An anon has been going through articles replacing italic d with upright d in math articles, for example
to
There is a small discussion about this at talk:Derivative.
As pointed out by Geometry guy, the previous discussion about this at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mathematics/Archive 4#straight or italic d? did not achieve consensus on what to use.
However, I would argue that while people should be allowed to use whatever notation they choose, I believe it is not a good idea to do mass changes to articles which used one type of notation for a long time.
That is to say, the vast majority of Wikipedia articles (all articles that I am aware of) use italic d notation. I vote to revert the anon conversions and to go back to status quo italic d notation at derivative and differential form. And if somebody starts a new article, and want to use roman d, they should be allowed. Comments? Oleg Alexandrov ( talk) 15:00, 23 March 2007 (UTC)
Reasons for pro italic usage of imaginary unit in Wikipedia: i |
---|
most mathematics books/papers use italic notation of imag. unit |
italic notation of imag. unit looks better Oleg Alexandrov |
is a conceptual case of definition, italic i is needed Septentrionalis |
Reasons for pro non-italic usage of imaginary unit in Wikipedia: i |
Better semantics. This has several beneficial implications. PizzaMargherita |
prevents confusion with running index i, electr. current, etc. Wurzel |
offers electrical engineering technicians an imaginary unit notation which has no interference with neither (Maxwell's) current density j nor with electr. current i Wurzel |
allows parallel usage with running indexes i,j Wurzel |
improves readability of formulas containing the imag. unit i because of no overlapping definitions Wurzel |
i is easily acessible on many computers/text systems / fonts Wurzel |
Reasons for usage of \imath |
Is an alternative offered by TeX Michael Hardy |
As an apology for causing trouble by partially supporting the anon, I promised to collect some links to previous discussions, to avoid (if possible) going over the same old ground. This is what I found so far: please add to this list if you find others. I tend to agree with User:Toby Bartels (although I am from the UK and he is from the US, we both personally prefer upright d's, but oppose the math project having a policy on this - see my comments after the list). Geometry guy 16:41, 23 March 2007 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Mathematics Collaboration of the Week has just been marked as inactive, its not received much activity since November. Should anything be done to revive the collaboration? -- Salix alba ( talk) 07:34, 28 March 2007 (UTC)
I just added this paragraph to the list of trigonometric identities, and maybe someone can add some information in response to the questions below.
where "|A| = k" means the index A runs through the set of all subsets of size k of the set { 1, 2, 3, ... }.
In these two identities an asymmetry appears that is not seen in the case of sums of finitely many terms: in each product, there are only finitely many sine factors and cofinitely many cosine factors.
I derived the identities from scratch without careful attention to these questions (that's quite easy, as you'll see if you try it), then I found them in a couple of old books (19th-century trigonometry texts were quite detailed and thorough), but again without careful attention to what the books said about these questions. --- Lazily... Michael Hardy 02:41, 2 April 2007 (UTC)
Oh. Yes. Clumsy of me.... Michael Hardy 19:56, 2 April 2007 (UTC)
...and now I've fixed it in what I wrote above, lest rely on it. Michael Hardy 19:57, 2 April 2007 (UTC)
We quite often begin our articles with "In mathematics..." or something similar. This has been discussed previously at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Mathematics and I'm happy to report that the consensus was to support a variety of styles. :)
Anyway, I just wanted to draw attention to a variant which I have started using, which I think might be quite useful to other editors (who also might have their own variants which they would like to share here). Quite often it is necessary and appropriate to set a more precise context in the first sentence, such as "In analysis...". Sometimes it is safe to do this without the risk that the reader will assume the article needs psychotherapy, sometimes not. In the latter case, mathematics needs to be mentioned. In this particular example the problem is solved easily by linking directly as "In mathematical analysis...", but it is not always so easy to find an elegant solution. A common approach (which I have used), is to begin "In mathematics, more specifically in widget theory...", but I am increasingly finding this rather awkward, so I came up with an alternative
This is a bit shorter and seems less forbidding to me, so I thought I would share it here. Comments and suggestions very welcome! Geometry guy 18:29, 30 March 2007 (UTC)
I agree, but I think "In the mathematical field of..." does this. Do you agree? (This is one reason that I posted.) Geometry guy 19:25, 30 March 2007 (UTC)
Here is an example similar to user:Geometry guy's from a page I've edited recently:
In this case starting
creates more problems than it solves: does it not imply that in physics Hilbert space means something else? I find it annoying, by the way, when the lead to an article with an elegant or not so elegant, but, at any rate, well thought-out solution is edited down to "In mathematics" with a happy note "boilerplate" in the edit summary. Arcfrk 08:26, 31 March 2007 (UTC)
Further to the discussion above ( Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mathematics#Attribution), the poll on the new WP:ATT summary of the verifiability and no original research guidelines is now open, and closes on April 6th. So far it looks close, so please vote to give the mathematicians' point of view.
It is my strong belief (and I am not alone, see above), that the proposed change is definitely a good thing for mathematics, since it reemphasises "attributable" (i.e., the fact that an article has sources) rather than "attribution" (choosing a particular source and citing it). Also, "no original research" would follow as consequence of being attributable, rather than a directive in itself. In some sense, every wikipedia article is "original research", because it gathers information from a variety of sources and presents it in a new (and hopefully fresh, lively and interesting) way. This is particularly true in mathematics, where an encyclopedic explanation of a fact requires careful writing in a novel way, even though there are hundreds of sources. This change, although clarifying existing policy, should help us (I'm an optimist) against the bureaucrats who insist on an inline citation to source every nontrivial sentence.
I also happen to think the change is good for wikipedia, because in other fields, the concept of "truth" is less clear-cut than it is in mathematics, and by replacing "verifiable" by "attributable", the role of an encyclopedia to describe knowledge (which is partly what people believe rather than what is true) is greatly clarified. Geometry guy 19:27, 31 March 2007 (UTC)
I was probably being a bit polite when I said "less clear-cut", as people can disagree quite vehemently on what the truth is, or even what "truth" means, which is why I find it not a terribly helpful term. I'm not actually sure what it means in general, and the wikipedia article on truth, while an interesting and amusing read, left me none-the-wiser! :) More seriously, I share your concerns, but hope that WP:ATT, backed up by a clear idea of what a reliable source is, will actually tighten the structure through its clarity. Geometry guy 13:14, 3 April 2007 (UTC)
I really do not like moving illustrations in articles (unless they only move when you click on them or some such). They are distracting and the use up the band-width of my modem connection. In some cases, the article never settles down enough for me to see what is there and edit it. In this particular case, I would like to ask whomever is responsible for the moving picture of a tesseract on our project page to please fix it so that it does not move or only moves when the reader clicks on it. Thank you. JRSpriggs 07:04, 1 April 2007 (UTC)
I wonder what people think of the recent additions to integral equation. To me at appears that it is not yet well-enough established research (see the references section) to show up on Wikipedia. Comments? Oleg Alexandrov ( talk) 04:25, 2 April 2007 (UTC)
I am new to Wickipedia contribution and I was not aware of the policy that material should have been published in well recognized journals. My contribution was made in good faith with a view to benefit the readers and enhance the value of Wickipedia. Now I know the policy of Wickipedia, and in this case it is likely to be a limitation of Wickipedia. You can read an expert review of my work here: http://www.integralresearch.net/#Expert_Review . Please see page 4 here which establishes the link between standard integral equations and Rao Integral Equations: http://www.integralresearch.net/wps.pdf . It is easily verified. As for naming my result, if my result is very important, then it is appropriate, and I believe it to be so. I am confident that my results will become "well established" in time. I am not in any hurry. I have protected my idea by applying for US patents. In public interest, in order to evaluate the correctness of my idea, if any qualified person volunteers to verify my results on behalf of Wickipedia, I can send one copy of my book free. But you can get a lot of information on my approach here: http://www.integralresearch.net/RTslides.pdf http://www.integralresearch.net/wps.pdf http://www.integralresearch.net/apex.pdf
Lastly, if someone shows that my new method of solution to solve the Fredholm Equation of the First Kind when applied to shift-variant image deblurring is not better than current methods, I will give them $250.
If you volunteers are serious about enhancing Wickipedia, you should restrict your comments to technical merits of my idea and point out technical weaknesses. Keeping the interests of Wickipedia and the users in mind, you can decide whether your want to post my method or not, is upto you.
I appreciate the voluntary service your are rendering to the public. Dr. Muralidhara SubbaRao (Rao) rao@integralresearch.net —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 24.47.184.148 ( talk) 23:33, 2 April 2007 (UTC).
A new user calling himself MrMiami has been adding some bizarre nonsense to randomness that claims that, if a probability can be assigned to something, then that thing is "ordered" and therefore "not random". I don't think he's likely to see reason. Please come help. -- Trovatore 18:03, 2 April 2007 (UTC)
Can someone please check over the area section I added here to make sure it's alright? Thanks :-) — METS501 ( talk) 20:39, 2 April 2007 (UTC)
Thanks everyone! :-) — METS501 ( talk) 02:47, 3 April 2007 (UTC)
Portal:Mathematics looks kind of odd these days, with redlinks for the article of the week and picture of the week. From the history it appears that this state of affairs was present for a while. Anybody knows why things are like this? Oleg Alexandrov ( talk) 02:08, 3 April 2007 (UTC)
Equilateral triangle redirects to triangle. Shouldn't there be an own article for it? -- 212.149.217.110 18:59, 3 April 2007 (UTC)
I've noticed that User:Smylei, with the only contributions in the areas of Television and Uncyclopedia under his belt, has removed a paragraph from the history of Lie groups, and I reverted it as vandalism. However, since he insists that he is right, and I am an interested party, having written the section, I would like to ask other mathematics editors to take a look. Arcfrk 23:07, 3 April 2007 (UTC)
{{
test}}
message left on someone's user page when they have done something untoward to an article. If you visit the template page, you will see that we have a very mild version at first, becoming progressively more firm. One reason is because vandalism is often a "Hey, look at me!" message, intended to provoke a strong reaction; we don't want to give them that reward. Another is because kids experiment. Yet another is because people make mistakes. If we call someone a vandal, they may choose to identify themselves that way and act that way, whereas if we take this approach, perhaps they will become good contributors. (And if not, we gave them every chance.)I wrote computational mathematics ( last version edited by me), which User:JJL proposes to replace by redirect to computational science with some additions there. Please see Talk:Computational mathematics and Talk:Applied mathematics#Computational mathematics for details. Jmath666 04:16, 4 April 2007 (UTC)
JJL, I see you have reverted my edits to scientific computing that made a distinction between computer science and computational mathematics, consistently with your POV about computational mathematics. I suggest to wait for the outcome of the discussion here. Jmath666 05:54, 4 April 2007 (UTC)
I apologize if this historic view may be incorrect in details.
Computer science a.k.a.
Informatics split off from
mathematics and
electrical engineering sometime in the 1950s and separate CS departments started to appear in the 1960s. The term
computational mathematics (CM) was used for
numerical analysis as well as other computing things done on the math side, see the 1985 Rheinboldt report
Future Directions in Computational Mathematics, Algorithms, and Scientific Software commissioned by
NSF. A
DOD commisioned
position paper (page 45) refers to CM as "The Mathematics of Scientific Computation". This report was followed by the
NSF program in CM which currently defines its scope by: "Supports mathematical research in areas of science where computing plays a central and essential role, emphasizing algorithms, numerical methods, and symbolic methods. The prominence of computation in the research is a hallmark of the program." Meanwhile, the 1982 Lax report
Large Scale Computing in Science and Engineering commissioned by NSF and
DOE was the beginning of substantial funding for (and thus the very existence of) what was at different times called
Large scale computing,
High performance computing,
Supercomputing, and
Computational science. (The reason for evolution of names was mostly political, to justify funding for something new, buzzwords get tired.) [Added:
Scientific computing seems to be a more general term for everything here, used already before 1980.] To date, computational mathematics kept its identity as the theoretical side of things (mostly of us do proofs) distinct from
Computer science (only the complexity people still do proofs) [Added: and
Computational science (what proofs?)]. So that is my take, which includes
sources. Maybe too much
original research for an article unless I am lucky enough to find an independent history source.
Jmath666
06:32, 4 April 2007 (UTC)
Added: SIAM Timeline says the Rheiboldt report "led to the High Performance Computing initiative.". Jmath666 15:44, 4 April 2007 (UTC)
Thank you. There are still great numerical analysts and even engineers who do not program, not even MATLAB, and will be. I am familiar with the the SIAM CS&E conference though I sent there someone with the paper instead of going myself. Yes, the distinctions are blurred. Some are along the line proofs/no proofs. Some are what is done in what department / academic program / center.
Perhaps someone could take an integrative view on the whole business of applied mathematics / computational mathematics / computer science / computational engineering / computational simulation / large scale simulation / large scale computing / supercomputing / high performance computing / scientific computing / scientific computation / numerical analysis / numerical mathematics [Added: / computational science] etc. and make some sense out of it. Maybe start with disambiguation page and/or a category. What we have is an inconsistent hodgepodge of separate articles, written at very different levels of expertise. The separate pages or sections should give attribution for whatever they say instead of POV. I'd think the role of major conferences, commissioned panels, editorial policies of journals, funding agencies programs, and funding initiatives in naming things and distinguishing fields is notable and also provides the required citations not otherwise available and will help to avoid editor's POV.
Right now, the question is: should
computational mathematics be remain a separate page or not?
Jmath666
16:23, 4 April 2007 (UTC)
It appears that User:Parker007 has asked User:Snowbot to tag a lot of math article talk pages with {{ maths rating}}. Has anyone heard anything about this? CMummert · talk 00:50, 30 March 2007 (UTC)
Snowbot has now been stopped. Thanks to all of you for addressing the issue. The bot has tagged about 1.6K talk pages, what I need to know if the project want them to be detagged or not. Snowolf (talk) CON COI - 13:31, 30 March 2007 (UTC)
Request tags be put back. It's useful information for users that the articles fall within the scope of Project Mathematics, and this should be indicated on their page.
It is a good thing for articles to be tagged with a Project, so people know where to come to for experts. And so 'bots can easily ID the subject matter, just from a links dump. Jheald 18:13, 5 April 2007 (UTC)
I don't seem to find any previous discussions concerning the use of quantifiers (e.g. , as in the definition section of Inner product space) in articles (I might be bad at searching, though). I personally think these should not be used in a 'textbook' setting, and they greatly reduce readabillity. Granted, they provide a clean and very clear exposition for readers who are comfortable with them, but since articles are usually directed to a general audience, I think they should be avoided. Comments? JohanK 07:51, 4 April 2007 (UTC)
Let , and . Then,
Oleg Alexandrov ( talk) 15:00, 4 April 2007 (UTC)
There is a reason that formal languages were invented. Natural languages are very confusing and clumsy at expressing complicated concepts, e.g. when there are quantifiers in both the hypothesis and conclusion of an implication. See Transfinite induction for an example of a concept which is expressed very unclearly in ordinary English, but would be trivial in formal logic notation. JRSpriggs 10:21, 5 April 2007 (UTC)
Should there be such category? There was only Image analysis in it and the category page was blank. So have have changed Image analysis to Category:Mathematics. Jmath666 20:48, 5 April 2007 (UTC)
I see. So I have corrected the page pointing there. Jmath666 21:22, 5 April 2007 (UTC)
I need some help there. From User:JJL on Talk:Computational mathematics: "I don't believe this is a separate field but rather a different name for what is now usually called computational science. I suggest redirecting it there and editing that article to mention that, indeed, computational science as a named academic program often has an emphasis on the applications to science." This [sentence] makes no sense. Some of you made few helpful edits to computational mathematics but that does not seem to be enough to make User:JJL go away and stop claiming that computational mathematics does not exist and pushing to delete the article. Thanks. Jmath666 00:40, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
Do you think that computational mathematics should be a separate article or, as JJL suggests, redirected to computational science and that article edited by JJL "to mention that, indeed, computational science as a named academic program often has an emphasis on the applications to science" (sic)? Please vote separate article or redirect. Thank you. Jmath666 04:08, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
If the information in computational mathematics (not form) is preserved after such move that's OK with me too but given the attitude of JJL that is highly unlikely, please do read the quoted sentence above that shows it clearly. The current painful state of computational mathematics (yes I fully agree) emerged after me trying to respond to objections of JJL but that was a mistake obviously nothing will satisfy JJL given his POV that computational mathematics does not exist and it just messed it up.
I would not mind taking look at the whole scientific computing area and I suggested just that above and even wrote a rought draft of a the top article but there was no response. and I cannot afford the kind of struggle like with JJL reverting my edits every step of the way - too much waste. Can you look? Sorry I do not know anything about computing in algebra etc.
I can give it one last shot and rewrite computational mathematics completely reporting on documented facts not any editor's wish what is should or should not be. But I would like to see some interest/support before I take on that task. Thanks. Jmath666 08:37, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
Thank you very much for the feedback. I have replaced the page by disambiguation. Jmath666 00:31, 7 April 2007 (UTC)
I hastily created a stub article titled lifting (mathematics), and at this moment I'm not even sure I've got the definition right. Could others here add more? Michael Hardy 21:04, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
Cross-posted from Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Maths, science, and technology:
Tearlach 12:56, 8 April 2007 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Curve transformation. The author of the page describes it as original research. Charles Matthews 19:16, 8 April 2007 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Internet shorthand notation seems to be misnamed for what I've always known as "ASCII math notation". Note, there may not be one standard method, but I believe the overall concept is notable for an article, at least in terms of the history of computing. Yea or nay, I think this nomination needs more knowledgeable input. -- Dhartung | Talk 21:55, 8 April 2007 (UTC)
I've come across the article Examples of differential equations which has been tagged as having insufficient context (in my opinion, rightly so), and following the links, found an article ordinary differential equation. Now, the interesting thing about it is that there is also an article differential equation which is not linked from the ODE page. Was there a schism a while back, with one school of editors leaving and founding their own page? What do other editors think about the current distribution of the basic material between different articles? (I'll mention two more: partial differential equation and phase portrait, which is just a stub with a picture.) Arcfrk 03:51, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
Should a formula be included for defining 2-, 6-, 10-, etc-petalled roses such as
or something? — METS501 ( talk) 05:11, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
The formula above is yet another excellent reason why vertically stacked fractions should not appear in superscripts. Consider:
Michael Hardy 21:08, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
Anyone think that the double integral article should be merged into the multiple integral article? The triple integral article already redirects to multiple integral.-- Jersey Devil 02:52, 9 April 2007 (UTC)
Something bizarre and troubling has come to my attention. I was looking at the article on classical modular curves and saw that two superscripts were closed with <sup> instead of </sup>. I fixed the problem, but was puzzled that something with such dramatically visible consequences had previously escaped notice. So I checked the edit history, which showed the problem had been there for a long time, flying under the radar of a number of seasoned editors. This struck me as odd, but I moved on. But just now, I found the same phenomenon with a subscript tag in an article, area of a disk, I have worked on and scrutinized repeatedly. Here, another editor did the fixing. The history claims a subscript tag has been missing for some time. I don't believe it; I'm sure the presented history is false.
I don't know what the source of this may be, whether a software glitch or deliberate foul play; but we really need to be able to trust histories. At the moment, I do not. -- KSmrq T 03:44, 9 April 2007 (UTC)
a<sub>1<sub>
by replacing the second <sub>
tag by a close tag, while the new version does not do this. --
Jitse Niesen (
talk)
04:58, 9 April 2007 (UTC)<sub>...<sub>
or <sup>...<sup>
that were previously automagically repaired, so that we can fix problems now no longer covered-up? --
Lambiam
Talk
07:20, 9 April 2007 (UTC)I think that Jitse is correct. The errors have been there all along, but were hidden by bugs in the processing of html. Notice also that where previously tags terminated automatically at the end of a paragraph, now they do not. A user had trouble with the "small" tag on the signature of Signpost not terminating any more and affecting the rest of his user talk page. JRSpriggs 11:11, 9 April 2007 (UTC)
Since I see that a lot of the subscript problems involve chemical formulae, I left a note over on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Chemistry describing the problem and pointing to Mets501's page. Perhaps some of the people there can help as well. — David Eppstein 20:23, 9 April 2007 (UTC)
Just to bring back an old discussion about content from Citizendium, the Special:Export page works on Citizendium to get the wikicode of any page. For example, to get the code of their Mathematics page, visit http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Special:Export/Mathematics. Not in ideal form, but it's a way. — METS501 ( talk) 00:01, 10 April 2007 (UTC)
In one of the most idiotic edits I've seen in a long time, User:The Kinslayer, who seems to spend most of his efforts on topics of no importance, marked Institute for Mathematics and its Applications for speedy deletion on the grounds that it is not important, and did not notify anyone who had edited that page. It was recreated recently. Someone else then deleted it. Michael Hardy 02:40, 29 March 2007 (UTC)
You can't know what should be considered notable and what should not without familiarity with the field. It seems to me those who were involved in the present case disregarded that fact, which I would think would be obvious. Michael Hardy 00:00, 30 March 2007 (UTC)
This article was created a few months ago and has sat mostly untouched for two months. As it stands, the article has problems visible from even a cursory reading. I was about to start working on it, but first I want to get a sense of whether this article belongs on WP at all. On the one hand this is a famous and important result that is covered in practically every text on mathematical logic. On the other hand, the proof can be found in practically every text on mathematical logic, so sketching the proof here only duplicates what is already available (and probably better) in other locations. CMummert · talk 22:42, 4 April 2007 (UTC)
Anyway perhaps I missed it, but all of CMummert's specific comments (in the article's talk page) are related to the form of the article - he suggests deviding it to sections, adding more links etc. I saw no content-related specific comment. Dan Gluck 19:54, 6 April 2007 (UTC) Anyway mathematical logic is not my field of expertise, so if it is yours, and you think the article is incorrect and cannot be repaired, feel free to erase it :( Dan Gluck 20:00, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
Hi. I noticed when adding a link somewhere to Bijection that we have individual articles for Bijection, injective function and surjective function, as well as an article called Bijection, injection and surjection. Is this the optimal way to cover these topics? It seems redundant to me. At the least, should bijection be renamed to bijective function, for consistency? - GTBacchus( talk) 18:52, 9 April 2007 (UTC)
I recently ran across some copyright violations, and read the policy. I think I understand how to go about cleaning those up. This article is different. It's an outright copy of this newsletter article. Interestingly, there's no copyright notice on the isi web site – or at least, I couldn't find it. Also of interest, this article was contributed by User:Pdagum, who one might reasonably suppose to be a relative (son Paul?) of Prof. Dagum.
Anyway, I'm unsure what to do about this one. It's an "in memoriam" article, quoted verbatim. As such it certainly doesn't sound very encyclopedic. Suggestions? DavidCBryant 14:40, 12 April 2007 (UTC)
Does someone know the title of the painting by Albrecht Dürer (I guess, not absolutely sure though), which shows a projection a smaller shape onto a bigger canvas? I know, the description is very vague... The image has some geometrical interest, I'd like to put it to projective space (if it is available somewhere). Jakob.scholbach 04:51, 13 April 2007 (UTC)
Any hope of evolving Mathematical landscape into something encyclopedic or shall it go straight to AfD? -- Pjacobi 13:15, 8 April 2007 (UTC)
Just saw this before coming here. Tagged several statements that seemed speculative and unsourced with {{ cn}}. But if it doesn't improve, I'd likely vote Delete in an AfD. — David Eppstein 16:38, 8 April 2007 (UTC)
Call me a pessimist, but writing about this kind of sociological stuff is difficult and will no doubt be easily prey to OR, lack of citations, and just generally crap. We already have great difficulty with articles about mathematical education (which can be readily sourced and is written quite frequently about). Who's ready and qualified to change this article anyway? -- C S (Talk) 11:59, 15 April 2007 (UTC)
The level of activity at the physics project has fallen way off. See Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Physics#Is this WikiProject moribund?. If any of you have an interest in physics, but have not been paying attention to it lately, now would be a good time to get involved. JRSpriggs 07:15, 10 April 2007 (UTC)
Many of the requests currently listed on Articles requested for more than two years seem to be mathematical ones. The requests on this page are those which have been unfulfilled for the longest time, and we therefore tend to treat them with a higher priority than those requested only for one year and the other request pages. If any members of this WikiProject have sufficient knowledge and access to sources to write a good stub on one or more of these topics, it would be much appreciated. Thanks – Gurch 10:31, 11 April 2007 (UTC)
Many of them can just be redirects. Take the topmost example from the 2 year list, amenable set, for instance. I was, just the other day, going to write an article on the Gödel, Jensen, Lévy etc. constructions (none of which exists as an obviously named article), but then I soon found that an article already exists on the constructible universe. It is pretty unlikely that we will be able to write a feature length article on amenable sets (without abandoning all pretence to being a general encyclopedia, that is), but we should certainly be able to do a better job of presenting the various independence results— if only to redirect key concepts to more comprehensive articles. — Kaustuv Chaudhuri 16:50, 11 April 2007 (UTC)
At the moment, mathematicians are divided by religion in Category:Mathematicians by religion. Analogous categories for many other professions (including in many scientific fields) have generally been deleted, mainly because religion is largely irrelevant to the given profession. Some people have defended these categories as being used specifically for clergy or devoutly religious, but they are rarely used that way in practice, as the category names leave open the possibility that someone will use these categories to identify anyone who is a mathematician of a given religion.
I was wondering whether these categories had the support of WikiProject Mathematics or not. If people here generally disapprove of these categories, then I can nominate them for deletion. On the other hand, if people really want these categories, then I will leave them alone.
Could other people here please comment? Thank you, Dr. Submillimeter 15:28, 13 April 2007 (UTC)
Spiritual beliefs are not necessarily irrelevant to how a mathematician thinks about the status of mathematical objects and of the infinite -- and this can affect his research as well; not the content of his conclusions, perhaps, but the way he interprets them, and what questions he chooses to study. -- Trovatore 01:07, 14 April 2007 (UTC)
I stumbled across Scholarpedia today, its a wikipedia type thing written by academics. The coverage seems patchy coving computational neuroscience, dynamical systems [8], and computational intelligence. But the articles that exists seem to be more in depth than here. They have quite a destinguised list of authors Milnor, possible Lonez Conway and Mandelbrot. -- Salix alba ( talk) 16:43, 14 April 2007 (UTC)
{{
fact}}
tags, ignoring the bibliography.I agree with the general sentiment, but let's not get carried away. Since you've chosen the exotic sphere article as an example, let's look and consider if any of these things has happened to it. Vandalism? Not really. Crank theories? No. Inline citation problems? No. Accessibility complaints? No. Illiterate ignoramuses revising the page? No (except me perhaps). As for the problems with say, Milnor putting in his new cutting edge research (which has somehow not made it into the literature after all these years...), I doubt he would have any trouble understanding the problems with that; in my experience, mathematicians tend to be good at realizing these things, even those that haven't edited Wikipedia much. Certainly after one of the people who normally edit the page pointed it out to him, I can't imagine Milnor unreasonably insisting on a revert war and being eventually blocked (he seems calm enough in person).
So, in summary, I would imagine if some famous mathematician were to edit Wikipedia (and somehow I can imagine this extremely well even with a lack of imagination...) I would expect little problems. The math portion of Wikipedia functions quite differently than some other parts though. So I would agree there is a kind of expert problem. But I don't know how much of a problem it is to us. And let's not disparate the exotic sphere article too much, eh? It's not bad; it's informative, gives some good references. Certainly one can find a fairly elementary introduction by Milnor (in one of those MAA lecture series from the 70s) that is wonderful, but that's a very high standard to try and match.
In your hypothetical example, I imagine some people would read Milnor's article and it would get promoted to A-class :-). -- C S (Talk) 07:16, 16 April 2007 (UTC)
One point that I think is particularly relevant to mathematics here. The aim is not so much to have 'great articles' but a great piece of hypertext. So that (for example by the end of this decade) it would not be an empty boast that cutting-edge research mathematics can be referred back to definitions by an unbroken chain of blue links. Deligne said the proof of the Ramanujan conjecture would write out as 1000 pages of graduate level mathematics. We have a new model for making that less scary. Charles Matthews 15:51, 16 April 2007 (UTC)
What do you mean by a credit-taking mechanism? Scholarpedia offers you an option: although you need to use your real name to register and you need to log in to edit, you can nonetheless edit either anonymously (but while logged in) or with your name on your edits in the edit history. Michael Hardy 01:37, 17 April 2007 (UTC)
I for one don't think any tenure committee is going to be impressed by time and effort spent on Wikipedia or Wikipedia-like systems. Giving some way to give people credit on their vitae for those efforts is just going to lead to the committee asking why they aren't spending more effort on research. I think, as Jmath666 wrote earlier, that effort spent on WP is not only valuable community service but also that it is valuable practice in writing readably. But I don't see any kind of credit system as much of a draw, and I worry that such a system would lead junior into spending more time than they should in WP and hurting their careers. The way it is now, there's a clearer picture of what you're getting: a chance to help others understand the world better, but not really a step on the career ladder. — David Eppstein 02:17, 17 April 2007 (UTC)
The article Mean information has been nominated for deletion. Comment as you see fit. Anville 19:49, 15 April 2007 (UTC)
I guess this does not qualify as encyclopedic content per WP:NOR. Comments? Oleg Alexandrov ( talk) 22:22, 15 April 2007 (UTC)
Someone has proposed that Euler on infinite series be transwikied to Wikiquote. I think instead the article should be expanded to be more than just a quote. Perhaps some of this pages public can contribute. Michael Hardy 23:58, 15 April 2007 (UTC)
Category:Complex systems is on CfD [ [11]]. -- Salix alba ( talk) 15:01, 16 April 2007 (UTC)
I think the name as it is is fine, it is what people in the area use and it is not ambiguous with any other meaning for the same phrase. If the problem is people not knowing the technical meaning of the phrase and guessing that things belong when they don't, wouldn't it suffice to add appropriate text to the category page? — David Eppstein 17:22, 18 April 2007 (UTC)
Please consider this list of edits which hits all of WAREL's pet topics. I didn;t see any that looked harmful; but I can't tell where the ja: links are going. Would people keep an eye on this? Septentrionalis PMAnderson 23:20, 16 April 2007 (UTC)
12988816 (number) is nominated for deletion. The AFD discussion is here. CMummert · talk 15:55, 17 April 2007 (UTC)
Nationalists are trying to move this article to a silly title again. — Ruud 23:24, 17 April 2007 (UTC)
I've always seen a relation shown as something like x~y on some set S. And that this relation is an "equivalence relation" iff it is reflexive, symmetric and transitive. So that for instance you could have x~y if x<y on the integer set Z. So this relation would not be an "equivalence relation" since x is not less than x so x~x is not true and so ~ is not reflexive. So ~ is a relation but not necessarily an "equivalence relation". But the article on the following articles seem contradictory to this saying that ~ alone denotes an equivalence relation:
Is there something I am missing here?-- Jersey Devil 01:23, 20 April 2007 (UTC)
The ~ may be very often used to express equivalence relations, as the article says, but this does not contradict the fact that it is sometimes used for any relation, equivalence or otherwise. The confusion is simply that mathematical notation varies in different places and contexts. Perhaps the Tilde article could be updated to reflect the more general use of the symbol, but apart from that I don't see any issue at all. JPD ( talk) 11:24, 20 April 2007 (UTC)
Hello. The categorization taskforce is trying to find WikiProjects interested in using the bot of Alai to identify mathematics stub articles which do not currently have a category (besides the stub category of course). If the project is interested, we could create something like Category:Uncategorized mathematics stubs which could then be categorized by people knowledgeable in the subject, thus reducing the risk of improper categorization. Please let us know on the taskforce's talk page if you're interested. Cheers, Pascal.Tesson 00:23, 23 April 2007 (UTC)
I have proposed renaming Category:Complex systems as Category:Complex systems (science). Here is my justification for the rename:
I came across this article on a mathematician while working on categories. (Don't ask how.) The article says little about why this person was notable, although I suspect that part of the reason why the person was notable was because he was a murder victim. I may nominate it for deletion, although first I have asked the article creator to improve the article.
Is anyone here familiar with de Leeuw's research? Was he notable in mathematics? From this standpoint of this person as a mathematician, should the article be kept, or should it be deleted? Dr. Submillimeter 20:59, 19 April 2007 (UTC)
By the way, does anyone know if he's any relation to Jan de Leeuw, who definitely should not have a redlink? -- Trovatore 06:02, 20 April 2007 (UTC)
Could someone please expand the article to indicate how the person was notable? Dr. Submillimeter 11:12, 20 April 2007 (UTC)
I was bold, and moved it to deLeeuw, which most of the sources seem to use. Does anybody mind? If so, let's do WP:RM. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 05:29, 26 April 2007 (UTC)
Please check out Systolic geometry. I noticed it when Katzmik ( talk · contribs) twice put a link to it into Hyperbolic geometry. Both times I removed the link after looking at the article and not seeing any relevance to hyperbolic geometry. Apparently, Katzmik is Mikhail G. Katz, author of a book linked to by the article. He did not create the article, but he has done most of the edits to it. Do you think that this is a legitimate topic or is it just link spam? JRSpriggs 07:54, 25 April 2007 (UTC)
We have assume good faith for a reason. This case illustrates why. Charles Matthews 16:50, 25 April 2007 (UTC)
It looks perfectly legitimate to me. The basic definition is stated in such a way that it should be instantly comprehensible to everyone (except non-mathematicians, maybe) and that's more than can be said for some math articles. This seems like a good reason why an author should not be forbidden to put in an external link to his own book. Michael Hardy 20:53, 25 April 2007 (UTC)
I was reading ordered field and noticed that the "Archimedean property" was capitalized, whereas in my Lang Algebra book, it is not. So, I noticed:
I had always learned that when the property is modified (like with -ian), that it loses its "properness" and should be written lowercase -- and I have never seen abelian capitalized. But, on the other hand, I have always seen Gaussian written capitalized. I would prefer to never capitalize such adjectives (but that could look very strange with Gauss, Hamiltonian, Hilbert space, etc) Any ideas or has this been discussed before? - grubber 16:02, 18 April 2007 (UTC)
Mathematical landscape has been nominated for deletion. Comment as you see fit! Anville 15:34, 26 April 2007 (UTC)
What is the difference between caluculi (e.g. propositional calculus, predicate calculus, proof calculus, and the various comp-sci calculi) vs. algebras (Boolean, heyting, etc)?
I was hoping to maybe find something on wikipedia explaining the difference, but I couldn't find anything. Brentt 03:03, 26 April 2007 (UTC)
I have always associated the word "calculus" with a method to manipulate strings of symbols in a meaningful way. There are "transformation rules" that tell you how to convert one string into another string. Not every transformation may be suitable for every string - you have to follow some rules. This matches the way that Newtonian calculus, lambda calculus, proof calculi, propositional calculus, etc. work. An algebra, on the other hand, is a set with operations such that any two elements can have the operation applied to them. In some cases, you can make up a semantics for the calculus that show that when the strings represent elements of a certain type of algebra then the transformation rules preserve some algebraic properties. But this is a very loose connection. Is that your question? CMummert · talk 03:35, 26 April 2007 (UTC)
Umm, hi,
This is surely off-topic here, but I'm hoping that people here would be kind enough to evaluate Equipartition theorem, which is a Featured Article candidate now. It's at the level of basic multivariable calculus, although there is a multidimensional integration by parts at one step of the derivation. Does the article read OK to you all? Any suggestions for improvements? Thanks ever so much for your time and trouble, Willow 21:58, 27 April 2007 (UTC)
It seems to be regarded as a positive thing to put {{maths rating}} templates on talk pages as a way of tracking progress in our task to provide a good range of high quality articles, with emphasis on the most important ones. However, I am confused by the current organization and would appreciate some links/clarification/discussion. The whole process seems to be intertwined with the separate but related selection of articles for the CD-ROM Wikipedia1.0, whose classification we use (modulo our additional B+ class).
At first this seems fine: I follow the "mathematics grading" link on a template to Wikipedia:WikiProject_Mathematics/Wikipedia_1.0 and find explanations of the grading, with helpful tables of how many articles there are in each class, analysed both by importance and field, automatically generated each day by a bot - great! When I follow links in this table to a particular class (A,B etc.), or importance level (low, mid etc.), I find myself on a category pages which automatically list the articles in the given category - also useful!
Finally I follow the link to geometry and topology and I see something which looks even more useful: a list of articles in my field, ordered first by decreasing importance and then by increasing quality (class), together with comments, presumably from the template on the talk page. Wow, this is the most useful page of all!
But then I notice that the page is incomplete (articles with ratings that I know are not there), and has an extra "Has template" column. The page appears not to be automated (indeed it is months out-of-date). Then I remember WP1.0 and guess this is some list of articles chosen to go on a CD-ROM. Is this right, or am I just confused? Wouldn't it be really useful to have pages like these which were updated automatically from templates on article pages? Wouldn't it be better to have an extra column "Selected for WP1.0" (which could be, and is usually, indicated on the article page)?
Forgive these mumblings if I have completely missed the point, but the current structure has left me very bewildered about what is going on. Geometry guy 21:01, 12 April 2007 (UTC)
Many thanks for the clarifications. It would be great if these pages were automated (although the "algebra" one would be a bit long unless stub class or low importance articles were somehow omitted).
However, one of the most useful things about these pages is that comments are there. Now there is a "comment" field on the {{maths rating}} template. This does not separate the comment from the author, but that is not important. At least in principle, couldn't the "comments/updated/has template" columns be replaced by a single column with the "comment" field of the article template? I know it requires someone to do the work, but it would be very useful and might encourage editors to use the "comment" field more often, and keep it up-to-date. Geometry guy 09:44, 13 April 2007 (UTC)
I see, that's a pity. Does that mean that if we moved to an automatic update regime we would lose the comments completely on the field pages, or would it be possible to write the code so that it checks the current field page for existing comments and writes them to the new page? (I guess that would be more work to do, though, because it involves parsing the field page.)
Would it be feasible to update comments from templates as a separate operation that happens less frequently? Weekly would surely be enough, or the bot could cycle through the list of fields to reduce the daily load (so each page would be updated every 11 days). Well, I know this is work, and work which I am not able to do, but I think it might add some energy to the project to have such a system for monitoring progress. I would at least be willing to go through (some of) the existing field pages and merge the existing comments into the templates on the article pages.
Also, I wonder if this is something that Snowolf and Snowbot would be able to do for us. Even a one-off update of the pages would be great. Geometry guy 15:54, 13 April 2007 (UTC)
This is a clever work-around — nice one Salix alba! I've changed {{ Maths rating}} to put articles with a comments page into Category:Mathematics articles with comments page. There are not so many of them yet, so I was able to go through them by hand, fixing them if necessary so that they are not also in Category:Mathematics articles with inline comments. It would be nice to have a third category with Category:Mathematics articles with no comments, but that required me to pluck up the courage to make a more substantial edit to the {{maths rating}} template, or for someone with more Template experience to do it before letting me the chance to mess it up ;) Geometry guy 15:50, 14 April 2007 (UTC)
I wasn't courageous enough so I just added a Category:Mathematics articles with no comments page. I also wasn't careful with the includeonly/noinclude issue so the template itself is an example. This is just a temporary fix to see where we are now. I will not be at all offended if someone reverts my edit! Geometry guy 20:08, 14 April 2007 (UTC)
I plucked up a bit more courage, and my ugly code appears to work, although it has the side effect of raising the "field" field slightly. I expect this is due to my lack of understanding of spaces and newlines in template code, and I hope an expert can fix it quickly (and improve my ugly nested code!): explanations on my talk page most welcome (and don't be afraid to be patronizing!). Meanwhile the temporary category Category:Mathematics articles with no comments page needs deleting (I don't think this needs to go through CFD since it contains no articles!). Geometry guy 21:23, 14 April 2007 (UTC)
Salix Alba suggests migrating from inline comments to only using comment subpages. I have no objection to that. I don't know the historical circumstances that led to the current redundant system.
If the comments are all moved to subpages then there is no technical problem with making the field summary pages. I wrote some proof-of-concept code whose results are available at User:CMummert/Sandbox4. That page is entirely automatically generated. Please let me know what can be improved. CMummert · talk 15:06, 14 April 2007 (UTC)
The plan is for all the field pages to be generated this way, unless there are objections. The argument in favor is that the old pages are horribly out of date and unlikely to be kept in sync manually as the number of rated pages increases. I just used the geometry field as a proof of concept to illustrate what can be done manually. CMummert · talk 21:39, 14 April 2007 (UTC)
I believe that all comments on the current Geometry and Topology page are now covered by /Comments pages. If someone wants to check what I have done, that would be very welcome, but from my point of view the current G&T page could be replaced by the proof of concept. Geometry guy 19:39, 14 April 2007 (UTC)
Note that not all comments at Analysis can be found in this proof-of-concept. This is because (I hope) they already exist in article talk page templates, and I've not migrated them to /Comments. As mentioned above, I really hope a bot will be able to do this. Geometry guy 18:23, 15 April 2007 (UTC)
I've now been through Algebra. This was relatively easy, as most of the comments are by Tompw (who almost always makes consistent comments on article and field pages). Geometry guy 19:34, 15 April 2007 (UTC)
I've now also checked Mathematical physics, which was relatively easy for the same reason. Geometry guy 20:21, 15 April 2007 (UTC)
I think we should not include the Mathematicians field in this process until an interested editor comments, as the format there is rather different (mathematicians are organized by year). Anyway, this means the checking is half-done, but I won't be able to do much more for the rest of the week. Geometry guy 22:17, 15 April 2007 (UTC)
In addition to the
Mathematicians field, I also notice that there is a
Theorems and Conjectures field. In the long term it would be nice to automate both of these, by adding e.g. a "mathematician=year" tag and a "theorem=Y" tag (cf. "vital=Y") to the template.
Geometry guy
19:44, 16 April 2007 (UTC)
I've now checked the
Basics field page. After automation, I think it makes sense to split
Applied into Applied Mathematics and Probability and Statistics. These are, after all, completely different fields. It would also be convenient, I think, to split
General into General Mathematics and History. The split pages could be given different names to save checking them for now.
Geometry guy
19:44, 16 April 2007 (UTC)
I've now also checked Number theory, Discrete mathematics and Foundations. Subject to the above comments, this completes the checking process. Geometry guy 22:24, 16 April 2007 (UTC)
This is a good idea. I would also suggest moving the current "Applied mathematics" page to a (probably temporary) location ("Applied" or "Applied and statistics"). Similarly, the current "General" page could be moved to "General and history". The "Mathematicians" and "Theorems and Corollaries" need further discussion. Geometry guy 23:23, 16 April 2007 (UTC)
I'm sure there was a reason why I put Probability and Statistics on the same page as Applied, but I can't remember it... I think the history category was added as an option after the general page got created. Anyway, seperate rating pages for P&S and history are a good thing. I'll sort it out properly tommorrow morning (it's late, and I'll make silly errors if I do it now) Tompw ( talk) 00:31, 17 April 2007 (UTC)
Thanks Jitse! I agree simpler is better. During my edits, the only places I noticed potential conflict with other WikiProjects were two or three articles such as Quantum mechanics which are joint with the Physics project. Even so, I think it is better (as well as simpler) to share comments between projects.
As for the migration of comments to /Comments, there are only about 130 pages to go, and there is no rush, so if we all move a comment from time to time (and I've done quite a few already), it will get done even without the help of a bot. See the categories created above for further information. Geometry guy 19:25, 17 April 2007 (UTC)
There appears to be general agreement that the automatic of per-field ratings pages is a good thing for all fields except "Mathematicians" and "Theorems and Conjectures" (which is not really a field), and that "Probability and statistics" should have its own page, separate from "Applied mathematics". I therefore suggest we begin to implement it. I have a few other ideas as well. Here is a possible list of actions to strike out when done!
I wonder also if it would be useful to add a "theorem" tag the {{ maths rating}} template to place articles into a category Category:Mathematics articles about theorems or conjectures (I'm happy to do this and tag the relevant articles). Could this then be used to automatically generate Theorems and conjectures? Geometry guy 13:35, 19 April 2007 (UTC)
Could you tell again what exactly is to be done with these 131 articles? I would volunteer to handle some of these, if help is needed. Jakob.scholbach 19:37, 19 April 2007 (UTC)
I have now checked that all comments on Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Wikipedia 1.0/Theorems and conjectures are reflected in the article Comments pages. I've asked the marvellous VeblenBot if it can generate this page for us using Category:Mathematical theorems and Category:Conjectures. Geometry guy 11:16, 26 April 2007 (UTC)
I am no longer convinced that a separate Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Wikipedia 1.0/History page is helpful. At the moment it only contains two articles, and only one is really about history. There is already a WikiProject on the History of Science which rates articles, there is already the Mathematicians field, and I think it is more helpful to place articles like History of manifolds and varieties in the relevant mathematical field ("Geometry and topology" in this case).
One possibility would be to treat these as suggested above for "Theorems and conjecture" using a "history" tag to generate a category called Category:Articles about the development of mathematical concepts or something similar. Comments? Geometry guy 13:41, 19 April 2007 (UTC)
Finally, does anyone have any ideas for the Mathematicians field? Sorting these by date is the hardest part. Would we be able to do it if every mathematician had a subpage containing their date of birth (or death)? Geometry guy 13:41, 19 April 2007 (UTC)
Yes, that is what I meant, simply because the current page sorts the mathematicians that way. Sorting by century is one option, but there is the problem that many mathematicians straddle two centuries (e.g. Gaston Darboux and Elie Cartan). There are also Category:1917 deaths style categories, which I suppose in principle could be used, but this may be too complicated to be worth the trouble! Geometry guy 14:12, 22 April 2007 (UTC)
There is now only the mathematicians page left to automate, so I have been looking at it again. There is in fact an obvious way to sort mathematicians by year: just make the table(s) "sortable". This can be automated using /Dates subpages giving the lifetime of the mathematician. Together with a couple of categories, such as Category:BCE mathematians and Category:First millenium mathematicians, sortable tables can easily be produced by transcluding these subpages. Such tables have the additional advantage that the tables can be sorted by importance or quality by clicking on the links provided by the sortable format.
It would be nice to be able to sort the table(s) also by name. One way to do this would be to introduce additional /SortName subpages, which give a sortable form of the mathematicians name (e.g. "Fermat, Pierre de" for Pierre de Fermat).
The creation of /Dates and /SortName subpages from the current page can probably be done using AWB (alas, I still don't have the expertise for this). However, there is another more subtle issue: at present the mathematicians page provides an additional "field" column, which lists the expertise and contributions of a mathematician, in addition to any comments on the quality of the article. This can partially be covered by the /Comments subpage. However, I think it might be useful to transclude another page containing the expertise and contribution information.
Many of these list entries describe the field(s) in which the mathematician contributed. This makes me wonder whether we should replace the "field = mathematicians" tag by a "mathematician = yes" tag, so the field is still free (for the primary field in which the mathematician contributed). One advantage of this would be the possibility to sort mathematicians by field. The mathematicians could then also be listed on the relevant field pages, although it is not obvious that this is necessarily a good thing, so please add comments! Geometry guy 19:47, 27 April 2007 (UTC)
To show how this can be done,
User:Geometry guy/Mathematicians
Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Wikipedia 1.0/Mathematicians now contains a sortable list of mathematicians with some dates. Most of the content of this page was automatically generated by VeblenBot with no change to the code. There are links for adding /Dates, /SortName, and /Contribs subpages to mathematician talk pages. At the moment, the sort order for the "class" and "importance" columns is not the natural one. Also, BCE and first millenium dates do not sort correctly. Feel free to make comments, changes, or add dates etc.
Geometry guy
12:32, 28 April 2007 (UTC)
I've now added almost all the dates, and many sortable names to the table. I have also managed to make the class and importance columns sort naturally, as well as BCE and first millenium dates, although my solutions are not particularly elegant. Geometry guy 18:17, 29 April 2007 (UTC)
I agree that the profusion of subpages is not ideal and your ideas are interesting indeed. I think the data should be stored with each mathematician, but I am not wedded to the current (experimental) approach. The /DB subpage per mathematician is a nice idea, and it might not be too much work to migrate the data I have created to produce entries like
(This above was generated by a template User:Geometry guy/MakeDB which might make the migration easier.) [Note added: I am now substituting for this template, so I can delete it from my user space.]
As I understand, I then just have to modify Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Wikipedia 1.0/Mathematician row format template to replace transclusions like {{ {{{1}}}/Dates }} by {{ {{{1}}}/DB | key = dates }}, which is easy to do. Geometry guy 09:48, 30 April 2007 (UTC)
The mathematicians page has now been fully automated by CMummert and VeblenBot. However, in view of the above discussion, it may be subject to some change for a short period. Geometry guy 16:38, 30 April 2007 (UTC)
I have now copied the /SortName, /Dates and /Contribs subpages into /Data subpages of the form
and modified the templates to use these /Data subpages in the Mathematicians table. The only disadvantage of this approach is that the /Data subpages appear to be empty. This could be fixed by adding instructions inside a "noinclude". I could do that, but it will take a while, even using AWB. Geometry guy 16:48, 3 May 2007 (UTC)
Nice! Can you implement this? I know it is boring going through 147 articles with AWB, but I think it is worthwhile. Using a template as you suggest has the huge advantage (which I didn't appreciate when I created these /Data pages) that the format can be changed without having to change all the pages. For the same reason, it is probably worth being flexible about any "noinclude": I was going to transclude a template explaining how to edit these pages, but it might be possible to absorb this into your idea. Geometry guy 00:13, 4 May 2007 (UTC)
Please look at Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Wikipedia 1.0/Geometry and topology, which is a test example of how to use the automated tables. Before implementing the other fields, I want to collect feedback on this one. It's worth looking at the source of that page to see how the implementation works. CMummert · talk 15:21, 20 April 2007 (UTC)
It isn't obvious without looking at the page source code, but that page can be edited by anyone and the changes will not be lost. The tables themselves are included from another page, and changes to them will get overwritten. So it's possible to edit the lead section or add stuff to the bottom without having to ask me to edit the bot code. Tompw has suggested a way of formatting the tables so that the formatting will also be able to be tweaked from the wiki without changing the bot. CMummert · talk 20:06, 20 April 2007 (UTC)
Category:Mathematicians by religion nominated for deletion before I could get to doing it. (Ask me about Slovenia!) Please go comment at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2007 April 29. Dr. Submillimeter 22:49, 29 April 2007 (UTC)
I have edited the source of this page to ask User:MiszaBot II to automatically archive it. If any errors occur, please remove the template from the very top of this page's source code. The cutoff is currently set for 7 days, and the bot appears to run at 6:35 and 18:35 UTC each day. CMummert · talk 13:33, 30 April 2007 (UTC)
I added this comment to FOIL rule:
I took every math course my high school offered; the curriculum was better than at most high schools and I not only mastered calculus when I took the course but absorbed a lot of material beyond what was required in every course, and I NEVER heard of "FOIL" until as an undergraduate I was tutoring other undergraduates. It seems this mnemonic is completely universally known to everyone who hates algebra but is required to take an algebra course. Am I right to think that perhaps most mathematicians don't know it? Michael Hardy 17:39, 30 April 2007 (UTC)
I don't understand all the fuss.
The statement, "This mnemonic is not used by mathematicians and perhaps not known by most mathematicians, but is taught by secondary school teachers" seems a little strong. Why not just say "This mnemonic is often taught in secondary schools" and leave it at that? In the article it also says, "The FOIL mnemonic is commonly taught but is sometimes frowned upon because the method does not work, without modification, for higher order polynomials (the double distributive method, by contrast, is easily extended to the latter case). Foiling can thus be seen as an example of learning by rote memorization of rules rather than by understanding underlying concepts." But I always have to memorize base cases, and I can combine FOIL with recursion to expand the multiplication of sums of arbitrary terms.
I disliked the article on purplemath.com referenced above. It's primarily because the author adopts the tone of "this is the way I do it so this is correct and it is the way you should do it." I'd agree more with KSmq's second comment that "Not all mnemonics are bad, and different students respond better to different means." (I also have a strong distaste for the use of "simplify" to describe the process of expanding the multiplication. Yuck.)
IMHO, the "Factorization" section of the article should either be removed or modified. It's not at all clear how one FOILs in reverse.
My two cents, Lunch 20:37, 30 April 2007 (UTC)
There is an ongoing opinion poll at Talk:Ring (mathematics)#Poll on unit requirement as to whether or not the rings on Wikipedia should be defined to unital or not. Opinions welcome. -- Fropuff 04:22, 1 May 2007 (UTC)
An anon has been going through articles replacing italic d with upright d in math articles, for example
to
There is a small discussion about this at talk:Derivative.
As pointed out by Geometry guy, the previous discussion about this at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mathematics/Archive 4#straight or italic d? did not achieve consensus on what to use.
However, I would argue that while people should be allowed to use whatever notation they choose, I believe it is not a good idea to do mass changes to articles which used one type of notation for a long time.
That is to say, the vast majority of Wikipedia articles (all articles that I am aware of) use italic d notation. I vote to revert the anon conversions and to go back to status quo italic d notation at derivative and differential form. And if somebody starts a new article, and want to use roman d, they should be allowed. Comments? Oleg Alexandrov ( talk) 15:00, 23 March 2007 (UTC)
Reasons for pro italic usage of imaginary unit in Wikipedia: i |
---|
most mathematics books/papers use italic notation of imag. unit |
italic notation of imag. unit looks better Oleg Alexandrov |
is a conceptual case of definition, italic i is needed Septentrionalis |
Reasons for pro non-italic usage of imaginary unit in Wikipedia: i |
Better semantics. This has several beneficial implications. PizzaMargherita |
prevents confusion with running index i, electr. current, etc. Wurzel |
offers electrical engineering technicians an imaginary unit notation which has no interference with neither (Maxwell's) current density j nor with electr. current i Wurzel |
allows parallel usage with running indexes i,j Wurzel |
improves readability of formulas containing the imag. unit i because of no overlapping definitions Wurzel |
i is easily acessible on many computers/text systems / fonts Wurzel |
Reasons for usage of \imath |
Is an alternative offered by TeX Michael Hardy |
As an apology for causing trouble by partially supporting the anon, I promised to collect some links to previous discussions, to avoid (if possible) going over the same old ground. This is what I found so far: please add to this list if you find others. I tend to agree with User:Toby Bartels (although I am from the UK and he is from the US, we both personally prefer upright d's, but oppose the math project having a policy on this - see my comments after the list). Geometry guy 16:41, 23 March 2007 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Mathematics Collaboration of the Week has just been marked as inactive, its not received much activity since November. Should anything be done to revive the collaboration? -- Salix alba ( talk) 07:34, 28 March 2007 (UTC)
I just added this paragraph to the list of trigonometric identities, and maybe someone can add some information in response to the questions below.
where "|A| = k" means the index A runs through the set of all subsets of size k of the set { 1, 2, 3, ... }.
In these two identities an asymmetry appears that is not seen in the case of sums of finitely many terms: in each product, there are only finitely many sine factors and cofinitely many cosine factors.
I derived the identities from scratch without careful attention to these questions (that's quite easy, as you'll see if you try it), then I found them in a couple of old books (19th-century trigonometry texts were quite detailed and thorough), but again without careful attention to what the books said about these questions. --- Lazily... Michael Hardy 02:41, 2 April 2007 (UTC)
Oh. Yes. Clumsy of me.... Michael Hardy 19:56, 2 April 2007 (UTC)
...and now I've fixed it in what I wrote above, lest rely on it. Michael Hardy 19:57, 2 April 2007 (UTC)
We quite often begin our articles with "In mathematics..." or something similar. This has been discussed previously at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Mathematics and I'm happy to report that the consensus was to support a variety of styles. :)
Anyway, I just wanted to draw attention to a variant which I have started using, which I think might be quite useful to other editors (who also might have their own variants which they would like to share here). Quite often it is necessary and appropriate to set a more precise context in the first sentence, such as "In analysis...". Sometimes it is safe to do this without the risk that the reader will assume the article needs psychotherapy, sometimes not. In the latter case, mathematics needs to be mentioned. In this particular example the problem is solved easily by linking directly as "In mathematical analysis...", but it is not always so easy to find an elegant solution. A common approach (which I have used), is to begin "In mathematics, more specifically in widget theory...", but I am increasingly finding this rather awkward, so I came up with an alternative
This is a bit shorter and seems less forbidding to me, so I thought I would share it here. Comments and suggestions very welcome! Geometry guy 18:29, 30 March 2007 (UTC)
I agree, but I think "In the mathematical field of..." does this. Do you agree? (This is one reason that I posted.) Geometry guy 19:25, 30 March 2007 (UTC)
Here is an example similar to user:Geometry guy's from a page I've edited recently:
In this case starting
creates more problems than it solves: does it not imply that in physics Hilbert space means something else? I find it annoying, by the way, when the lead to an article with an elegant or not so elegant, but, at any rate, well thought-out solution is edited down to "In mathematics" with a happy note "boilerplate" in the edit summary. Arcfrk 08:26, 31 March 2007 (UTC)
Further to the discussion above ( Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mathematics#Attribution), the poll on the new WP:ATT summary of the verifiability and no original research guidelines is now open, and closes on April 6th. So far it looks close, so please vote to give the mathematicians' point of view.
It is my strong belief (and I am not alone, see above), that the proposed change is definitely a good thing for mathematics, since it reemphasises "attributable" (i.e., the fact that an article has sources) rather than "attribution" (choosing a particular source and citing it). Also, "no original research" would follow as consequence of being attributable, rather than a directive in itself. In some sense, every wikipedia article is "original research", because it gathers information from a variety of sources and presents it in a new (and hopefully fresh, lively and interesting) way. This is particularly true in mathematics, where an encyclopedic explanation of a fact requires careful writing in a novel way, even though there are hundreds of sources. This change, although clarifying existing policy, should help us (I'm an optimist) against the bureaucrats who insist on an inline citation to source every nontrivial sentence.
I also happen to think the change is good for wikipedia, because in other fields, the concept of "truth" is less clear-cut than it is in mathematics, and by replacing "verifiable" by "attributable", the role of an encyclopedia to describe knowledge (which is partly what people believe rather than what is true) is greatly clarified. Geometry guy 19:27, 31 March 2007 (UTC)
I was probably being a bit polite when I said "less clear-cut", as people can disagree quite vehemently on what the truth is, or even what "truth" means, which is why I find it not a terribly helpful term. I'm not actually sure what it means in general, and the wikipedia article on truth, while an interesting and amusing read, left me none-the-wiser! :) More seriously, I share your concerns, but hope that WP:ATT, backed up by a clear idea of what a reliable source is, will actually tighten the structure through its clarity. Geometry guy 13:14, 3 April 2007 (UTC)
I really do not like moving illustrations in articles (unless they only move when you click on them or some such). They are distracting and the use up the band-width of my modem connection. In some cases, the article never settles down enough for me to see what is there and edit it. In this particular case, I would like to ask whomever is responsible for the moving picture of a tesseract on our project page to please fix it so that it does not move or only moves when the reader clicks on it. Thank you. JRSpriggs 07:04, 1 April 2007 (UTC)
I wonder what people think of the recent additions to integral equation. To me at appears that it is not yet well-enough established research (see the references section) to show up on Wikipedia. Comments? Oleg Alexandrov ( talk) 04:25, 2 April 2007 (UTC)
I am new to Wickipedia contribution and I was not aware of the policy that material should have been published in well recognized journals. My contribution was made in good faith with a view to benefit the readers and enhance the value of Wickipedia. Now I know the policy of Wickipedia, and in this case it is likely to be a limitation of Wickipedia. You can read an expert review of my work here: http://www.integralresearch.net/#Expert_Review . Please see page 4 here which establishes the link between standard integral equations and Rao Integral Equations: http://www.integralresearch.net/wps.pdf . It is easily verified. As for naming my result, if my result is very important, then it is appropriate, and I believe it to be so. I am confident that my results will become "well established" in time. I am not in any hurry. I have protected my idea by applying for US patents. In public interest, in order to evaluate the correctness of my idea, if any qualified person volunteers to verify my results on behalf of Wickipedia, I can send one copy of my book free. But you can get a lot of information on my approach here: http://www.integralresearch.net/RTslides.pdf http://www.integralresearch.net/wps.pdf http://www.integralresearch.net/apex.pdf
Lastly, if someone shows that my new method of solution to solve the Fredholm Equation of the First Kind when applied to shift-variant image deblurring is not better than current methods, I will give them $250.
If you volunteers are serious about enhancing Wickipedia, you should restrict your comments to technical merits of my idea and point out technical weaknesses. Keeping the interests of Wickipedia and the users in mind, you can decide whether your want to post my method or not, is upto you.
I appreciate the voluntary service your are rendering to the public. Dr. Muralidhara SubbaRao (Rao) rao@integralresearch.net —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 24.47.184.148 ( talk) 23:33, 2 April 2007 (UTC).
A new user calling himself MrMiami has been adding some bizarre nonsense to randomness that claims that, if a probability can be assigned to something, then that thing is "ordered" and therefore "not random". I don't think he's likely to see reason. Please come help. -- Trovatore 18:03, 2 April 2007 (UTC)
Can someone please check over the area section I added here to make sure it's alright? Thanks :-) — METS501 ( talk) 20:39, 2 April 2007 (UTC)
Thanks everyone! :-) — METS501 ( talk) 02:47, 3 April 2007 (UTC)
Portal:Mathematics looks kind of odd these days, with redlinks for the article of the week and picture of the week. From the history it appears that this state of affairs was present for a while. Anybody knows why things are like this? Oleg Alexandrov ( talk) 02:08, 3 April 2007 (UTC)
Equilateral triangle redirects to triangle. Shouldn't there be an own article for it? -- 212.149.217.110 18:59, 3 April 2007 (UTC)
I've noticed that User:Smylei, with the only contributions in the areas of Television and Uncyclopedia under his belt, has removed a paragraph from the history of Lie groups, and I reverted it as vandalism. However, since he insists that he is right, and I am an interested party, having written the section, I would like to ask other mathematics editors to take a look. Arcfrk 23:07, 3 April 2007 (UTC)
{{
test}}
message left on someone's user page when they have done something untoward to an article. If you visit the template page, you will see that we have a very mild version at first, becoming progressively more firm. One reason is because vandalism is often a "Hey, look at me!" message, intended to provoke a strong reaction; we don't want to give them that reward. Another is because kids experiment. Yet another is because people make mistakes. If we call someone a vandal, they may choose to identify themselves that way and act that way, whereas if we take this approach, perhaps they will become good contributors. (And if not, we gave them every chance.)I wrote computational mathematics ( last version edited by me), which User:JJL proposes to replace by redirect to computational science with some additions there. Please see Talk:Computational mathematics and Talk:Applied mathematics#Computational mathematics for details. Jmath666 04:16, 4 April 2007 (UTC)
JJL, I see you have reverted my edits to scientific computing that made a distinction between computer science and computational mathematics, consistently with your POV about computational mathematics. I suggest to wait for the outcome of the discussion here. Jmath666 05:54, 4 April 2007 (UTC)
I apologize if this historic view may be incorrect in details.
Computer science a.k.a.
Informatics split off from
mathematics and
electrical engineering sometime in the 1950s and separate CS departments started to appear in the 1960s. The term
computational mathematics (CM) was used for
numerical analysis as well as other computing things done on the math side, see the 1985 Rheinboldt report
Future Directions in Computational Mathematics, Algorithms, and Scientific Software commissioned by
NSF. A
DOD commisioned
position paper (page 45) refers to CM as "The Mathematics of Scientific Computation". This report was followed by the
NSF program in CM which currently defines its scope by: "Supports mathematical research in areas of science where computing plays a central and essential role, emphasizing algorithms, numerical methods, and symbolic methods. The prominence of computation in the research is a hallmark of the program." Meanwhile, the 1982 Lax report
Large Scale Computing in Science and Engineering commissioned by NSF and
DOE was the beginning of substantial funding for (and thus the very existence of) what was at different times called
Large scale computing,
High performance computing,
Supercomputing, and
Computational science. (The reason for evolution of names was mostly political, to justify funding for something new, buzzwords get tired.) [Added:
Scientific computing seems to be a more general term for everything here, used already before 1980.] To date, computational mathematics kept its identity as the theoretical side of things (mostly of us do proofs) distinct from
Computer science (only the complexity people still do proofs) [Added: and
Computational science (what proofs?)]. So that is my take, which includes
sources. Maybe too much
original research for an article unless I am lucky enough to find an independent history source.
Jmath666
06:32, 4 April 2007 (UTC)
Added: SIAM Timeline says the Rheiboldt report "led to the High Performance Computing initiative.". Jmath666 15:44, 4 April 2007 (UTC)
Thank you. There are still great numerical analysts and even engineers who do not program, not even MATLAB, and will be. I am familiar with the the SIAM CS&E conference though I sent there someone with the paper instead of going myself. Yes, the distinctions are blurred. Some are along the line proofs/no proofs. Some are what is done in what department / academic program / center.
Perhaps someone could take an integrative view on the whole business of applied mathematics / computational mathematics / computer science / computational engineering / computational simulation / large scale simulation / large scale computing / supercomputing / high performance computing / scientific computing / scientific computation / numerical analysis / numerical mathematics [Added: / computational science] etc. and make some sense out of it. Maybe start with disambiguation page and/or a category. What we have is an inconsistent hodgepodge of separate articles, written at very different levels of expertise. The separate pages or sections should give attribution for whatever they say instead of POV. I'd think the role of major conferences, commissioned panels, editorial policies of journals, funding agencies programs, and funding initiatives in naming things and distinguishing fields is notable and also provides the required citations not otherwise available and will help to avoid editor's POV.
Right now, the question is: should
computational mathematics be remain a separate page or not?
Jmath666
16:23, 4 April 2007 (UTC)
It appears that User:Parker007 has asked User:Snowbot to tag a lot of math article talk pages with {{ maths rating}}. Has anyone heard anything about this? CMummert · talk 00:50, 30 March 2007 (UTC)
Snowbot has now been stopped. Thanks to all of you for addressing the issue. The bot has tagged about 1.6K talk pages, what I need to know if the project want them to be detagged or not. Snowolf (talk) CON COI - 13:31, 30 March 2007 (UTC)
Request tags be put back. It's useful information for users that the articles fall within the scope of Project Mathematics, and this should be indicated on their page.
It is a good thing for articles to be tagged with a Project, so people know where to come to for experts. And so 'bots can easily ID the subject matter, just from a links dump. Jheald 18:13, 5 April 2007 (UTC)
I don't seem to find any previous discussions concerning the use of quantifiers (e.g. , as in the definition section of Inner product space) in articles (I might be bad at searching, though). I personally think these should not be used in a 'textbook' setting, and they greatly reduce readabillity. Granted, they provide a clean and very clear exposition for readers who are comfortable with them, but since articles are usually directed to a general audience, I think they should be avoided. Comments? JohanK 07:51, 4 April 2007 (UTC)
Let , and . Then,
Oleg Alexandrov ( talk) 15:00, 4 April 2007 (UTC)
There is a reason that formal languages were invented. Natural languages are very confusing and clumsy at expressing complicated concepts, e.g. when there are quantifiers in both the hypothesis and conclusion of an implication. See Transfinite induction for an example of a concept which is expressed very unclearly in ordinary English, but would be trivial in formal logic notation. JRSpriggs 10:21, 5 April 2007 (UTC)
Should there be such category? There was only Image analysis in it and the category page was blank. So have have changed Image analysis to Category:Mathematics. Jmath666 20:48, 5 April 2007 (UTC)
I see. So I have corrected the page pointing there. Jmath666 21:22, 5 April 2007 (UTC)
I need some help there. From User:JJL on Talk:Computational mathematics: "I don't believe this is a separate field but rather a different name for what is now usually called computational science. I suggest redirecting it there and editing that article to mention that, indeed, computational science as a named academic program often has an emphasis on the applications to science." This [sentence] makes no sense. Some of you made few helpful edits to computational mathematics but that does not seem to be enough to make User:JJL go away and stop claiming that computational mathematics does not exist and pushing to delete the article. Thanks. Jmath666 00:40, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
Do you think that computational mathematics should be a separate article or, as JJL suggests, redirected to computational science and that article edited by JJL "to mention that, indeed, computational science as a named academic program often has an emphasis on the applications to science" (sic)? Please vote separate article or redirect. Thank you. Jmath666 04:08, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
If the information in computational mathematics (not form) is preserved after such move that's OK with me too but given the attitude of JJL that is highly unlikely, please do read the quoted sentence above that shows it clearly. The current painful state of computational mathematics (yes I fully agree) emerged after me trying to respond to objections of JJL but that was a mistake obviously nothing will satisfy JJL given his POV that computational mathematics does not exist and it just messed it up.
I would not mind taking look at the whole scientific computing area and I suggested just that above and even wrote a rought draft of a the top article but there was no response. and I cannot afford the kind of struggle like with JJL reverting my edits every step of the way - too much waste. Can you look? Sorry I do not know anything about computing in algebra etc.
I can give it one last shot and rewrite computational mathematics completely reporting on documented facts not any editor's wish what is should or should not be. But I would like to see some interest/support before I take on that task. Thanks. Jmath666 08:37, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
Thank you very much for the feedback. I have replaced the page by disambiguation. Jmath666 00:31, 7 April 2007 (UTC)
I hastily created a stub article titled lifting (mathematics), and at this moment I'm not even sure I've got the definition right. Could others here add more? Michael Hardy 21:04, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
Cross-posted from Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Maths, science, and technology:
Tearlach 12:56, 8 April 2007 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Curve transformation. The author of the page describes it as original research. Charles Matthews 19:16, 8 April 2007 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Internet shorthand notation seems to be misnamed for what I've always known as "ASCII math notation". Note, there may not be one standard method, but I believe the overall concept is notable for an article, at least in terms of the history of computing. Yea or nay, I think this nomination needs more knowledgeable input. -- Dhartung | Talk 21:55, 8 April 2007 (UTC)
I've come across the article Examples of differential equations which has been tagged as having insufficient context (in my opinion, rightly so), and following the links, found an article ordinary differential equation. Now, the interesting thing about it is that there is also an article differential equation which is not linked from the ODE page. Was there a schism a while back, with one school of editors leaving and founding their own page? What do other editors think about the current distribution of the basic material between different articles? (I'll mention two more: partial differential equation and phase portrait, which is just a stub with a picture.) Arcfrk 03:51, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
Should a formula be included for defining 2-, 6-, 10-, etc-petalled roses such as
or something? — METS501 ( talk) 05:11, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
The formula above is yet another excellent reason why vertically stacked fractions should not appear in superscripts. Consider:
Michael Hardy 21:08, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
Anyone think that the double integral article should be merged into the multiple integral article? The triple integral article already redirects to multiple integral.-- Jersey Devil 02:52, 9 April 2007 (UTC)
Something bizarre and troubling has come to my attention. I was looking at the article on classical modular curves and saw that two superscripts were closed with <sup> instead of </sup>. I fixed the problem, but was puzzled that something with such dramatically visible consequences had previously escaped notice. So I checked the edit history, which showed the problem had been there for a long time, flying under the radar of a number of seasoned editors. This struck me as odd, but I moved on. But just now, I found the same phenomenon with a subscript tag in an article, area of a disk, I have worked on and scrutinized repeatedly. Here, another editor did the fixing. The history claims a subscript tag has been missing for some time. I don't believe it; I'm sure the presented history is false.
I don't know what the source of this may be, whether a software glitch or deliberate foul play; but we really need to be able to trust histories. At the moment, I do not. -- KSmrq T 03:44, 9 April 2007 (UTC)
a<sub>1<sub>
by replacing the second <sub>
tag by a close tag, while the new version does not do this. --
Jitse Niesen (
talk)
04:58, 9 April 2007 (UTC)<sub>...<sub>
or <sup>...<sup>
that were previously automagically repaired, so that we can fix problems now no longer covered-up? --
Lambiam
Talk
07:20, 9 April 2007 (UTC)I think that Jitse is correct. The errors have been there all along, but were hidden by bugs in the processing of html. Notice also that where previously tags terminated automatically at the end of a paragraph, now they do not. A user had trouble with the "small" tag on the signature of Signpost not terminating any more and affecting the rest of his user talk page. JRSpriggs 11:11, 9 April 2007 (UTC)
Since I see that a lot of the subscript problems involve chemical formulae, I left a note over on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Chemistry describing the problem and pointing to Mets501's page. Perhaps some of the people there can help as well. — David Eppstein 20:23, 9 April 2007 (UTC)
Just to bring back an old discussion about content from Citizendium, the Special:Export page works on Citizendium to get the wikicode of any page. For example, to get the code of their Mathematics page, visit http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Special:Export/Mathematics. Not in ideal form, but it's a way. — METS501 ( talk) 00:01, 10 April 2007 (UTC)
In one of the most idiotic edits I've seen in a long time, User:The Kinslayer, who seems to spend most of his efforts on topics of no importance, marked Institute for Mathematics and its Applications for speedy deletion on the grounds that it is not important, and did not notify anyone who had edited that page. It was recreated recently. Someone else then deleted it. Michael Hardy 02:40, 29 March 2007 (UTC)
You can't know what should be considered notable and what should not without familiarity with the field. It seems to me those who were involved in the present case disregarded that fact, which I would think would be obvious. Michael Hardy 00:00, 30 March 2007 (UTC)
This article was created a few months ago and has sat mostly untouched for two months. As it stands, the article has problems visible from even a cursory reading. I was about to start working on it, but first I want to get a sense of whether this article belongs on WP at all. On the one hand this is a famous and important result that is covered in practically every text on mathematical logic. On the other hand, the proof can be found in practically every text on mathematical logic, so sketching the proof here only duplicates what is already available (and probably better) in other locations. CMummert · talk 22:42, 4 April 2007 (UTC)
Anyway perhaps I missed it, but all of CMummert's specific comments (in the article's talk page) are related to the form of the article - he suggests deviding it to sections, adding more links etc. I saw no content-related specific comment. Dan Gluck 19:54, 6 April 2007 (UTC) Anyway mathematical logic is not my field of expertise, so if it is yours, and you think the article is incorrect and cannot be repaired, feel free to erase it :( Dan Gluck 20:00, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
Hi. I noticed when adding a link somewhere to Bijection that we have individual articles for Bijection, injective function and surjective function, as well as an article called Bijection, injection and surjection. Is this the optimal way to cover these topics? It seems redundant to me. At the least, should bijection be renamed to bijective function, for consistency? - GTBacchus( talk) 18:52, 9 April 2007 (UTC)
I recently ran across some copyright violations, and read the policy. I think I understand how to go about cleaning those up. This article is different. It's an outright copy of this newsletter article. Interestingly, there's no copyright notice on the isi web site – or at least, I couldn't find it. Also of interest, this article was contributed by User:Pdagum, who one might reasonably suppose to be a relative (son Paul?) of Prof. Dagum.
Anyway, I'm unsure what to do about this one. It's an "in memoriam" article, quoted verbatim. As such it certainly doesn't sound very encyclopedic. Suggestions? DavidCBryant 14:40, 12 April 2007 (UTC)
Does someone know the title of the painting by Albrecht Dürer (I guess, not absolutely sure though), which shows a projection a smaller shape onto a bigger canvas? I know, the description is very vague... The image has some geometrical interest, I'd like to put it to projective space (if it is available somewhere). Jakob.scholbach 04:51, 13 April 2007 (UTC)
Any hope of evolving Mathematical landscape into something encyclopedic or shall it go straight to AfD? -- Pjacobi 13:15, 8 April 2007 (UTC)
Just saw this before coming here. Tagged several statements that seemed speculative and unsourced with {{ cn}}. But if it doesn't improve, I'd likely vote Delete in an AfD. — David Eppstein 16:38, 8 April 2007 (UTC)
Call me a pessimist, but writing about this kind of sociological stuff is difficult and will no doubt be easily prey to OR, lack of citations, and just generally crap. We already have great difficulty with articles about mathematical education (which can be readily sourced and is written quite frequently about). Who's ready and qualified to change this article anyway? -- C S (Talk) 11:59, 15 April 2007 (UTC)
The level of activity at the physics project has fallen way off. See Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Physics#Is this WikiProject moribund?. If any of you have an interest in physics, but have not been paying attention to it lately, now would be a good time to get involved. JRSpriggs 07:15, 10 April 2007 (UTC)
Many of the requests currently listed on Articles requested for more than two years seem to be mathematical ones. The requests on this page are those which have been unfulfilled for the longest time, and we therefore tend to treat them with a higher priority than those requested only for one year and the other request pages. If any members of this WikiProject have sufficient knowledge and access to sources to write a good stub on one or more of these topics, it would be much appreciated. Thanks – Gurch 10:31, 11 April 2007 (UTC)
Many of them can just be redirects. Take the topmost example from the 2 year list, amenable set, for instance. I was, just the other day, going to write an article on the Gödel, Jensen, Lévy etc. constructions (none of which exists as an obviously named article), but then I soon found that an article already exists on the constructible universe. It is pretty unlikely that we will be able to write a feature length article on amenable sets (without abandoning all pretence to being a general encyclopedia, that is), but we should certainly be able to do a better job of presenting the various independence results— if only to redirect key concepts to more comprehensive articles. — Kaustuv Chaudhuri 16:50, 11 April 2007 (UTC)
At the moment, mathematicians are divided by religion in Category:Mathematicians by religion. Analogous categories for many other professions (including in many scientific fields) have generally been deleted, mainly because religion is largely irrelevant to the given profession. Some people have defended these categories as being used specifically for clergy or devoutly religious, but they are rarely used that way in practice, as the category names leave open the possibility that someone will use these categories to identify anyone who is a mathematician of a given religion.
I was wondering whether these categories had the support of WikiProject Mathematics or not. If people here generally disapprove of these categories, then I can nominate them for deletion. On the other hand, if people really want these categories, then I will leave them alone.
Could other people here please comment? Thank you, Dr. Submillimeter 15:28, 13 April 2007 (UTC)
Spiritual beliefs are not necessarily irrelevant to how a mathematician thinks about the status of mathematical objects and of the infinite -- and this can affect his research as well; not the content of his conclusions, perhaps, but the way he interprets them, and what questions he chooses to study. -- Trovatore 01:07, 14 April 2007 (UTC)
I stumbled across Scholarpedia today, its a wikipedia type thing written by academics. The coverage seems patchy coving computational neuroscience, dynamical systems [8], and computational intelligence. But the articles that exists seem to be more in depth than here. They have quite a destinguised list of authors Milnor, possible Lonez Conway and Mandelbrot. -- Salix alba ( talk) 16:43, 14 April 2007 (UTC)
{{
fact}}
tags, ignoring the bibliography.I agree with the general sentiment, but let's not get carried away. Since you've chosen the exotic sphere article as an example, let's look and consider if any of these things has happened to it. Vandalism? Not really. Crank theories? No. Inline citation problems? No. Accessibility complaints? No. Illiterate ignoramuses revising the page? No (except me perhaps). As for the problems with say, Milnor putting in his new cutting edge research (which has somehow not made it into the literature after all these years...), I doubt he would have any trouble understanding the problems with that; in my experience, mathematicians tend to be good at realizing these things, even those that haven't edited Wikipedia much. Certainly after one of the people who normally edit the page pointed it out to him, I can't imagine Milnor unreasonably insisting on a revert war and being eventually blocked (he seems calm enough in person).
So, in summary, I would imagine if some famous mathematician were to edit Wikipedia (and somehow I can imagine this extremely well even with a lack of imagination...) I would expect little problems. The math portion of Wikipedia functions quite differently than some other parts though. So I would agree there is a kind of expert problem. But I don't know how much of a problem it is to us. And let's not disparate the exotic sphere article too much, eh? It's not bad; it's informative, gives some good references. Certainly one can find a fairly elementary introduction by Milnor (in one of those MAA lecture series from the 70s) that is wonderful, but that's a very high standard to try and match.
In your hypothetical example, I imagine some people would read Milnor's article and it would get promoted to A-class :-). -- C S (Talk) 07:16, 16 April 2007 (UTC)
One point that I think is particularly relevant to mathematics here. The aim is not so much to have 'great articles' but a great piece of hypertext. So that (for example by the end of this decade) it would not be an empty boast that cutting-edge research mathematics can be referred back to definitions by an unbroken chain of blue links. Deligne said the proof of the Ramanujan conjecture would write out as 1000 pages of graduate level mathematics. We have a new model for making that less scary. Charles Matthews 15:51, 16 April 2007 (UTC)
What do you mean by a credit-taking mechanism? Scholarpedia offers you an option: although you need to use your real name to register and you need to log in to edit, you can nonetheless edit either anonymously (but while logged in) or with your name on your edits in the edit history. Michael Hardy 01:37, 17 April 2007 (UTC)
I for one don't think any tenure committee is going to be impressed by time and effort spent on Wikipedia or Wikipedia-like systems. Giving some way to give people credit on their vitae for those efforts is just going to lead to the committee asking why they aren't spending more effort on research. I think, as Jmath666 wrote earlier, that effort spent on WP is not only valuable community service but also that it is valuable practice in writing readably. But I don't see any kind of credit system as much of a draw, and I worry that such a system would lead junior into spending more time than they should in WP and hurting their careers. The way it is now, there's a clearer picture of what you're getting: a chance to help others understand the world better, but not really a step on the career ladder. — David Eppstein 02:17, 17 April 2007 (UTC)
The article Mean information has been nominated for deletion. Comment as you see fit. Anville 19:49, 15 April 2007 (UTC)
I guess this does not qualify as encyclopedic content per WP:NOR. Comments? Oleg Alexandrov ( talk) 22:22, 15 April 2007 (UTC)
Someone has proposed that Euler on infinite series be transwikied to Wikiquote. I think instead the article should be expanded to be more than just a quote. Perhaps some of this pages public can contribute. Michael Hardy 23:58, 15 April 2007 (UTC)
Category:Complex systems is on CfD [ [11]]. -- Salix alba ( talk) 15:01, 16 April 2007 (UTC)
I think the name as it is is fine, it is what people in the area use and it is not ambiguous with any other meaning for the same phrase. If the problem is people not knowing the technical meaning of the phrase and guessing that things belong when they don't, wouldn't it suffice to add appropriate text to the category page? — David Eppstein 17:22, 18 April 2007 (UTC)
Please consider this list of edits which hits all of WAREL's pet topics. I didn;t see any that looked harmful; but I can't tell where the ja: links are going. Would people keep an eye on this? Septentrionalis PMAnderson 23:20, 16 April 2007 (UTC)
12988816 (number) is nominated for deletion. The AFD discussion is here. CMummert · talk 15:55, 17 April 2007 (UTC)
Nationalists are trying to move this article to a silly title again. — Ruud 23:24, 17 April 2007 (UTC)
I've always seen a relation shown as something like x~y on some set S. And that this relation is an "equivalence relation" iff it is reflexive, symmetric and transitive. So that for instance you could have x~y if x<y on the integer set Z. So this relation would not be an "equivalence relation" since x is not less than x so x~x is not true and so ~ is not reflexive. So ~ is a relation but not necessarily an "equivalence relation". But the article on the following articles seem contradictory to this saying that ~ alone denotes an equivalence relation:
Is there something I am missing here?-- Jersey Devil 01:23, 20 April 2007 (UTC)
The ~ may be very often used to express equivalence relations, as the article says, but this does not contradict the fact that it is sometimes used for any relation, equivalence or otherwise. The confusion is simply that mathematical notation varies in different places and contexts. Perhaps the Tilde article could be updated to reflect the more general use of the symbol, but apart from that I don't see any issue at all. JPD ( talk) 11:24, 20 April 2007 (UTC)
Hello. The categorization taskforce is trying to find WikiProjects interested in using the bot of Alai to identify mathematics stub articles which do not currently have a category (besides the stub category of course). If the project is interested, we could create something like Category:Uncategorized mathematics stubs which could then be categorized by people knowledgeable in the subject, thus reducing the risk of improper categorization. Please let us know on the taskforce's talk page if you're interested. Cheers, Pascal.Tesson 00:23, 23 April 2007 (UTC)
I have proposed renaming Category:Complex systems as Category:Complex systems (science). Here is my justification for the rename:
I came across this article on a mathematician while working on categories. (Don't ask how.) The article says little about why this person was notable, although I suspect that part of the reason why the person was notable was because he was a murder victim. I may nominate it for deletion, although first I have asked the article creator to improve the article.
Is anyone here familiar with de Leeuw's research? Was he notable in mathematics? From this standpoint of this person as a mathematician, should the article be kept, or should it be deleted? Dr. Submillimeter 20:59, 19 April 2007 (UTC)
By the way, does anyone know if he's any relation to Jan de Leeuw, who definitely should not have a redlink? -- Trovatore 06:02, 20 April 2007 (UTC)
Could someone please expand the article to indicate how the person was notable? Dr. Submillimeter 11:12, 20 April 2007 (UTC)
I was bold, and moved it to deLeeuw, which most of the sources seem to use. Does anybody mind? If so, let's do WP:RM. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 05:29, 26 April 2007 (UTC)
Please check out Systolic geometry. I noticed it when Katzmik ( talk · contribs) twice put a link to it into Hyperbolic geometry. Both times I removed the link after looking at the article and not seeing any relevance to hyperbolic geometry. Apparently, Katzmik is Mikhail G. Katz, author of a book linked to by the article. He did not create the article, but he has done most of the edits to it. Do you think that this is a legitimate topic or is it just link spam? JRSpriggs 07:54, 25 April 2007 (UTC)
We have assume good faith for a reason. This case illustrates why. Charles Matthews 16:50, 25 April 2007 (UTC)
It looks perfectly legitimate to me. The basic definition is stated in such a way that it should be instantly comprehensible to everyone (except non-mathematicians, maybe) and that's more than can be said for some math articles. This seems like a good reason why an author should not be forbidden to put in an external link to his own book. Michael Hardy 20:53, 25 April 2007 (UTC)
I was reading ordered field and noticed that the "Archimedean property" was capitalized, whereas in my Lang Algebra book, it is not. So, I noticed:
I had always learned that when the property is modified (like with -ian), that it loses its "properness" and should be written lowercase -- and I have never seen abelian capitalized. But, on the other hand, I have always seen Gaussian written capitalized. I would prefer to never capitalize such adjectives (but that could look very strange with Gauss, Hamiltonian, Hilbert space, etc) Any ideas or has this been discussed before? - grubber 16:02, 18 April 2007 (UTC)
Mathematical landscape has been nominated for deletion. Comment as you see fit! Anville 15:34, 26 April 2007 (UTC)
What is the difference between caluculi (e.g. propositional calculus, predicate calculus, proof calculus, and the various comp-sci calculi) vs. algebras (Boolean, heyting, etc)?
I was hoping to maybe find something on wikipedia explaining the difference, but I couldn't find anything. Brentt 03:03, 26 April 2007 (UTC)
I have always associated the word "calculus" with a method to manipulate strings of symbols in a meaningful way. There are "transformation rules" that tell you how to convert one string into another string. Not every transformation may be suitable for every string - you have to follow some rules. This matches the way that Newtonian calculus, lambda calculus, proof calculi, propositional calculus, etc. work. An algebra, on the other hand, is a set with operations such that any two elements can have the operation applied to them. In some cases, you can make up a semantics for the calculus that show that when the strings represent elements of a certain type of algebra then the transformation rules preserve some algebraic properties. But this is a very loose connection. Is that your question? CMummert · talk 03:35, 26 April 2007 (UTC)
Umm, hi,
This is surely off-topic here, but I'm hoping that people here would be kind enough to evaluate Equipartition theorem, which is a Featured Article candidate now. It's at the level of basic multivariable calculus, although there is a multidimensional integration by parts at one step of the derivation. Does the article read OK to you all? Any suggestions for improvements? Thanks ever so much for your time and trouble, Willow 21:58, 27 April 2007 (UTC)
It seems to be regarded as a positive thing to put {{maths rating}} templates on talk pages as a way of tracking progress in our task to provide a good range of high quality articles, with emphasis on the most important ones. However, I am confused by the current organization and would appreciate some links/clarification/discussion. The whole process seems to be intertwined with the separate but related selection of articles for the CD-ROM Wikipedia1.0, whose classification we use (modulo our additional B+ class).
At first this seems fine: I follow the "mathematics grading" link on a template to Wikipedia:WikiProject_Mathematics/Wikipedia_1.0 and find explanations of the grading, with helpful tables of how many articles there are in each class, analysed both by importance and field, automatically generated each day by a bot - great! When I follow links in this table to a particular class (A,B etc.), or importance level (low, mid etc.), I find myself on a category pages which automatically list the articles in the given category - also useful!
Finally I follow the link to geometry and topology and I see something which looks even more useful: a list of articles in my field, ordered first by decreasing importance and then by increasing quality (class), together with comments, presumably from the template on the talk page. Wow, this is the most useful page of all!
But then I notice that the page is incomplete (articles with ratings that I know are not there), and has an extra "Has template" column. The page appears not to be automated (indeed it is months out-of-date). Then I remember WP1.0 and guess this is some list of articles chosen to go on a CD-ROM. Is this right, or am I just confused? Wouldn't it be really useful to have pages like these which were updated automatically from templates on article pages? Wouldn't it be better to have an extra column "Selected for WP1.0" (which could be, and is usually, indicated on the article page)?
Forgive these mumblings if I have completely missed the point, but the current structure has left me very bewildered about what is going on. Geometry guy 21:01, 12 April 2007 (UTC)
Many thanks for the clarifications. It would be great if these pages were automated (although the "algebra" one would be a bit long unless stub class or low importance articles were somehow omitted).
However, one of the most useful things about these pages is that comments are there. Now there is a "comment" field on the {{maths rating}} template. This does not separate the comment from the author, but that is not important. At least in principle, couldn't the "comments/updated/has template" columns be replaced by a single column with the "comment" field of the article template? I know it requires someone to do the work, but it would be very useful and might encourage editors to use the "comment" field more often, and keep it up-to-date. Geometry guy 09:44, 13 April 2007 (UTC)
I see, that's a pity. Does that mean that if we moved to an automatic update regime we would lose the comments completely on the field pages, or would it be possible to write the code so that it checks the current field page for existing comments and writes them to the new page? (I guess that would be more work to do, though, because it involves parsing the field page.)
Would it be feasible to update comments from templates as a separate operation that happens less frequently? Weekly would surely be enough, or the bot could cycle through the list of fields to reduce the daily load (so each page would be updated every 11 days). Well, I know this is work, and work which I am not able to do, but I think it might add some energy to the project to have such a system for monitoring progress. I would at least be willing to go through (some of) the existing field pages and merge the existing comments into the templates on the article pages.
Also, I wonder if this is something that Snowolf and Snowbot would be able to do for us. Even a one-off update of the pages would be great. Geometry guy 15:54, 13 April 2007 (UTC)
This is a clever work-around — nice one Salix alba! I've changed {{ Maths rating}} to put articles with a comments page into Category:Mathematics articles with comments page. There are not so many of them yet, so I was able to go through them by hand, fixing them if necessary so that they are not also in Category:Mathematics articles with inline comments. It would be nice to have a third category with Category:Mathematics articles with no comments, but that required me to pluck up the courage to make a more substantial edit to the {{maths rating}} template, or for someone with more Template experience to do it before letting me the chance to mess it up ;) Geometry guy 15:50, 14 April 2007 (UTC)
I wasn't courageous enough so I just added a Category:Mathematics articles with no comments page. I also wasn't careful with the includeonly/noinclude issue so the template itself is an example. This is just a temporary fix to see where we are now. I will not be at all offended if someone reverts my edit! Geometry guy 20:08, 14 April 2007 (UTC)
I plucked up a bit more courage, and my ugly code appears to work, although it has the side effect of raising the "field" field slightly. I expect this is due to my lack of understanding of spaces and newlines in template code, and I hope an expert can fix it quickly (and improve my ugly nested code!): explanations on my talk page most welcome (and don't be afraid to be patronizing!). Meanwhile the temporary category Category:Mathematics articles with no comments page needs deleting (I don't think this needs to go through CFD since it contains no articles!). Geometry guy 21:23, 14 April 2007 (UTC)
Salix Alba suggests migrating from inline comments to only using comment subpages. I have no objection to that. I don't know the historical circumstances that led to the current redundant system.
If the comments are all moved to subpages then there is no technical problem with making the field summary pages. I wrote some proof-of-concept code whose results are available at User:CMummert/Sandbox4. That page is entirely automatically generated. Please let me know what can be improved. CMummert · talk 15:06, 14 April 2007 (UTC)
The plan is for all the field pages to be generated this way, unless there are objections. The argument in favor is that the old pages are horribly out of date and unlikely to be kept in sync manually as the number of rated pages increases. I just used the geometry field as a proof of concept to illustrate what can be done manually. CMummert · talk 21:39, 14 April 2007 (UTC)
I believe that all comments on the current Geometry and Topology page are now covered by /Comments pages. If someone wants to check what I have done, that would be very welcome, but from my point of view the current G&T page could be replaced by the proof of concept. Geometry guy 19:39, 14 April 2007 (UTC)
Note that not all comments at Analysis can be found in this proof-of-concept. This is because (I hope) they already exist in article talk page templates, and I've not migrated them to /Comments. As mentioned above, I really hope a bot will be able to do this. Geometry guy 18:23, 15 April 2007 (UTC)
I've now been through Algebra. This was relatively easy, as most of the comments are by Tompw (who almost always makes consistent comments on article and field pages). Geometry guy 19:34, 15 April 2007 (UTC)
I've now also checked Mathematical physics, which was relatively easy for the same reason. Geometry guy 20:21, 15 April 2007 (UTC)
I think we should not include the Mathematicians field in this process until an interested editor comments, as the format there is rather different (mathematicians are organized by year). Anyway, this means the checking is half-done, but I won't be able to do much more for the rest of the week. Geometry guy 22:17, 15 April 2007 (UTC)
In addition to the
Mathematicians field, I also notice that there is a
Theorems and Conjectures field. In the long term it would be nice to automate both of these, by adding e.g. a "mathematician=year" tag and a "theorem=Y" tag (cf. "vital=Y") to the template.
Geometry guy
19:44, 16 April 2007 (UTC)
I've now checked the
Basics field page. After automation, I think it makes sense to split
Applied into Applied Mathematics and Probability and Statistics. These are, after all, completely different fields. It would also be convenient, I think, to split
General into General Mathematics and History. The split pages could be given different names to save checking them for now.
Geometry guy
19:44, 16 April 2007 (UTC)
I've now also checked Number theory, Discrete mathematics and Foundations. Subject to the above comments, this completes the checking process. Geometry guy 22:24, 16 April 2007 (UTC)
This is a good idea. I would also suggest moving the current "Applied mathematics" page to a (probably temporary) location ("Applied" or "Applied and statistics"). Similarly, the current "General" page could be moved to "General and history". The "Mathematicians" and "Theorems and Corollaries" need further discussion. Geometry guy 23:23, 16 April 2007 (UTC)
I'm sure there was a reason why I put Probability and Statistics on the same page as Applied, but I can't remember it... I think the history category was added as an option after the general page got created. Anyway, seperate rating pages for P&S and history are a good thing. I'll sort it out properly tommorrow morning (it's late, and I'll make silly errors if I do it now) Tompw ( talk) 00:31, 17 April 2007 (UTC)
Thanks Jitse! I agree simpler is better. During my edits, the only places I noticed potential conflict with other WikiProjects were two or three articles such as Quantum mechanics which are joint with the Physics project. Even so, I think it is better (as well as simpler) to share comments between projects.
As for the migration of comments to /Comments, there are only about 130 pages to go, and there is no rush, so if we all move a comment from time to time (and I've done quite a few already), it will get done even without the help of a bot. See the categories created above for further information. Geometry guy 19:25, 17 April 2007 (UTC)
There appears to be general agreement that the automatic of per-field ratings pages is a good thing for all fields except "Mathematicians" and "Theorems and Conjectures" (which is not really a field), and that "Probability and statistics" should have its own page, separate from "Applied mathematics". I therefore suggest we begin to implement it. I have a few other ideas as well. Here is a possible list of actions to strike out when done!
I wonder also if it would be useful to add a "theorem" tag the {{ maths rating}} template to place articles into a category Category:Mathematics articles about theorems or conjectures (I'm happy to do this and tag the relevant articles). Could this then be used to automatically generate Theorems and conjectures? Geometry guy 13:35, 19 April 2007 (UTC)
Could you tell again what exactly is to be done with these 131 articles? I would volunteer to handle some of these, if help is needed. Jakob.scholbach 19:37, 19 April 2007 (UTC)
I have now checked that all comments on Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Wikipedia 1.0/Theorems and conjectures are reflected in the article Comments pages. I've asked the marvellous VeblenBot if it can generate this page for us using Category:Mathematical theorems and Category:Conjectures. Geometry guy 11:16, 26 April 2007 (UTC)
I am no longer convinced that a separate Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Wikipedia 1.0/History page is helpful. At the moment it only contains two articles, and only one is really about history. There is already a WikiProject on the History of Science which rates articles, there is already the Mathematicians field, and I think it is more helpful to place articles like History of manifolds and varieties in the relevant mathematical field ("Geometry and topology" in this case).
One possibility would be to treat these as suggested above for "Theorems and conjecture" using a "history" tag to generate a category called Category:Articles about the development of mathematical concepts or something similar. Comments? Geometry guy 13:41, 19 April 2007 (UTC)
Finally, does anyone have any ideas for the Mathematicians field? Sorting these by date is the hardest part. Would we be able to do it if every mathematician had a subpage containing their date of birth (or death)? Geometry guy 13:41, 19 April 2007 (UTC)
Yes, that is what I meant, simply because the current page sorts the mathematicians that way. Sorting by century is one option, but there is the problem that many mathematicians straddle two centuries (e.g. Gaston Darboux and Elie Cartan). There are also Category:1917 deaths style categories, which I suppose in principle could be used, but this may be too complicated to be worth the trouble! Geometry guy 14:12, 22 April 2007 (UTC)
There is now only the mathematicians page left to automate, so I have been looking at it again. There is in fact an obvious way to sort mathematicians by year: just make the table(s) "sortable". This can be automated using /Dates subpages giving the lifetime of the mathematician. Together with a couple of categories, such as Category:BCE mathematians and Category:First millenium mathematicians, sortable tables can easily be produced by transcluding these subpages. Such tables have the additional advantage that the tables can be sorted by importance or quality by clicking on the links provided by the sortable format.
It would be nice to be able to sort the table(s) also by name. One way to do this would be to introduce additional /SortName subpages, which give a sortable form of the mathematicians name (e.g. "Fermat, Pierre de" for Pierre de Fermat).
The creation of /Dates and /SortName subpages from the current page can probably be done using AWB (alas, I still don't have the expertise for this). However, there is another more subtle issue: at present the mathematicians page provides an additional "field" column, which lists the expertise and contributions of a mathematician, in addition to any comments on the quality of the article. This can partially be covered by the /Comments subpage. However, I think it might be useful to transclude another page containing the expertise and contribution information.
Many of these list entries describe the field(s) in which the mathematician contributed. This makes me wonder whether we should replace the "field = mathematicians" tag by a "mathematician = yes" tag, so the field is still free (for the primary field in which the mathematician contributed). One advantage of this would be the possibility to sort mathematicians by field. The mathematicians could then also be listed on the relevant field pages, although it is not obvious that this is necessarily a good thing, so please add comments! Geometry guy 19:47, 27 April 2007 (UTC)
To show how this can be done,
User:Geometry guy/Mathematicians
Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Wikipedia 1.0/Mathematicians now contains a sortable list of mathematicians with some dates. Most of the content of this page was automatically generated by VeblenBot with no change to the code. There are links for adding /Dates, /SortName, and /Contribs subpages to mathematician talk pages. At the moment, the sort order for the "class" and "importance" columns is not the natural one. Also, BCE and first millenium dates do not sort correctly. Feel free to make comments, changes, or add dates etc.
Geometry guy
12:32, 28 April 2007 (UTC)
I've now added almost all the dates, and many sortable names to the table. I have also managed to make the class and importance columns sort naturally, as well as BCE and first millenium dates, although my solutions are not particularly elegant. Geometry guy 18:17, 29 April 2007 (UTC)
I agree that the profusion of subpages is not ideal and your ideas are interesting indeed. I think the data should be stored with each mathematician, but I am not wedded to the current (experimental) approach. The /DB subpage per mathematician is a nice idea, and it might not be too much work to migrate the data I have created to produce entries like
(This above was generated by a template User:Geometry guy/MakeDB which might make the migration easier.) [Note added: I am now substituting for this template, so I can delete it from my user space.]
As I understand, I then just have to modify Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Wikipedia 1.0/Mathematician row format template to replace transclusions like {{ {{{1}}}/Dates }} by {{ {{{1}}}/DB | key = dates }}, which is easy to do. Geometry guy 09:48, 30 April 2007 (UTC)
The mathematicians page has now been fully automated by CMummert and VeblenBot. However, in view of the above discussion, it may be subject to some change for a short period. Geometry guy 16:38, 30 April 2007 (UTC)
I have now copied the /SortName, /Dates and /Contribs subpages into /Data subpages of the form
and modified the templates to use these /Data subpages in the Mathematicians table. The only disadvantage of this approach is that the /Data subpages appear to be empty. This could be fixed by adding instructions inside a "noinclude". I could do that, but it will take a while, even using AWB. Geometry guy 16:48, 3 May 2007 (UTC)
Nice! Can you implement this? I know it is boring going through 147 articles with AWB, but I think it is worthwhile. Using a template as you suggest has the huge advantage (which I didn't appreciate when I created these /Data pages) that the format can be changed without having to change all the pages. For the same reason, it is probably worth being flexible about any "noinclude": I was going to transclude a template explaining how to edit these pages, but it might be possible to absorb this into your idea. Geometry guy 00:13, 4 May 2007 (UTC)
Please look at Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Wikipedia 1.0/Geometry and topology, which is a test example of how to use the automated tables. Before implementing the other fields, I want to collect feedback on this one. It's worth looking at the source of that page to see how the implementation works. CMummert · talk 15:21, 20 April 2007 (UTC)
It isn't obvious without looking at the page source code, but that page can be edited by anyone and the changes will not be lost. The tables themselves are included from another page, and changes to them will get overwritten. So it's possible to edit the lead section or add stuff to the bottom without having to ask me to edit the bot code. Tompw has suggested a way of formatting the tables so that the formatting will also be able to be tweaked from the wiki without changing the bot. CMummert · talk 20:06, 20 April 2007 (UTC)
Category:Mathematicians by religion nominated for deletion before I could get to doing it. (Ask me about Slovenia!) Please go comment at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2007 April 29. Dr. Submillimeter 22:49, 29 April 2007 (UTC)
I have edited the source of this page to ask User:MiszaBot II to automatically archive it. If any errors occur, please remove the template from the very top of this page's source code. The cutoff is currently set for 7 days, and the bot appears to run at 6:35 and 18:35 UTC each day. CMummert · talk 13:33, 30 April 2007 (UTC)
I added this comment to FOIL rule:
I took every math course my high school offered; the curriculum was better than at most high schools and I not only mastered calculus when I took the course but absorbed a lot of material beyond what was required in every course, and I NEVER heard of "FOIL" until as an undergraduate I was tutoring other undergraduates. It seems this mnemonic is completely universally known to everyone who hates algebra but is required to take an algebra course. Am I right to think that perhaps most mathematicians don't know it? Michael Hardy 17:39, 30 April 2007 (UTC)
I don't understand all the fuss.
The statement, "This mnemonic is not used by mathematicians and perhaps not known by most mathematicians, but is taught by secondary school teachers" seems a little strong. Why not just say "This mnemonic is often taught in secondary schools" and leave it at that? In the article it also says, "The FOIL mnemonic is commonly taught but is sometimes frowned upon because the method does not work, without modification, for higher order polynomials (the double distributive method, by contrast, is easily extended to the latter case). Foiling can thus be seen as an example of learning by rote memorization of rules rather than by understanding underlying concepts." But I always have to memorize base cases, and I can combine FOIL with recursion to expand the multiplication of sums of arbitrary terms.
I disliked the article on purplemath.com referenced above. It's primarily because the author adopts the tone of "this is the way I do it so this is correct and it is the way you should do it." I'd agree more with KSmq's second comment that "Not all mnemonics are bad, and different students respond better to different means." (I also have a strong distaste for the use of "simplify" to describe the process of expanding the multiplication. Yuck.)
IMHO, the "Factorization" section of the article should either be removed or modified. It's not at all clear how one FOILs in reverse.
My two cents, Lunch 20:37, 30 April 2007 (UTC)
There is an ongoing opinion poll at Talk:Ring (mathematics)#Poll on unit requirement as to whether or not the rings on Wikipedia should be defined to unital or not. Opinions welcome. -- Fropuff 04:22, 1 May 2007 (UTC)