There is an interesting collection of photos of lots(!) of mathematicians at http://owpdb.mfo.de/. It seems that the institute is willing to grant WP the right to publish it here, see the discussion at the German Wikipedia http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal_Diskussion:Mathematik#Biographien_und_Fotos. Apparently the German Wikipedians don't want to take it under "Fair Use" license. I'm not that familiar with these license issues, but it is worth a look. Jakob.scholbach 14:47, 1 December 2007 (UTC)
So as I understand it, the reason that non-English Wikipedias usually won't use fair-use stuff is that fair use is a concept of American law, not valid in (say) Germany. Even if there's some similar notion in German copyright law (I don't know whether there is or not), it isn't the same, so the arguments that something is fair use under American law may not carry over.
Now, does anyone think that makes any sense at all? The servers are in Florida, not in Germany. Lots of people read -- and contribute to -- English WP from Germany; if German law is at issue, then it's as problematic for en.wiki as for de.wiki, except maybe numerically, insofar as one might expect a higher proportion of accesses from Germany to be on de.wiki. And I'm sure there are also lots of de.wiki users in the United States. How is the language of a WP even relevant to the legal question? -- Trovatore 02:23, 4 December 2007 (UTC)
The ICA page is somewhat of a mess, with the first definition on the page not being a true definition, and no examples or common uses. Does this page fall within the boundaries of the Mathematics project? I assumed so, so I'm posting a request here that it be the "article to be fixed of the day/week/month" so that a few people can check it out and fix it up. Thanks! -- eykanal talk 01:53, 3 December 2007 (UTC)
Currently Category:Information theory is not in the list of mathematics categories, and mathbot does not add its articles to the list of mathematics articles. Prompted by a question by Michael Hardy on my talk page, I wonder, should we consider this category as part of mathematics? If yes, mathbot will add all the articles in this category to the math articles list. (I for some reason thought that information theory was more comp sci and engineering, or either way that it strays too much from mathematics, but I am not an expert.) Oleg Alexandrov ( talk) 06:22, 3 December 2007 (UTC)
Could we be specific here? Which things in information theory do not belong either to probability theory or coding theory? Which articles? Name some examples. Michael Hardy 16:05, 3 December 2007 (UTC)
Michael, an example of a subcategory of Category:Information theory that is not mathematical: Category:Information theory > Category:Data compression > Category:Compression algorithms > Category:Lossy compression algorithms > Category:MP3 > Category:iPod - GTBacchus( talk) 17:30, 3 December 2007 (UTC)
Look at List of inequalities. There's a section titled "Pure mathematics" and another one titled "Probability theory". "Pure mathematics" is in effect being used as a catch-all---a "none-of-the-above" category (except that in this case it's below rather than above). Can it be organized into sections? Michael Hardy 16:22, 3 December 2007 (UTC)
The Constant page was moved to Numerical constant. I'd argue that the former name is better. Comments? Oleg Alexandrov ( talk) 04:59, 30 November 2007 (UTC)
This is currently a redirect to {{ maths rating}}. I think it should be deleted - it encourages 'flag planting' instead of actually rating articles. There's no need to tag talk pages since the List of mathematics articles already lists all the math articles. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 15:59, 4 December 2007 (UTC)
At the suggestion of Sj, I am exploring the possibility of creating a Wikipedia Visualization Project to allow Wikipedia to take advantage of the Wolfram Demonstrations Project resources and similar Internet resources for scientific and mathematical visualization. Wikipedia already makes extensive use of MathWorld which is hosted on the Wolfram Research website.
Sj, who is also associated with the One Laptop Per Child project, communicated with Theodore Gray at Wolfram Research and persuaded the company to change its license to allow screenshots and some related materials on the Wolfram demonstrations project to be GFDL-compatible. As is noted on my Wikipedia entry, I consult for Wolfram Research.
The Wolfram Demonstrations Project is a professionally published site with an editorial screening process. The site already contains over 2,000 demonstrations created using Mathematica, on such topics calculus, physics, biology, astronomy, and such.
Are there other similar GFDL-compatible sites that should be added to the scope of such a visualization project? Are there Wikipedians interested in the subject of visualization who would be willing to help? -- Pleasantville ( talk) 22:31, 26 November 2007 (UTC)
Personally, I deplore the fact that much of mathematics software is proprietary, and not open to public examination, use, development and maintenance. Now, I am not a Free-software purist; I can live in a middle ground. However, Wolfram has no track record at all in aiding and assisting the Free software world; it would be highly inappropriate to mount a project that is essentially a commercial promotion for the increased use of thier software. linas ( talk) 15:00, 27 November 2007 (UTC)
The new improved Terms of Use on the Wolfram Demonstrations site ( a combination of one of the Creative Commons licenses & and the MIT license) should be up by tomorrow. -- Pleasantville 18:26, 3 December 2007 (UTC)
Revised Terms of Use for demonstrations.wolfram.com. Here we go. I believe these are GFDL-compatible:
Terms of Use The Wolfram Demonstrations Project ("this Site") is an informational resource made freely available by Wolfram Research.
All content on this site is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution - Noncommercial - Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. By accessing the site or using it in any way, you accept and agree to be bound by the terms of this license. If you do not agree to these Terms of Use, you may not use this Site or content obtained from this Site. Wolfram Research reserves the right to change, modify, add to, or remove portions of these Terms of Use at any time without notice. Please refer back to this page for the latest Terms of Use.
A summary of the licensing terms can be found at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0
The full legal code can be found at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/legalcode
In addition, the preview animations of each Demonstration, the pop-up snapshots, and the images available after clicking "Link to this Demonstration" are also licensed under the MIT License. The MIT License allows unrestricted use provided that the copyright notice is preserved. We encourage the use of the aforementioned items in educational resources around the web, for example on Wikipedia and university websites.
The full text of the MIT License can be found at: http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php
Please have a look and tell me what you think. -- Pleasantville ( talk) 21:26, 4 December 2007 (UTC)
Math is one of the many Sciences (others being, chemistry, physics, biology, geology, etc....) just curious -- Storkian aka iSoroush Talk 23:43, 3 December 2007 (UTC)
I consider mathematics to be one of the humanities. Like philosophy, which I would consider its closest relative. Clearly, mathematical physics or applied PDEs or economics are social sciences or sciences, but they aren't properly mathematics (in the sense that analytical number theory is number theory that happens to use analysis, these are subjects that happen to use mathematics). The fact that mathematics are so useful in the sciences does not necessarily mean that they themselves constitute a science. -- Cheeser1 01:40, 4 December 2007 (UTC)
User:Oleg Alexandrov suggested I came here for insightful comments on the constant article I'm working on. I've basically rewritten most of the article, do you think I'm on the right track? Randomblue ( talk) 21:00, 6 December 2007 (UTC)
Would someone be so kind and have a look at the "wrong proof". Thanks -- Meisterkoch ( talk) 16:21, 8 December 2007 (UTC)
See talk:Lists of mathematics topics#This article doesn't pass WP:VER and Wikipedia:Featured list removal candidates/Lists of mathematics topics. The Transhumanist 22:28, 10 December 2007 (UTC)
I removed Homotopy groups of spheres from Wikipedia:WikiProject_Mathematics/A-class_rating today; it isn't A-class yet but the comments show it is getting close. Meanwhile Pi is a new candidate, nominated by Disavian. This is obviously an extremely important article for a general encyclopedia. Give it a read to see how far it has come.
Although it's a relatively low-volume process, the A-class rating system gives detailed peer review about mathematics articles by editors who are familiar with the topic, without the hassle of the featured article process. I hope more editors will take advantage of it. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 16:46, 11 December 2007 (UTC)
With help from Hans Adler, I have been working on a major expansion of Mathematical logic. If you have interest or expertise in the area, and the time to read through it, I would appreciate any suggestions you have to fill out the coverage or improve the exposition. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 20:32, 11 December 2007 (UTC)
Can anyone confirm what Silverman [1] actually proved from the abc Conjecture? The consensus seems to be:
but WAREL quotes
(In either case, we need to revert that idiotic superscript 2 character to <sup>2</sup>. Is it possible for an AWB substitution to select those?) — Arthur Rubin | (talk) 18:02, 12 December 2007 (UTC)
Some users are talking about starting a Wiki Project for mathematical biology, e.g. in user space this tentative project page. I added math to the list of related projects. On account of my interest in convergence phenomena in self-adapting genetic algorithms, I'm a big believer that we can suck up their wisdom the way we have leeched physicists for centuries :-) Pete St.John ( talk) 17:35, 13 December 2007 (UTC)
After being in unsatisfactory form as a subpage of a user page for a long time, the list of triangle topics is now an article, no longer a red link within the lists of mathematics topics. Of course it could still use improvement, so work on it! Michael Hardy ( talk) 01:30, 14 December 2007 (UTC)
Having more math images is great. However, I would disagree with images (and captions) as on the right (taken from the chain rule article). It is basically an advertisement for the Wolfram Demonstrations Project. If the mathematica people are sincere in their desire to help with math images they could as well remove the ugly software controls and limit themselvs to acknowledgements in the image page itself. Comments? Oleg Alexandrov ( talk) 04:45, 14 December 2007 (UTC)
For clarification, it is not the MathWorld license that is at issue. That has not changed. It is the Wolfram Demonstration Project license that has been altered to accommodate Wikipedia. I left controls in because they show what parameters are at issue. -- Pleasantville ( talk) 13:19, 14 December 2007 (UTC)
What I am trying to work out is the details of how Wikipedia can take advantage of the license change, and I have made a number of suggestions to Wolfram based on my experience yesterday and the day before about how Wolfram could do things differently to make it easier for someone from Wikipedia with 1/2 and hour to spare to find something useful on the Demonstrations site and find the right spot for it. Here are the issues that have come up so far. (Feel free to add to this list; changes can be made.)
1. Navigation within the site: It is not instantly obvious that the gray words on the background of the Demonstrations splash page are clickable links to subject areas. There is an index to the complete list of demonstrations, but it is in tiny gray letters at the bottom of the page. There is also a search feature, but it seems to me that blind searches are less-than-optimal way of finding illustrations for specific Wikipedia pages. I have raised this issue with Wolfram and am told a better navigation system will be in place by the end of January.
2. Size: The images on the WDP site tend to be bigger than 400 pixels wide. When shrunk so that they would reasonably fit on a Wikipedia page, often the type is hard to read. I'm not sure what the solution is.
3. Labeling: Because these are computer models, often important tags are embedded in the gray Manipulate interface Oleg was complaining about. In principle, the Manipulate interface can be cropped out, but then somehow the tags need to be reintroduced, either via the caption (which may not always work) or via work in something like Photoshop. Also, as noted in 2, if the graphic is smaller than a certain size, the text on the graphic may not be legible. I'm not sure what the solution is.
4. Still images vs. animation: in some cases, the information conveyed by the demonstrations is conveyed by motion, and still images do not capture it. This might be solved by miniaturized animated gifs, but creating those may be up to Wikipedians. I'm not sure that Wolfram would be willing to create and post those on a large scale.
5. Finding good matches between specific demonstrations and specific Wikipedia articles. It seems to me that the thing Wolfram could do that would be most helpful to Wikipedia would be to make it easy to match up demonstrations and articles. Better navigational tools on the Demonstrations site would help, but wouldn't completely address the issue. I made a first crack at it here by pasting in all the names of published demonstrations formatted so that the names would link to Wikipedia pages of the same name if such pages existed. There are maybe a hundred overlaps. But I think this could be done a lot better.
Is there a centralized list of articles needing illustrations? Or could a wishlist be created? That would probably also be helpful in creating a system that would make it easy to find good matches. Pleasantville ( talk) 14:29, 14 December 2007 (UTC)
I've had a go at cropping the above image for demonstration/discussion purposes.
As for requested picture Wikipedia:Requested pictures/Science#Mathematics/ Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Graphics is where they should (in theory) appear, however there are none. There are a few in Category:Wikipedia requested images for example Talk:Lissajous orbit (more physics than mathematics). This lack of formal requests should not be taken as an indication that there is no need for pictures, as there are many many mathematics articles lacking any sort of illustration. -- Salix alba ( talk) 15:16, 14 December 2007 (UTC)
If you weren't having enough AfD fun already, I happened to notice that the page Natural mathematics seems a little, well, confused. As elaborated at further length here, there's reason to suspect it's a work of, er, fractured ceramics. Somebody more familiar than I with the philosophy of mathematics might be better able to tell if there's content there worth salvaging.
Cheers, Anville ( talk) 19:33, 16 December 2007 (UTC)
A requested move Boolean logic in computer science → Boolean logic is being discussed here. -- Lambiam 22:50, 17 December 2007 (UTC)
There was some discussion of proofs here a few weeks ago so I thought people might be interested in this one. Ben 04:52, 15 December 2007 (UTC)
Mathematicians, PLEASE weigh in on this one. Deletion is being urged on the grounds that an encyclopedia should not contain mathematical proofs. Michael Hardy ( talk) 21:12, 15 December 2007 (UTC)
If proofs are not allowed, I'm going to start nominating every single article on Wikipedia for deletion. Proofs are nothing more than lists of facts that form a logical sequence. Which basically describes any worthwhile article on Wikipedia. Loisel ( talk) 01:31, 17 December 2007 (UTC)
A related issue that comes up regularly concerns proofs, often elementary inductions, added to articles without crediting a source for that proof. I'm no longer convinced that this is a good idea, but here's an example of one I added myself, over a year ago: Fáry's theorem. If an article contains a proof, is it necessary that the proof adhere closely to one of the published proofs of the same result and be credited to a reliable source, or do we view proofs of this type as self-verifying? Obviously if a particularly clever proof can be attributed to someone, it should be, as a matter of good scholarship, but I am thinking here more about whether an uncredited proof should be viewed as original research and disallowed as such.
I note that Totient function/Proofs survived AfD without this issue really being directly addressed; it has since been sprinkled with fact tags, but those are for the individual assertions within its proofs, not for the provenance of the proof as a whole. — David Eppstein ( talk) 19:55, 16 December 2007 (UTC)
I've had a look though some of the proof articles:
-- Salix alba ( talk) 20:54, 16 December 2007 (UTC) -- Salix alba ( talk) 20:54, 16 December 2007 (UTC)
Talk:Carl Hewitt has been protected, to supress this discussion. Is that appropriate? Comments? (I guess we need to comment here, since again, that talk page is protected). Oleg Alexandrov ( talk) 05:08, 18 December 2007 (UTC)
May I request your attention for the following burning question: should the verifier-based definition of NP-complete in the section Formal definitions for P and NP of P = NP problem use the definite article (the verifier) or the indefinite article (a verifier)? The discussion has stalled. See Talk:P = NP problem#Request for comments: "the" verifier or "a" verifier?. -- Lambiam 08:39, 22 December 2007 (UTC)
I added canonical representative to Wikipedia:Requested_articles/mathematics a few days ago, and Jitse's bot has updated Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Current activity since then, but my request doesn't appear on that page. Why is that? -- Dominus ( talk) 03:02, 24 December 2007 (UTC)
Season greetings! I have an article spotted on new(ish) pages patrol for you to consider. It's Hilbert Spaces and Fourier analysis. Thanks! -- Malcolmxl5 ( talk) 06:22, 25 December 2007 (UTC)
I have nominated one of us, Salix alba, for adminstrator position. If you know Salix alba and would like to comment in the discussion, you can do so at Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/Salix alba. Oleg Alexandrov ( talk) 16:35, 17 December 2007 (UTC)
I think, there is an invalid statement in the middle of the section Examples in the article permutation group. There is stated: G forms a group, since aa = bb = e, ba = ab, and baba = e. So (G,M) forms a permutation group. However nowhere is mentioned associativity of permutations, although there is ab = ba, which refers to commutative group. I'm only starting with group theory, so it might be correct, only I can't see how these properties imply associativity. Even if it is true, I think, it is a bit misleading. Please, somebody have a look at it. Thanks. -- Tomaxer ( talk) 00:03, 28 December 2007 (UTC)
As we have tried, and tried to improve mathematics education for elementary and secondary students, it is obvious that a simpler, humbler, more beautiful definition of mathematics is urgently needed. I am personally tired of trying to fit some of the narrow focused, often distracting, and often arrogant definitions I find at hand. Yes, we deal with forms. patterns, a language, and can discuss about structures being "pure" or "applied", but I am sure there are simpler ways of explaining the nature and high value of mathematics to our frustrated children and math-phobic adults. There is a great disservice being done today by much of the K-12 curriculum being defined by people who do not seem to understand the yearnings of common people to see the simpler meaning of things, precision, accuracy, reliable predictability, cost-benefit, and safety, among others. Mathematics, I believe is not "the language of god", as we sometimes want to define it, perhaps to give ourselves some self-improtance (talking like god?), but a useful tool that, pure or applied, is intended to be part of all our activities, sciences, arts, and religions, and make our lives easier, happier. I KNOW there are simpler definitions, but sometimes it feels like it will take another 100 years, before we can get off our high math horse - Last year I tried to suggest a new, more pragmatic addition to try to help on this, but that was removed (!!!) by Wikipedia. So far for contributive definitions.[[User: 68.7.11.138 ( talk) 00:51, 31 December 2007 (UTC)Felipe Razo]] 16:43, 30 December 2007 (UTC)
There is an interesting collection of photos of lots(!) of mathematicians at http://owpdb.mfo.de/. It seems that the institute is willing to grant WP the right to publish it here, see the discussion at the German Wikipedia http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal_Diskussion:Mathematik#Biographien_und_Fotos. Apparently the German Wikipedians don't want to take it under "Fair Use" license. I'm not that familiar with these license issues, but it is worth a look. Jakob.scholbach 14:47, 1 December 2007 (UTC)
So as I understand it, the reason that non-English Wikipedias usually won't use fair-use stuff is that fair use is a concept of American law, not valid in (say) Germany. Even if there's some similar notion in German copyright law (I don't know whether there is or not), it isn't the same, so the arguments that something is fair use under American law may not carry over.
Now, does anyone think that makes any sense at all? The servers are in Florida, not in Germany. Lots of people read -- and contribute to -- English WP from Germany; if German law is at issue, then it's as problematic for en.wiki as for de.wiki, except maybe numerically, insofar as one might expect a higher proportion of accesses from Germany to be on de.wiki. And I'm sure there are also lots of de.wiki users in the United States. How is the language of a WP even relevant to the legal question? -- Trovatore 02:23, 4 December 2007 (UTC)
The ICA page is somewhat of a mess, with the first definition on the page not being a true definition, and no examples or common uses. Does this page fall within the boundaries of the Mathematics project? I assumed so, so I'm posting a request here that it be the "article to be fixed of the day/week/month" so that a few people can check it out and fix it up. Thanks! -- eykanal talk 01:53, 3 December 2007 (UTC)
Currently Category:Information theory is not in the list of mathematics categories, and mathbot does not add its articles to the list of mathematics articles. Prompted by a question by Michael Hardy on my talk page, I wonder, should we consider this category as part of mathematics? If yes, mathbot will add all the articles in this category to the math articles list. (I for some reason thought that information theory was more comp sci and engineering, or either way that it strays too much from mathematics, but I am not an expert.) Oleg Alexandrov ( talk) 06:22, 3 December 2007 (UTC)
Could we be specific here? Which things in information theory do not belong either to probability theory or coding theory? Which articles? Name some examples. Michael Hardy 16:05, 3 December 2007 (UTC)
Michael, an example of a subcategory of Category:Information theory that is not mathematical: Category:Information theory > Category:Data compression > Category:Compression algorithms > Category:Lossy compression algorithms > Category:MP3 > Category:iPod - GTBacchus( talk) 17:30, 3 December 2007 (UTC)
Look at List of inequalities. There's a section titled "Pure mathematics" and another one titled "Probability theory". "Pure mathematics" is in effect being used as a catch-all---a "none-of-the-above" category (except that in this case it's below rather than above). Can it be organized into sections? Michael Hardy 16:22, 3 December 2007 (UTC)
The Constant page was moved to Numerical constant. I'd argue that the former name is better. Comments? Oleg Alexandrov ( talk) 04:59, 30 November 2007 (UTC)
This is currently a redirect to {{ maths rating}}. I think it should be deleted - it encourages 'flag planting' instead of actually rating articles. There's no need to tag talk pages since the List of mathematics articles already lists all the math articles. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 15:59, 4 December 2007 (UTC)
At the suggestion of Sj, I am exploring the possibility of creating a Wikipedia Visualization Project to allow Wikipedia to take advantage of the Wolfram Demonstrations Project resources and similar Internet resources for scientific and mathematical visualization. Wikipedia already makes extensive use of MathWorld which is hosted on the Wolfram Research website.
Sj, who is also associated with the One Laptop Per Child project, communicated with Theodore Gray at Wolfram Research and persuaded the company to change its license to allow screenshots and some related materials on the Wolfram demonstrations project to be GFDL-compatible. As is noted on my Wikipedia entry, I consult for Wolfram Research.
The Wolfram Demonstrations Project is a professionally published site with an editorial screening process. The site already contains over 2,000 demonstrations created using Mathematica, on such topics calculus, physics, biology, astronomy, and such.
Are there other similar GFDL-compatible sites that should be added to the scope of such a visualization project? Are there Wikipedians interested in the subject of visualization who would be willing to help? -- Pleasantville ( talk) 22:31, 26 November 2007 (UTC)
Personally, I deplore the fact that much of mathematics software is proprietary, and not open to public examination, use, development and maintenance. Now, I am not a Free-software purist; I can live in a middle ground. However, Wolfram has no track record at all in aiding and assisting the Free software world; it would be highly inappropriate to mount a project that is essentially a commercial promotion for the increased use of thier software. linas ( talk) 15:00, 27 November 2007 (UTC)
The new improved Terms of Use on the Wolfram Demonstrations site ( a combination of one of the Creative Commons licenses & and the MIT license) should be up by tomorrow. -- Pleasantville 18:26, 3 December 2007 (UTC)
Revised Terms of Use for demonstrations.wolfram.com. Here we go. I believe these are GFDL-compatible:
Terms of Use The Wolfram Demonstrations Project ("this Site") is an informational resource made freely available by Wolfram Research.
All content on this site is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution - Noncommercial - Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. By accessing the site or using it in any way, you accept and agree to be bound by the terms of this license. If you do not agree to these Terms of Use, you may not use this Site or content obtained from this Site. Wolfram Research reserves the right to change, modify, add to, or remove portions of these Terms of Use at any time without notice. Please refer back to this page for the latest Terms of Use.
A summary of the licensing terms can be found at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0
The full legal code can be found at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/legalcode
In addition, the preview animations of each Demonstration, the pop-up snapshots, and the images available after clicking "Link to this Demonstration" are also licensed under the MIT License. The MIT License allows unrestricted use provided that the copyright notice is preserved. We encourage the use of the aforementioned items in educational resources around the web, for example on Wikipedia and university websites.
The full text of the MIT License can be found at: http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php
Please have a look and tell me what you think. -- Pleasantville ( talk) 21:26, 4 December 2007 (UTC)
Math is one of the many Sciences (others being, chemistry, physics, biology, geology, etc....) just curious -- Storkian aka iSoroush Talk 23:43, 3 December 2007 (UTC)
I consider mathematics to be one of the humanities. Like philosophy, which I would consider its closest relative. Clearly, mathematical physics or applied PDEs or economics are social sciences or sciences, but they aren't properly mathematics (in the sense that analytical number theory is number theory that happens to use analysis, these are subjects that happen to use mathematics). The fact that mathematics are so useful in the sciences does not necessarily mean that they themselves constitute a science. -- Cheeser1 01:40, 4 December 2007 (UTC)
User:Oleg Alexandrov suggested I came here for insightful comments on the constant article I'm working on. I've basically rewritten most of the article, do you think I'm on the right track? Randomblue ( talk) 21:00, 6 December 2007 (UTC)
Would someone be so kind and have a look at the "wrong proof". Thanks -- Meisterkoch ( talk) 16:21, 8 December 2007 (UTC)
See talk:Lists of mathematics topics#This article doesn't pass WP:VER and Wikipedia:Featured list removal candidates/Lists of mathematics topics. The Transhumanist 22:28, 10 December 2007 (UTC)
I removed Homotopy groups of spheres from Wikipedia:WikiProject_Mathematics/A-class_rating today; it isn't A-class yet but the comments show it is getting close. Meanwhile Pi is a new candidate, nominated by Disavian. This is obviously an extremely important article for a general encyclopedia. Give it a read to see how far it has come.
Although it's a relatively low-volume process, the A-class rating system gives detailed peer review about mathematics articles by editors who are familiar with the topic, without the hassle of the featured article process. I hope more editors will take advantage of it. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 16:46, 11 December 2007 (UTC)
With help from Hans Adler, I have been working on a major expansion of Mathematical logic. If you have interest or expertise in the area, and the time to read through it, I would appreciate any suggestions you have to fill out the coverage or improve the exposition. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 20:32, 11 December 2007 (UTC)
Can anyone confirm what Silverman [1] actually proved from the abc Conjecture? The consensus seems to be:
but WAREL quotes
(In either case, we need to revert that idiotic superscript 2 character to <sup>2</sup>. Is it possible for an AWB substitution to select those?) — Arthur Rubin | (talk) 18:02, 12 December 2007 (UTC)
Some users are talking about starting a Wiki Project for mathematical biology, e.g. in user space this tentative project page. I added math to the list of related projects. On account of my interest in convergence phenomena in self-adapting genetic algorithms, I'm a big believer that we can suck up their wisdom the way we have leeched physicists for centuries :-) Pete St.John ( talk) 17:35, 13 December 2007 (UTC)
After being in unsatisfactory form as a subpage of a user page for a long time, the list of triangle topics is now an article, no longer a red link within the lists of mathematics topics. Of course it could still use improvement, so work on it! Michael Hardy ( talk) 01:30, 14 December 2007 (UTC)
Having more math images is great. However, I would disagree with images (and captions) as on the right (taken from the chain rule article). It is basically an advertisement for the Wolfram Demonstrations Project. If the mathematica people are sincere in their desire to help with math images they could as well remove the ugly software controls and limit themselvs to acknowledgements in the image page itself. Comments? Oleg Alexandrov ( talk) 04:45, 14 December 2007 (UTC)
For clarification, it is not the MathWorld license that is at issue. That has not changed. It is the Wolfram Demonstration Project license that has been altered to accommodate Wikipedia. I left controls in because they show what parameters are at issue. -- Pleasantville ( talk) 13:19, 14 December 2007 (UTC)
What I am trying to work out is the details of how Wikipedia can take advantage of the license change, and I have made a number of suggestions to Wolfram based on my experience yesterday and the day before about how Wolfram could do things differently to make it easier for someone from Wikipedia with 1/2 and hour to spare to find something useful on the Demonstrations site and find the right spot for it. Here are the issues that have come up so far. (Feel free to add to this list; changes can be made.)
1. Navigation within the site: It is not instantly obvious that the gray words on the background of the Demonstrations splash page are clickable links to subject areas. There is an index to the complete list of demonstrations, but it is in tiny gray letters at the bottom of the page. There is also a search feature, but it seems to me that blind searches are less-than-optimal way of finding illustrations for specific Wikipedia pages. I have raised this issue with Wolfram and am told a better navigation system will be in place by the end of January.
2. Size: The images on the WDP site tend to be bigger than 400 pixels wide. When shrunk so that they would reasonably fit on a Wikipedia page, often the type is hard to read. I'm not sure what the solution is.
3. Labeling: Because these are computer models, often important tags are embedded in the gray Manipulate interface Oleg was complaining about. In principle, the Manipulate interface can be cropped out, but then somehow the tags need to be reintroduced, either via the caption (which may not always work) or via work in something like Photoshop. Also, as noted in 2, if the graphic is smaller than a certain size, the text on the graphic may not be legible. I'm not sure what the solution is.
4. Still images vs. animation: in some cases, the information conveyed by the demonstrations is conveyed by motion, and still images do not capture it. This might be solved by miniaturized animated gifs, but creating those may be up to Wikipedians. I'm not sure that Wolfram would be willing to create and post those on a large scale.
5. Finding good matches between specific demonstrations and specific Wikipedia articles. It seems to me that the thing Wolfram could do that would be most helpful to Wikipedia would be to make it easy to match up demonstrations and articles. Better navigational tools on the Demonstrations site would help, but wouldn't completely address the issue. I made a first crack at it here by pasting in all the names of published demonstrations formatted so that the names would link to Wikipedia pages of the same name if such pages existed. There are maybe a hundred overlaps. But I think this could be done a lot better.
Is there a centralized list of articles needing illustrations? Or could a wishlist be created? That would probably also be helpful in creating a system that would make it easy to find good matches. Pleasantville ( talk) 14:29, 14 December 2007 (UTC)
I've had a go at cropping the above image for demonstration/discussion purposes.
As for requested picture Wikipedia:Requested pictures/Science#Mathematics/ Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Graphics is where they should (in theory) appear, however there are none. There are a few in Category:Wikipedia requested images for example Talk:Lissajous orbit (more physics than mathematics). This lack of formal requests should not be taken as an indication that there is no need for pictures, as there are many many mathematics articles lacking any sort of illustration. -- Salix alba ( talk) 15:16, 14 December 2007 (UTC)
If you weren't having enough AfD fun already, I happened to notice that the page Natural mathematics seems a little, well, confused. As elaborated at further length here, there's reason to suspect it's a work of, er, fractured ceramics. Somebody more familiar than I with the philosophy of mathematics might be better able to tell if there's content there worth salvaging.
Cheers, Anville ( talk) 19:33, 16 December 2007 (UTC)
A requested move Boolean logic in computer science → Boolean logic is being discussed here. -- Lambiam 22:50, 17 December 2007 (UTC)
There was some discussion of proofs here a few weeks ago so I thought people might be interested in this one. Ben 04:52, 15 December 2007 (UTC)
Mathematicians, PLEASE weigh in on this one. Deletion is being urged on the grounds that an encyclopedia should not contain mathematical proofs. Michael Hardy ( talk) 21:12, 15 December 2007 (UTC)
If proofs are not allowed, I'm going to start nominating every single article on Wikipedia for deletion. Proofs are nothing more than lists of facts that form a logical sequence. Which basically describes any worthwhile article on Wikipedia. Loisel ( talk) 01:31, 17 December 2007 (UTC)
A related issue that comes up regularly concerns proofs, often elementary inductions, added to articles without crediting a source for that proof. I'm no longer convinced that this is a good idea, but here's an example of one I added myself, over a year ago: Fáry's theorem. If an article contains a proof, is it necessary that the proof adhere closely to one of the published proofs of the same result and be credited to a reliable source, or do we view proofs of this type as self-verifying? Obviously if a particularly clever proof can be attributed to someone, it should be, as a matter of good scholarship, but I am thinking here more about whether an uncredited proof should be viewed as original research and disallowed as such.
I note that Totient function/Proofs survived AfD without this issue really being directly addressed; it has since been sprinkled with fact tags, but those are for the individual assertions within its proofs, not for the provenance of the proof as a whole. — David Eppstein ( talk) 19:55, 16 December 2007 (UTC)
I've had a look though some of the proof articles:
-- Salix alba ( talk) 20:54, 16 December 2007 (UTC) -- Salix alba ( talk) 20:54, 16 December 2007 (UTC)
Talk:Carl Hewitt has been protected, to supress this discussion. Is that appropriate? Comments? (I guess we need to comment here, since again, that talk page is protected). Oleg Alexandrov ( talk) 05:08, 18 December 2007 (UTC)
May I request your attention for the following burning question: should the verifier-based definition of NP-complete in the section Formal definitions for P and NP of P = NP problem use the definite article (the verifier) or the indefinite article (a verifier)? The discussion has stalled. See Talk:P = NP problem#Request for comments: "the" verifier or "a" verifier?. -- Lambiam 08:39, 22 December 2007 (UTC)
I added canonical representative to Wikipedia:Requested_articles/mathematics a few days ago, and Jitse's bot has updated Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Current activity since then, but my request doesn't appear on that page. Why is that? -- Dominus ( talk) 03:02, 24 December 2007 (UTC)
Season greetings! I have an article spotted on new(ish) pages patrol for you to consider. It's Hilbert Spaces and Fourier analysis. Thanks! -- Malcolmxl5 ( talk) 06:22, 25 December 2007 (UTC)
I have nominated one of us, Salix alba, for adminstrator position. If you know Salix alba and would like to comment in the discussion, you can do so at Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/Salix alba. Oleg Alexandrov ( talk) 16:35, 17 December 2007 (UTC)
I think, there is an invalid statement in the middle of the section Examples in the article permutation group. There is stated: G forms a group, since aa = bb = e, ba = ab, and baba = e. So (G,M) forms a permutation group. However nowhere is mentioned associativity of permutations, although there is ab = ba, which refers to commutative group. I'm only starting with group theory, so it might be correct, only I can't see how these properties imply associativity. Even if it is true, I think, it is a bit misleading. Please, somebody have a look at it. Thanks. -- Tomaxer ( talk) 00:03, 28 December 2007 (UTC)
As we have tried, and tried to improve mathematics education for elementary and secondary students, it is obvious that a simpler, humbler, more beautiful definition of mathematics is urgently needed. I am personally tired of trying to fit some of the narrow focused, often distracting, and often arrogant definitions I find at hand. Yes, we deal with forms. patterns, a language, and can discuss about structures being "pure" or "applied", but I am sure there are simpler ways of explaining the nature and high value of mathematics to our frustrated children and math-phobic adults. There is a great disservice being done today by much of the K-12 curriculum being defined by people who do not seem to understand the yearnings of common people to see the simpler meaning of things, precision, accuracy, reliable predictability, cost-benefit, and safety, among others. Mathematics, I believe is not "the language of god", as we sometimes want to define it, perhaps to give ourselves some self-improtance (talking like god?), but a useful tool that, pure or applied, is intended to be part of all our activities, sciences, arts, and religions, and make our lives easier, happier. I KNOW there are simpler definitions, but sometimes it feels like it will take another 100 years, before we can get off our high math horse - Last year I tried to suggest a new, more pragmatic addition to try to help on this, but that was removed (!!!) by Wikipedia. So far for contributive definitions.[[User: 68.7.11.138 ( talk) 00:51, 31 December 2007 (UTC)Felipe Razo]] 16:43, 30 December 2007 (UTC)