware of policy disscussion through the normal in-project channels.
Yes, I would like a list of the material that has been deleted. I think it is totally reasonable to expect some notice and time for us to decide what should be kept and where. I get the message that this material is not wanted at Wikisource, but that is no excuse for simply deleting it without informing anyone who might be interested. The fact that no supporter of the material spoke up during the April discussion should have been a clue that there was not adequate notice. -- agr 20:16, 19 June 2006 (UTC)
I certainly was not trying to suggest that anyone is behaving like Nazis and I apologize if the title is too harsh. As I said in my original post, I believe the regular editors at Wikisource are due some deference in their decision making. But I find the wholesale deletion of articles belonging to topics no longer in favor, Mathematics in particular, to be very disturbing. It is one thing to change the scope of a project, another to simply discard material submitted and accepted in good faith.-- agr 00:38, 20 June 2006 (UTC)
To cool things down a bit, I have changed the topic heading here and at scriptorium. User:Bookofjude has finally provided a list of the material deleted after others told me to search through the logs. That is a big help. I really don't want to make this personal, but I must point out that after the November discussion led to a clear consensus on keeping reference material, I submitted a detailed proposal on what tabular material to include to the discussion page on January 18, 2006. It received no further comment. I think I had every reason to think the matter was settled. -- agr 14:52, 20 June 2006 (UTC)
Although I am a bystander in the debate, though in favour of keeping math tables on wikisource, I would like to remark that I read Wikipedia Signpost regularly and I don't remember any remark about voting about massive deletions of existing material on Wikisource. Considering that fact that Wikisource is not so high profile and people here could be interested in the voting, I think it's a bit unfair. Samohyl Jan 16:47, 20 June 2006 (UTC)
As best I can determine, here is a list of the math-related articles that have been deleted. Birgitte§β has kindly restored them temporarily:
Also there were computer source code articles with the following titles:
I'm not sure these have mcuch value. Finally, I believe there were once articles listing pi and e to a million places. These would be easy to reconstruct if anyone wants to make a case for them.
I think a case can be made for moving at least the first two or three articles above to Wikipedia, presumably retitled as "Table of..." Comments?-- agr 18:35, 20 June 2006 (UTC)
The section Old Babylonian Mathematics (2000-1600 BC) of this article seems to be a copy of this page (starting with "Perhaps the most amazing aspect of ..."). It's especially funny in sentences like "In our article on Pythagoras's theorem in Babylonian mathematics we examine...", where in reality, no such article exists on Wikipedia. What should be done about it?
On a somewhat related issue, User:Chem1 has created the article Ibn al-Banna (1256-1321), to whom he attributes the invention of the iterative process for finding the square root of a number - aka the "Babylonian method". This doesn't seem right. -- Meni Rosenfeld ( talk) 14:41, 21 June 2006 (UTC)
I would like to propose that all usages of "iff" to mean "if and only if" be replaced by "if and only if", as iff is not a very common abbreviation. Thoughts? (I actually did a bit of this but Oleg Alexandrov advised me to ask here – if there is a consensus for me to remove those edits it will be no problem for me to do it.) — Mets501 ( talk) 20:24, 21 June 2006 (UTC)
I've never poked my head into the Math WikiProject before, but a few months back I did some work on Fraction (mathematics) before I had to take a break to tend to both Real Life and my proper job. Looking around, I can't help feeling there's a lot to be done, and it's not just a matter of the one article:
I'd keep going, but another task is calling me from my PC. I know that fractions might not be a hip'n'trendy subject, but I work as a tutor at a community college and there are a few math topics that come up a lot, and manipulating fractions is one of them. :) I'd be willing to take the lead on this, as long as I have the support of the Project. -- Jay (Histrion) ( talk • contribs) 21:09, 21 June 2006 (UTC)
I just created a new template, {{ In sqrt}}. It basically displays the radical (√) and the the number with an overline. For example, if you enter {{In sqrt|x}}, it will produce √x. It works great for all CSS capable browsers, otherwise it just displays a radical sign. I was wondering, should we put this in the mathematics manual of style as a recommendation for all inline square roots? — Mets501 ( talk) 01:15, 23 June 2006 (UTC)
subst:
so that the text as it originally looked will still be able to be read.
J
ɪ
m
p
04:26, 31 May 2007 (UTC)Wikipedia:Categories for deletion/Log/2006 June 23#Category:Degenerate forms Oleg Alexandrov ( talk) 01:48, 23 June 2006 (UTC)
JA: Could use a third opinion at Operation (mathematics), a page that was created as a gloss on the generic concept but is now being converted into "hwk-helper" with material that either belongs or is pretty much already covered at Binary operation and other places.
JA: Looking down the road, in both directions, I am seeing here a more generic issue for the WP math community. For instance, the article in question was categorized as Mathematical Logic, and is now being recategorized as Elementary Mathematics. I think that there needs to be a standard operating procedure for sorting out and coordinating "tutorial" and "standard" articles. I notice that the physics folks already have a template for doing this. Anyway, something to think about. Thanks, Jon Awbrey 17:56, 23 June 2006 (UTC)
JA: This is like deja vu of discussions that we had on Function and Relation, and so I'd rather focus on the generic problem, as I'm fresh out of ergs to be caring about this stuff unless others do. I created this article because of a recurring need in other articles — check the "what links here" page — for a quick gloss to a suitably general concept of k-adic operations. And now anybody chasing those links is likely to skip the whole darn thing before getting past the TOC. What we have now is two articles whose front ends are devoted to Binary operations, and so it seems like the whole thing is better dealt with by way of a 1-liner up top like: {{for|an introductory treatment|Binary operation}}. Jon Awbrey 19:48, 23 June 2006 (UTC)
Please see my proposal here. — Mets501 ( talk) 22:20, 23 June 2006 (UTC)
span.texhtml {font-size=14px}
"? That will at least get it to be the same line height as the sans serif.
[5] Dmharvey 18:35, 24 June 2006 (UTC)
It is more like saying "Every positive real number has a unique square root, i.e. a negative number which when multiplied by itself gives the positive number.". He is treating the abnormal case as the normal. JRSpriggs 11:01, 27 June 2006 (UTC)
When I do "random article" I occasionally come across mathematical formulae (and sometimes with general science books etc). It would be useful for those of us who are not mathematically informed if there was a "basic explanation" as to use and purpose.
See the examples I put on Wikipedia:Requests for expansion for what I mean. Jackiespeel 16:54, 26 June 2006 (UTC)
On the request for expansion page, you wrote:
The article "finitary boolean function" describes a simple generalization of a boolean function. There's not much else to write. Perhaps that article needs to be merged into the "boolean-valued function" article. The article "boolean domain" is just a definition, and is already marked as a stub. The article "boolean-valued function" gives what you ask for: it describes the function and gives several fields where it's used. Could you explain why that doesn't meet what you want? Lunch 18:32, 26 June 2006 (UTC)
I was busy trying to make a Strongly regular graph separate article, and I was wondering : what will we agree on the conventions.
Graph theory can really be annoying when you really want to do it right. For instance my syllabus agreed on not including disconnected graphs and their complements, which in turn implied .
The spectrum also changes when you allow disconnectedness: the degree of disconnected graphs becomes an eigenvalue with more than dimension one.
What is your opinion?
Evilbu 18:22, 26 June 2006 (UTC)
Okay, well first of all, I checked my syllabus and found that followig THOSE conditions works out eventually. But I don't want to get into any trouble with my own University for copying very explicitly. The problem is that the University of Ghent is such a big 'player' in the field of incidence geometry, that a lot on the internet (and that is assuming you find something) comes from their sites I bet you also disapprove then of my pg(s,t,\alpha) notation in the partial geometry article? I read that Formula page and even applied one of the guidelines on Paley graph. But I am totally confused with HTML/Tex/PNG, especially since I was instructed very recently to switch my Preferences to 'Always render PNG'. Evilbu 13:09, 28 June 2006 (UTC)
I noticed User:Bluebot is automatically converting HTML entities to Unicode on various articles. See e.g. [6]. Does anyone have an opinion on whether such conversion is desirable in mathematics articles? Would it hinder possible future efforts to automatically switch to MathML? - Gauge 05:55, 28 June 2006 (UTC)
<math>
tags, and unicodifying only takes place outside <math>
tags, so it would have no effect of MathML. As far as being desireable, it makes it easier to read the article in edit mode, especially for newbies who are not used to used to HTML entities. —
Mets501 (
talk)
12:44, 28 June 2006 (UTC)
<math>\text{∫}_0^1</math>
-- yuck!). It might become desirable to limit the characters that could be used in text mode (e.g. extended latin, and other scripts like japanese, chinese, klingon, etc).
Dmharvey
20:49, 28 June 2006 (UTC)
<math>
tags, then BlahTeX will render it as HTML, anyway. So there seems to be no reason why we should keep using math formulas written in HTML. In fact, I'm not quite sure why we use inline HTML now for things like variables or "flat" equations that would render (in <math>
tags) now as HTML now anyway with texvc. —
Mets501 (
talk)
01:13, 29 June 2006 (UTC)
In response to KSmrq's comment about prior discussions involving unicode in mathematics article, on this page, there have been at least three:
Paul August ☎ 21:37, 28 June 2006 (UTC)
Are people interested in having the \mathscr command available? (Provided by \usepackage{mathrsfs}.) Here's what it looks like:
The top one is \mathscr, the bottom is \mathcal (which is what we have now). I've noticed that \mathscr (or something similar) is quite popular in certain fields. I've noticed it especially in functional analysis.
There wouldn't be any difference in MathML because MathML only defines a single "mathvariant=script".
Opinions welcome. Dmharvey 19:25, 28 June 2006 (UTC)
Is anyone aware of any sources that use both a mathscr-like font and a mathcal-like font, with different semantics? There's a thread on the www-math mailing list discussing this now. If anyone could build a case, we might well get two different font variants in MathML 3.0 (which is on the drawing board). Dmharvey 18:39, 5 July 2006 (UTC)
You know how we all put something like "\,\!" at the end of <math> blocks to force the output as PNG? Well I was just doing some database work and happened to be trying things out on the hebrew wikipedia, and discovered that they all put "\ " at the beginning of the equation! (e.g. [9]) Or is it the end of the equation? I don't even know... the </math> comes before the <math>... Dmharvey 22:02, 28 June 2006 (UTC)
\
" is at the beginning. If we think of the eqn as an atom in a right-to-left context, then to the reader the blank space appears to appear to the left of and therefore after the atom (instead of being part of the atom). --
Lambiam
Talk
22:50, 28 June 2006 (UTC)More database work.... last time I checked around the beginning of March, the 13 largest wikipedias had 208,000 distinct equations altogether. Now (as of about mid-June) there are about 289,000. That works out at about a 10% growth rate per month. Pretty amazing. Dmharvey 02:06, 29 June 2006 (UTC)
The " proof that 0.999... equals 1" article is once more under attack — from the inside. And for the n-th time, Melchoir is involved. I'm sick of dealing with him and (now) Supadawg. If anyone is interested, please get involved in whatever way you see fit. As for me, it's come down to a revert war or walking away.
Some of you may be aware I completely stopped editing Wikipedia articles awhile back, except for really minor things like typos. I confined my contributions to talk pages, because I had no more stomach for seeing articles obstinately trashed by editors with inadequate subject knowledge, horrible writing skills, and no social skills. That worked for me, though not so well for the articles I abandoned. In the current instance, I can't see wasting more time debating with someone who pretends a proof using Dedekind cuts and the Archimedean property is original research, and who doesn't see a problem in beginning a sentence with a decimal point, but who knows exactly how the article should be rewritten.
However, if you long for abuse or have a desperate yearning to save the world (or both!), here's your opportunity. You'll need to act quickly, for the Mongol hordes are invading as we speak. They have already insisted that an article devoted to a proof should not be so named, nor should state that in the opening sentence. ("It's unencyclopedic!") Next on their agenda is a complete rewrite. It boggles the mind.
OK, so saving this article probably won't save the world. Still, I'll bet it gets more page views than the snake lemma and the hairy ball theorem put together (no disrespect intended). Please stop by the talk page, or help revert. ( This version works for me, tolerably.)
Just for fun:
Thanks, all. -- KSmrq T 06:42, 29 June 2006 (UTC)
I'm happy to join the corps of reverters for that article, but I cannot in good conscience revert to the version you link, which is buried behind over a hundred edits already. The best I can do is add the article to my watchlist and revert future changes. - lethe talk + 15:37, 29 June 2006 (UTC)
Is there a way to have a redirect focus the point on a specific section of the article? Specifically, I have in mind the redirect from Koszul connection to covariant derivative, which reads
If you follow the link explicitly, by clicking the above link, then the point focuses on the relevant section. But if you follow the link Koszul connection, then you are taken to covariant derivative without the change in focus. Any thoughts or advice? Silly rabbit 17:32, 29 June 2006 (UTC)
Sorry if I startled you, the WikiProject, but I boldly separated the List of Mathematicians article into eight smaller articles. Prior to this, the article was giant: it ranked in the Top 50 on
Special:Longpages. Seeing as this is problematic, since not all of our users have the patience to load a page that is hundreds of kilobytes in size, I took the liberty to divide it into smaller pieces. I'm sorry if it's unacceptable to the WikiProject, but I was doing what I felt was good for the list. —
THIS IS MESSED
OCKER
(TALK)
02:50, 30 June 2006 (UTC)
This article is extremely POV, particularly considering the open criticism of Geostatistics within the main page. I was hoping that someone with more experience could build some equations and expand on the evolution of geostatistics. Considering how widely geostatistics is used for the natural sciences, environmental planning, climate studies, oceanic studies, military analysis, urban planning, and Geographic Information Systems, this topic warrants some attention from math experts. SCmurky 03:56, 30 June 2006 (UTC)
My knowledge of Lie algebras is a single course, but this potentially confusing notation was never mentioned. Has anyone else heard of this? Septentrionalis 18:40, 1 June 2006 (UTC)
I have extensively revised and cleaned up Divisibility rule, so please take a look and help to improve it more. As I'm not fully experienced at all the editing tools, I'm sure the formatting and adherence to guidelines and standards could be improved.
I'd like to create a number of other pages related to mental math, so I'd like to get feedback on this one, the first I've heavily edited. (The current mental arithmetic has only the most basic, simple of techniques.
See Wikipedia:Categories_for_deletion#Category:Thousand. Oleg Alexandrov ( talk) 18:57, 3 June 2006 (UTC)
Some Chinese news sources have picked up a story about a recent journal article by Cao and Zhu, experts on the Ricci flow, who have written what they (and the journal editors) claim is a "complete" proof of the geometrization conjecture, by giving more details of Perelman's work. Slashdot has also picked up on this. As a consequence, there has been several editors who have insisted on placing mention of Cao and Zhu's paper in the lead section. I have disagreed (see talk page discussion and also some of my edit summaries for extensive reasons). Please continue discussion there. I would also appreciate if people could pop in and check that things don't get out of control. Thanks. -- C S (Talk) 02:15, 6 June 2006 (UTC)
The article on American Institute of Mathematics has been nominated for deletion by someone. R.e.b. 13:02, 6 June 2006 (UTC)
The PlanetMath Exchange project has today reached a new milestone, with 40% of all PlanetMath articles reviewed.
For those of you who have not been following the project, I thought I would take this opportunity to report on the status of the project, and the progress which has been made to date. The purpose of the project is to review all PlanetMath (PM) articles (which are licensed under GFDL) and to incorporate any appropriate PM content not adequately covered on Wikipedia (WP).
There are over 4800 PM articles listed, of which over 1900 of which have been reviewed so far. Of the reviewed articles, 143 PM articles have been copied to WP, creating entirely new WP articles, and 121 have been merged into already existing WP articles. Additionally, a further 75 PM articles have been identified as needing to be copied, and 349 needing to be merged.
The project maintains 49 lists of PM articles grouped by topic (e.g. 11 Number theory, 26 Real functions, 54 General topology). The entire list of lists is compiled into a "Article lists" table, and statistics are maintained for each topic's list.
19 editors have identified themselves as participants, and 26 have reviewed at least one PM article (see Editor contributions).
Oleg Alexandrov, has provided several excellent tools to facilitate the project. He and Mathbot created the original 49 lists (first created in Feb 2005, and updated with new PM articles in March 2006). They also perform daily updates of statistics in the "Article lists", and "Editor contributions" tables. In addition, Oleg has created a convenient tool to assist in converting a PM article to wiki markup.
I heartily encourage everyone to join the fun.
Paul August ☎ 02:06, 8 June 2006 (UTC)
See Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Direct_logic -Dan 15:36, 8 June 2006 (UTC)
Please vote at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/American Institute of Mathematics. Michael Hardy 23:33, 9 June 2006 (UTC)
Hi, I left a question regarding the correct statement of the Ryll-Nardzewski fixed point theorem at Talk:Ryll-Nardzewski fixed point theorem. Cheers, AxelBoldt 04:10, 11 June 2006 (UTC)
I invite interested parties to make comments at Talk:Poincaré_conjecture#Peer_review. -- C S (Talk) 12:48, 11 June 2006 (UTC)
An anon recently redirected the wikilink in Chaos Theory from the first to the second. Is this legitimite? Are these the same person? — Arthur Rubin | (talk) 15:30, 11 June 2006 (UTC)
I wanted to {{ prod}} this article. But to be sure I thought I'd check. Is this article nonsense or not? I couldn't google the name, but that doesn't always mean anything. Garion96 (talk) 00:20, 12 June 2006 (UTC)
I'm skeptical that the name is very common. I can't imagine the theorem would even have a name amongst mathematicians. So I think the term would only be used in certain kinds of introductory course work. Google gives no results (off Wikipedia), so nobody that has mentioned it, for example, in a course webpage. The only place I can think the term may exist is in some textbooks somewhere. Even in that eventuality, I don't know if it's worth having an article based on that amount of usage. I guess it does no harm, but I'm also hard-pressed to imagine a situation where we would want to link to it. -- C S (Talk) 19:18, 12 June 2006 (UTC)
Over at Talk:Constant of motion, I've been reduced to babling and waving my hands to the effect that a "system of differential equations with constants of motion == integrable system == system with symmetries" and conversely, "non-integrable system == system with no constants of motion". However, it occurs to me that I know of no grand theorems making this claim. Are there any? Is this in fact a collection of small results in narrow fields that have accreted into a grand truth? Guidance? How can one make this clear at a college-math level? It doesn't help that the article integrable system is somewhat foreboding in its current form. linas 01:30, 13 June 2006 (UTC)
You make a good point about the current article being somewhat forbidding. I would go a step further. I don't think integrable system should redirect to integrability conditions. An integrable system usually (?) refers to a Hamiltonian system with a full set of Poisson-commuting flows. Naturally, integrability conditions do play a role, but there is more structure a priori in an integrable system. For the point about conserved quantities for an integrable system, since the Hamiltonian flows commute, there should be loads of conserved quantities. (As you ask, is there a general theorem here? Does Noether apply? etc). Hence a system without "enough" conserved quantities will be non-integrable. I'm not so sure about the converse. Silly rabbit 13:15, 13 June 2006 (UTC)
On Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mathematics/Wikipedia 1.0 there is a request for the most notable mathematicians whos biographies could be included in Wikipedia:Version 0.5 Nominations. Suggestions for celebratity mathematicians welcome. Possible also assesments of the quality of their article also welcome. -- Salix alba ( talk) 07:45, 15 June 2006 (UTC)
Does WP have a glossary that translates the language of probability theory to measure theory? I've got a complaint on my talk page that I'm trying to decipher; I don't understand Score (statistics) and Fisher information, although I suspect I would, if they were restated in terms of measure theory. The root of this interest is the rather astounding edit here, which is so remarkable, I abstract it here:
Surely, the ommission of M-theory and intelligent design is just an oversight? linas 00:38, 17 June 2006 (UTC)
A new user mathisreallycool ( talk · contribs) has made several edits which to my mind betray a fundamental lack of knowledge in certain mathematical topics. I have reverted several additions by this user, and I want to vet some other things by the user. For example, the article Konfisakhar space seems unobjectionable, it's referenced. However I've never heard of this idea, it's not in any of my texts, nor is it in my EDM2, and frankly, I find the idea of a fractal vector space hard to believe. Can someone (maybe with access to the book by Schaeffer) verify this concept? Otherwise, I shall want to AfD is. And maybe also this definition of semidirect products for monoids? - lethe talk + 07:14, 17 June 2006 (UTC)
JA: Hi, could you help sort out the continuing tangles at Propositional calculus? First there was that improper name change last month, and I let it go because the user who did it seemed fairly competent and added some good stuff, but now the word "logic" seems to be inviting anonymous users to take the article out of the mathematical logic designation and add any sort of half-baked exposition that they can cook up. I don't know my way around the procedures well enough to keep dealing with sort of stuff. Much appreciated, Jon Awbrey 05:15, 17 June 2006 (UTC)
Some editors appear to believe that there is a convention which requires the use of "if" in definitions rather than " iff" (short for "if and only if"). A definition is a proposition which equates a new term to a compound expression composed of old terms. So using "if" is wrong. One should use "iff" or an equivalent, such as: "if and only if", "is", "is the same as", "means", "is equivalent to", "when and only when", etc.. JRSpriggs 08:20, 17 June 2006 (UTC)
I strongly support the use of "if" in definitions over either "iff" or "if and only if". By the way this has (of course) been discussed before. I will now provide for your reading pleasure this oldie but goldi, this blast from our past:
Paul August ☎ 18:38, 17 June 2006 (UTC)
In regards to Lambiam's comment on a style reference, a popular one is Nick Higham's "Handbook of Writing for the Mathematical Sciences." On page 20 of the second edition it says:
In my own experience, I cannot recall ever seeing "if and only if" in a definition in formal mathematical writing. Can someone supporting the use of "if and only if" cite a current journal article with this usage or give reference to a style manual that advocates its use? Lunch 20:44, 19 June 2006 (UTC)
If the consensus is that "iff" may be confusing because some lay-persons do not know what it means and it might be mistaken for a misspelling of "if", then I will not object when other editors change "iff" to "if and only if" or an equivalent. However, I still object to using "if" by itself between the definiendum and the definiens. JRSpriggs 03:52, 20 June 2006 (UTC)
"Often ... the definition is a statement that expresses a logical equivalence between the definiendum and the definiens." When we define a mathematical symbol (constant, function, or relation), the definiendum (symbol defined) is a new word being added to our language; and it has no meaning other than that given to it by the definition. The definition is a postulate which gives meaning to the new word. Since it is not normally our intention to add strength to our set of axioms (as the axioms of ZFC), this must be a conservative extension. And we should be able to translate any sentence involving the new word into one which omits it and has the same meaning. If you put a conditonal ("if") rather than a biconditional ("if and only if") between the definiendum and the definiens, then you are doing one of three things:
In conclusion, definitions should not be conditionals. JRSpriggs 03:52, 20 June 2006 (UTC)
Currently we have 12102 articles in the list of mathematics articles. Out of them, 1070 are redirects (see the complete list). Redirects get created in several ways
In my view it is the third which makes for most redirects.
While redirects are very important, I see no good reason for why they should stay listed in the list of mathematics articles (I estimate that there are at least 2000 math redirects which are not there).
I wonder what people think of a big purge, removing all redirects from the list of mathematics articles. Of course, if at some point a redirect becomes back an article, my bot will add it back to the list. Thanks. Oleg Alexandrov ( talk) 22:37, 17 June 2006 (UTC)
Done. The log is at User:Mathbot/Changes mathlist. Oleg Alexandrov ( talk) 02:39, 19 June 2006 (UTC)
Hi people. For those of you who have been watching developments concerning m:blahtex, MathML support on wikipedia, etc, I'm sure you've noticed nothing much has been happening for a while. Well, for the past few months, Jitse and I have been trying pretty damn hard to push buttons in the background to make things happen, but sadly the core developers simply haven't taken the bait. It seems to be a case of "yeah, it looks interesting, but we've got like 10,000 other things we're trying to do, and we just haven't got around to checking out the code yet...". It seems that wikipedia just doesn't have enough engineer-hours to give us the attention we need to get this going, and there's only so much pushing that Jitse and I can do without becoming annoying pains in the arse.
The status now is that I'm certainly not spending any more time on the code until I have some indication that there's a chance wikipedia is going to use it. And I've had enough of all the promotional "hey everyone isn't blahtex wonderful and y'all should be using it". It's tiring and not really my style. I enjoy writing code, not selling it.
So unless the people who hang out on this page somehow band together and make the developers realise that MathML is something that people want, the project is going to die a serene death. I took the initiative about a year ago, and wrote 13,000 lines of code to prove that it was possible. I'm happy to help out some more, and of course I look forward to the day when there is good mathml support in wikipedia. But someone else needs to take the initiative now, because I'm through.
Anyway, I think I'll go to bed now, make sure I'm bright and fresh to watch Australia defeat Brazil 6-0 tomorrow.
Good luck guys. Dmharvey 03:57, 18 June 2006 (UTC)
But so what is the next step? Campaign to get it installed on test.wikipedia.org? What can we do to help? Send messages to mediawiki-l? I notice searching through the archives, that you have previously announced releases of blahtex to that mailing list, and they have never had any response. Have you ever had any dialogue with anyone from mediawiki development about this code? Whom do we talk to? - lethe talk + 10:43, 18 June 2006 (UTC)
At the risk of sounding too critical, how difficult would it be to make things work for the current "bastardized TeX"? The idea of breaking old revisions of articles without it being obvious why that is makes me kind of queasy ...
Is this a major issue? How do things fail after the change? Backwards compatibility is something that needs to be addressed, even if it cannot be guaranteed.
Not that I think this is a huge problem, if the scope is that small.
Otherwise, I'm with lethe. Whom do we talk to, and what's their favourite ice cream flavour (for bribes, you know)?
RandomP 11:00, 18 June 2006 (UTC)
I'd just like to qualify my remarks: it seems that even today, "history" won't get you anything like the old version of an article, at least when that article uses images from the commons.
I think it would be really cool if someone wrote, essentially, a simulated wayback machine for wikipedia, that went back to the wikicode, images, and math layout as they were when the revision was created. I thought that's what history was, but apparently, not so.
So that's not an issue either, and can we please have mathml now?
RandomP 14:09, 18 June 2006 (UTC)
I sent this email to mediawiki-l just now:
From: lethe at charter dot net
Subject: Blahtex: what's the next step
Date: June 18, 2006 8:08:37 AM CDT
To: mediawiki-l@Wikimedia.org
David Harvey and others has been working hard on Blahtex, the next generation in MediaWiki math rendering technology. Visit
http://www.blahtex.org/ for more information and
http://wiki.blahtex.org/go/Main_Page for a running demo hosted by Jitse Niesen.
Harvey suggests that blahtex will afford a significant performance advantage, but the main impetus is the ability to render MathML. Support for MathML is not widespread at the moment, so the need for Blahtex is not urgent, but it is the future, and we have reason to believe that Wikipedia's adoption could goad browser developers to speed their efforts (the answer to the old chicken and egg of who comes first, browser support or use by web pages could be: Wikipedia comes first).
It has to happen someday, and today is as good a day as any. Harvey says the software is ready for the next step, and wants to move forward, but doesn't know whom to talk to in order to make this happen. I'm writing you to voice my full support for Harvey's and Niesen's efforts, to find out what needs to be done to take the next step towards rolling this software out, and to ask if there is anything I can do to help the developers to get this software ready for deployment.
Thanks
lethe
I was hoping that several others of you would chime in on the mailing list. If we had a chorus of complaining voices, we would be harder to ignore. Currently, the developers watching that mailing list have ignored me completely. What should I do? Send another, more plaintive, email? - lethe talk + 11:51, 20 June 2006 (UTC)
I'm not a developer, nor am I Jimbo, but putting myself in their shoes I'd be much more worried about the font issue than about accepting an apparently well-tested huge chunk of outside code. In fact, not being in their shoes this worries me. Many people access Wikipedia from computers they have no control over, and are in no position to download and install fonts for, even if willing to do so. Others may try to and fail. Most wouldn't even try, and miss out on all Wikipedia has to offer that involves formulas. I think it is important to keep blahtex alive, but aim at introduction after the availability of the required fonts has become common. -- Lambiam Talk 13:53, 18 June 2006 (UTC)
See here. I'm not precisely sure about terminology here, but perhaps this makes Jitse a Developer. This is good news, but I don't promise mathml tomorrow. Still some work to do. We'll keep you posted. Thanks guys for your encouragement, and especially lethe for the insistent emails on mediawiki-l :-) Dmharvey 12:00, 22 June 2006 (UTC)
Maybe this is not the place for this (I am aware that this is not un all-purpose forum), but here it goes. I intend to order some math books from Amazon, but I'm not sure what to get. As it seems to me that there are some very good mathematicians here, I think you could help me a lot with some recommendations. Now for some background, to understand what I specifically need: I'm an undergraduate math student (though also an economics graduate and working economist) and I pursue math mostly for my own curiosity and because I truly enjoy it (more than economics :D). I need something mainly appropriate for self-learning, so I'm targeting good classic texts on major fields or other good books. I prefer books that don't shy away from advanced/abstract concepts, but preferably give motivation for concepts and some intuitive explanaition/interpretation. Also, I learn the most from books which include examples worked-out in detail and/or solved relevant problems. Also, note that unfortunately cost is an issue, so don't recommend too many books that are only somewhat helpfull (though by all means recommend books that you consider good, even if they are not very popular). Hope that you will have some advice for me... AdamSmithee 20:48, 18 June 2006 (UTC)
Well, first of all tx for replying! As I said, I know this is not the place (and I'll probably try sci.math, which I didn't know about), but I tried it because I came to trust many of you guys. As for my background and interests: I'm an undergraduate student in math at this time. So far, my exposure was almost entirely to Romanian textbooks, which are very tightly written and unfortunately are generally very good for reference but not for learning (this is somewhat of a characteristic of Romanian academic books). On the other hand, I've read quite a few American graduate level textbooks in economics and I noticed that, generally, they are much better for learning (also, reading some freely available online math books lead me to believe this is also true for math). To give an example, at this time I'm struggling with linear connections and covariant derivative, but my (Romanian) books insist to much on tightely written modern coordinate-free stuff, giving virtually no motivation and no explanation, and I'm having trouble understanding why the stuff is defined that way, what does it mean and what is it good for.
At this moment my interests are rather wide and I just want to get a reasonable background in the main fields. However, I do have a sweet spot for abstract algebra, and I'm interested in probability and statistics (including links to measure theory, numeric analysis etc.) for the aplications to economics. But I'm also very interested in stuff like differential geometry for instance. As an example of one book that I have heard about, and I might get, I know about Jacobson's 'Basic Algebra' (though I don't know how that is), but I have no idea what else is there.
Regarding level, it is hard to say what undergraduate in Romania means compared to other education systems, but it is possibly more advanced than American undergraduate level (?maybe?). AdamSmithee 23:25, 18 June 2006 (UTC)
I have just had a brief look at the page Poussin proof, and apart from being a short stub, at least half of it seems to be mathematical rubbish. I would like to have a go at making this into a sensible article - but about the Dirichlet divsor problem (the first sentence of the Possin page), as I can't find anything about this elsewhere. If I have missed it, and there really is a page about the Dirichlet divisor problem, plase let me know before I waste too much time ... Madmath789 12:11, 19 June 2006 (UTC) (OK, having read it again, it is not total rubbish, but badly worded.)
(I've copied the following from Talk:Mathematics. — Paul August ☎ 16:56, 19 June 2006 (UTC))
I would like to call the communities attention to and personally protest a decision at Wikisource to exclude and delete a significant portion of the material that was part of its original charter. Prior to April 29 of this year, Wikisource:What is Wikisource? listed the following as included material:
"Some things we include are:
On that date the project page was changed to explicitly exclude:
Obviously, this represents a major change in the scope of the project. It is based on a single poll conducted between April 4 and 27, 2006 Wikisource:Scriptorium/Archives/2006/04. Previous discussions had been held with opposite results Wikisource:Wikisource talk:What Wikisource includes. A primary reason given for the new change is that the editors participating do not feel competent to maintain this material and have little interest in it. However apparently no effort was made to notify participants in the previous discussions, nor to recruit new editors that might have an interest. Note that there are many active projects pages in mathematics and the sciences where such people might be found.
There was also no discussion of methods for reducing the load on editors, such as locking material after review. In general, reference material does not need or benefit from frequent edits.
I certainly respect the efforts of the regular editors on Wikisource and agree that their views should be shown some deference. However the process they chose is not sufficient. At the very least, I think there needs to be broader community input into such a massive change in the scope of a Wikimedia project. Even if this material is best excluded from Wikisource, I believe it deserves to be part of an encyclopedia and that any material already contributed should be moved elsewhere rather than be deleted. The simplest solution would be to move mathematical and scientific reference material to Wikipedia, where there are large communities to evaluate and protect this information. An argument could be made that mathematical data belongs in Wikicommons because it is, or potentially can be, language neutral. Or perhaps there should be a new Wikireference project. Computer source code deserves a separate discussion, since there are so many other open source code repositories available.
At this point hundreds of articles have been marked for deletion. See Wikisource:Category:Deletion requests/Reference data Some material has apparently aready been deleted. There is nothing left in Category:Mathematics. I would propose that all article deletions on Wikisource based on this change be frozen until a fuller, community-wide discussion can be held.
I have also posted these comments at Wikisource:Scriptorium, where I think the primary discussion should be held.-- agr 16:01, 19 June 2006 (UTC) -- agr 16:01, 19 June 2006 (UTC)
(end of copied text)
I realize this has been discussed several times in the past, to the agreement of accepting such material. However, the current state of reference data on Wikisource is unacceptable. The community members who are active on this site have little interest, and in some cases understanding, of the data we have been hosting. Although there have been editors that were adamant that this material should be included here, they have not remained active in the organization nor matainance of it. Much of this material is beyond the active administrators ability to even distinguish vandalism from corrections. Because of this current state of affairs there have been nominations for deletion for some of this data. However I feel we need discuss the larger questions of the place of reference material on Wikisource before we make any deletions.
I think [Ec has] hit the nail on the head with "Good rules support existing practice rather than shape it." The problem with the original suggestion is such advertisement would atract people who have no understanding of existing practice. That is my concern. I feel anyone familar with existing practice will be aware of policy disscussion through the normal in-project channels.
Yes, I would like a list of the material that has been deleted. I think it is totally reasonable to expect some notice and time for us to decide what should be kept and where. I get the message that this material is not wanted at Wikisource, but that is no excuse for simply deleting it without informing anyone who might be interested. The fact that no supporter of the material spoke up during the April discussion should have been a clue that there was not adequate notice. -- agr 20:16, 19 June 2006 (UTC)
I certainly was not trying to suggest that anyone is behaving like Nazis and I apologize if the title is too harsh. As I said in my original post, I believe the regular editors at Wikisource are due some deference in their decision making. But I find the wholesale deletion of articles belonging to topics no longer in favor, Mathematics in particular, to be very disturbing. It is one thing to change the scope of a project, another to simply discard material submitted and accepted in good faith.-- agr 00:38, 20 June 2006 (UTC)
To cool things down a bit, I have changed the topic heading here and at scriptorium. User:Bookofjude has finally provided a list of the material deleted after others told me to search through the logs. That is a big help. I really don't want to make this personal, but I must point out that after the November discussion led to a clear consensus on keeping reference material, I submitted a detailed proposal on what tabular material to include to the discussion page on January 18, 2006. It received no further comment. I think I had every reason to think the matter was settled. -- agr 14:52, 20 June 2006 (UTC)
Although I am a bystander in the debate, though in favour of keeping math tables on wikisource, I would like to remark that I read Wikipedia Signpost regularly and I don't remember any remark about voting about massive deletions of existing material on Wikisource. Considering that fact that Wikisource is not so high profile and people here could be interested in the voting, I think it's a bit unfair. Samohyl Jan 16:47, 20 June 2006 (UTC)
As best I can determine, here is a list of the math-related articles that have been deleted. Birgitte§β has kindly restored them temporarily:
Also there were computer source code articles with the following titles:
I'm not sure these have mcuch value. Finally, I believe there were once articles listing pi and e to a million places. These would be easy to reconstruct if anyone wants to make a case for them.
I think a case can be made for moving at least the first two or three articles above to Wikipedia, presumably retitled as "Table of..." Comments?-- agr 18:35, 20 June 2006 (UTC)
The section Old Babylonian Mathematics (2000-1600 BC) of this article seems to be a copy of this page (starting with "Perhaps the most amazing aspect of ..."). It's especially funny in sentences like "In our article on Pythagoras's theorem in Babylonian mathematics we examine...", where in reality, no such article exists on Wikipedia. What should be done about it?
On a somewhat related issue, User:Chem1 has created the article Ibn al-Banna (1256-1321), to whom he attributes the invention of the iterative process for finding the square root of a number - aka the "Babylonian method". This doesn't seem right. -- Meni Rosenfeld ( talk) 14:41, 21 June 2006 (UTC)
I would like to propose that all usages of "iff" to mean "if and only if" be replaced by "if and only if", as iff is not a very common abbreviation. Thoughts? (I actually did a bit of this but Oleg Alexandrov advised me to ask here – if there is a consensus for me to remove those edits it will be no problem for me to do it.) — Mets501 ( talk) 20:24, 21 June 2006 (UTC)
I've never poked my head into the Math WikiProject before, but a few months back I did some work on Fraction (mathematics) before I had to take a break to tend to both Real Life and my proper job. Looking around, I can't help feeling there's a lot to be done, and it's not just a matter of the one article:
I'd keep going, but another task is calling me from my PC. I know that fractions might not be a hip'n'trendy subject, but I work as a tutor at a community college and there are a few math topics that come up a lot, and manipulating fractions is one of them. :) I'd be willing to take the lead on this, as long as I have the support of the Project. -- Jay (Histrion) ( talk • contribs) 21:09, 21 June 2006 (UTC)
I just created a new template, {{ In sqrt}}. It basically displays the radical (√) and the the number with an overline. For example, if you enter {{In sqrt|x}}, it will produce √x. It works great for all CSS capable browsers, otherwise it just displays a radical sign. I was wondering, should we put this in the mathematics manual of style as a recommendation for all inline square roots? — Mets501 ( talk) 01:15, 23 June 2006 (UTC)
subst:
so that the text as it originally looked will still be able to be read.
J
ɪ
m
p
04:26, 31 May 2007 (UTC)Wikipedia:Categories for deletion/Log/2006 June 23#Category:Degenerate forms Oleg Alexandrov ( talk) 01:48, 23 June 2006 (UTC)
JA: Could use a third opinion at Operation (mathematics), a page that was created as a gloss on the generic concept but is now being converted into "hwk-helper" with material that either belongs or is pretty much already covered at Binary operation and other places.
JA: Looking down the road, in both directions, I am seeing here a more generic issue for the WP math community. For instance, the article in question was categorized as Mathematical Logic, and is now being recategorized as Elementary Mathematics. I think that there needs to be a standard operating procedure for sorting out and coordinating "tutorial" and "standard" articles. I notice that the physics folks already have a template for doing this. Anyway, something to think about. Thanks, Jon Awbrey 17:56, 23 June 2006 (UTC)
JA: This is like deja vu of discussions that we had on Function and Relation, and so I'd rather focus on the generic problem, as I'm fresh out of ergs to be caring about this stuff unless others do. I created this article because of a recurring need in other articles — check the "what links here" page — for a quick gloss to a suitably general concept of k-adic operations. And now anybody chasing those links is likely to skip the whole darn thing before getting past the TOC. What we have now is two articles whose front ends are devoted to Binary operations, and so it seems like the whole thing is better dealt with by way of a 1-liner up top like: {{for|an introductory treatment|Binary operation}}. Jon Awbrey 19:48, 23 June 2006 (UTC)
Please see my proposal here. — Mets501 ( talk) 22:20, 23 June 2006 (UTC)
span.texhtml {font-size=14px}
"? That will at least get it to be the same line height as the sans serif.
[5] Dmharvey 18:35, 24 June 2006 (UTC)
It is more like saying "Every positive real number has a unique square root, i.e. a negative number which when multiplied by itself gives the positive number.". He is treating the abnormal case as the normal. JRSpriggs 11:01, 27 June 2006 (UTC)
When I do "random article" I occasionally come across mathematical formulae (and sometimes with general science books etc). It would be useful for those of us who are not mathematically informed if there was a "basic explanation" as to use and purpose.
See the examples I put on Wikipedia:Requests for expansion for what I mean. Jackiespeel 16:54, 26 June 2006 (UTC)
On the request for expansion page, you wrote:
The article "finitary boolean function" describes a simple generalization of a boolean function. There's not much else to write. Perhaps that article needs to be merged into the "boolean-valued function" article. The article "boolean domain" is just a definition, and is already marked as a stub. The article "boolean-valued function" gives what you ask for: it describes the function and gives several fields where it's used. Could you explain why that doesn't meet what you want? Lunch 18:32, 26 June 2006 (UTC)
I was busy trying to make a Strongly regular graph separate article, and I was wondering : what will we agree on the conventions.
Graph theory can really be annoying when you really want to do it right. For instance my syllabus agreed on not including disconnected graphs and their complements, which in turn implied .
The spectrum also changes when you allow disconnectedness: the degree of disconnected graphs becomes an eigenvalue with more than dimension one.
What is your opinion?
Evilbu 18:22, 26 June 2006 (UTC)
Okay, well first of all, I checked my syllabus and found that followig THOSE conditions works out eventually. But I don't want to get into any trouble with my own University for copying very explicitly. The problem is that the University of Ghent is such a big 'player' in the field of incidence geometry, that a lot on the internet (and that is assuming you find something) comes from their sites I bet you also disapprove then of my pg(s,t,\alpha) notation in the partial geometry article? I read that Formula page and even applied one of the guidelines on Paley graph. But I am totally confused with HTML/Tex/PNG, especially since I was instructed very recently to switch my Preferences to 'Always render PNG'. Evilbu 13:09, 28 June 2006 (UTC)
I noticed User:Bluebot is automatically converting HTML entities to Unicode on various articles. See e.g. [6]. Does anyone have an opinion on whether such conversion is desirable in mathematics articles? Would it hinder possible future efforts to automatically switch to MathML? - Gauge 05:55, 28 June 2006 (UTC)
<math>
tags, and unicodifying only takes place outside <math>
tags, so it would have no effect of MathML. As far as being desireable, it makes it easier to read the article in edit mode, especially for newbies who are not used to used to HTML entities. —
Mets501 (
talk)
12:44, 28 June 2006 (UTC)
<math>\text{∫}_0^1</math>
-- yuck!). It might become desirable to limit the characters that could be used in text mode (e.g. extended latin, and other scripts like japanese, chinese, klingon, etc).
Dmharvey
20:49, 28 June 2006 (UTC)
<math>
tags, then BlahTeX will render it as HTML, anyway. So there seems to be no reason why we should keep using math formulas written in HTML. In fact, I'm not quite sure why we use inline HTML now for things like variables or "flat" equations that would render (in <math>
tags) now as HTML now anyway with texvc. —
Mets501 (
talk)
01:13, 29 June 2006 (UTC)
In response to KSmrq's comment about prior discussions involving unicode in mathematics article, on this page, there have been at least three:
Paul August ☎ 21:37, 28 June 2006 (UTC)
Are people interested in having the \mathscr command available? (Provided by \usepackage{mathrsfs}.) Here's what it looks like:
The top one is \mathscr, the bottom is \mathcal (which is what we have now). I've noticed that \mathscr (or something similar) is quite popular in certain fields. I've noticed it especially in functional analysis.
There wouldn't be any difference in MathML because MathML only defines a single "mathvariant=script".
Opinions welcome. Dmharvey 19:25, 28 June 2006 (UTC)
Is anyone aware of any sources that use both a mathscr-like font and a mathcal-like font, with different semantics? There's a thread on the www-math mailing list discussing this now. If anyone could build a case, we might well get two different font variants in MathML 3.0 (which is on the drawing board). Dmharvey 18:39, 5 July 2006 (UTC)
You know how we all put something like "\,\!" at the end of <math> blocks to force the output as PNG? Well I was just doing some database work and happened to be trying things out on the hebrew wikipedia, and discovered that they all put "\ " at the beginning of the equation! (e.g. [9]) Or is it the end of the equation? I don't even know... the </math> comes before the <math>... Dmharvey 22:02, 28 June 2006 (UTC)
\
" is at the beginning. If we think of the eqn as an atom in a right-to-left context, then to the reader the blank space appears to appear to the left of and therefore after the atom (instead of being part of the atom). --
Lambiam
Talk
22:50, 28 June 2006 (UTC)More database work.... last time I checked around the beginning of March, the 13 largest wikipedias had 208,000 distinct equations altogether. Now (as of about mid-June) there are about 289,000. That works out at about a 10% growth rate per month. Pretty amazing. Dmharvey 02:06, 29 June 2006 (UTC)
The " proof that 0.999... equals 1" article is once more under attack — from the inside. And for the n-th time, Melchoir is involved. I'm sick of dealing with him and (now) Supadawg. If anyone is interested, please get involved in whatever way you see fit. As for me, it's come down to a revert war or walking away.
Some of you may be aware I completely stopped editing Wikipedia articles awhile back, except for really minor things like typos. I confined my contributions to talk pages, because I had no more stomach for seeing articles obstinately trashed by editors with inadequate subject knowledge, horrible writing skills, and no social skills. That worked for me, though not so well for the articles I abandoned. In the current instance, I can't see wasting more time debating with someone who pretends a proof using Dedekind cuts and the Archimedean property is original research, and who doesn't see a problem in beginning a sentence with a decimal point, but who knows exactly how the article should be rewritten.
However, if you long for abuse or have a desperate yearning to save the world (or both!), here's your opportunity. You'll need to act quickly, for the Mongol hordes are invading as we speak. They have already insisted that an article devoted to a proof should not be so named, nor should state that in the opening sentence. ("It's unencyclopedic!") Next on their agenda is a complete rewrite. It boggles the mind.
OK, so saving this article probably won't save the world. Still, I'll bet it gets more page views than the snake lemma and the hairy ball theorem put together (no disrespect intended). Please stop by the talk page, or help revert. ( This version works for me, tolerably.)
Just for fun:
Thanks, all. -- KSmrq T 06:42, 29 June 2006 (UTC)
I'm happy to join the corps of reverters for that article, but I cannot in good conscience revert to the version you link, which is buried behind over a hundred edits already. The best I can do is add the article to my watchlist and revert future changes. - lethe talk + 15:37, 29 June 2006 (UTC)
Is there a way to have a redirect focus the point on a specific section of the article? Specifically, I have in mind the redirect from Koszul connection to covariant derivative, which reads
If you follow the link explicitly, by clicking the above link, then the point focuses on the relevant section. But if you follow the link Koszul connection, then you are taken to covariant derivative without the change in focus. Any thoughts or advice? Silly rabbit 17:32, 29 June 2006 (UTC)
Sorry if I startled you, the WikiProject, but I boldly separated the List of Mathematicians article into eight smaller articles. Prior to this, the article was giant: it ranked in the Top 50 on
Special:Longpages. Seeing as this is problematic, since not all of our users have the patience to load a page that is hundreds of kilobytes in size, I took the liberty to divide it into smaller pieces. I'm sorry if it's unacceptable to the WikiProject, but I was doing what I felt was good for the list. —
THIS IS MESSED
OCKER
(TALK)
02:50, 30 June 2006 (UTC)
This article is extremely POV, particularly considering the open criticism of Geostatistics within the main page. I was hoping that someone with more experience could build some equations and expand on the evolution of geostatistics. Considering how widely geostatistics is used for the natural sciences, environmental planning, climate studies, oceanic studies, military analysis, urban planning, and Geographic Information Systems, this topic warrants some attention from math experts. SCmurky 03:56, 30 June 2006 (UTC)