Uncle G 10:54, 29 January 2007 (UTC)
It wouldn't hurt to have some intelligent people comment on the above AfD, since the first several comments were written by silly gullible people. Michael Hardy 23:40, 29 January 2007 (UTC)
Out of curiosity, I made a version of Special:Ancientpages just for math articles: User:CMummert/Oldpages. It lists articles on Mathbot's list whose last edit was in 2005. There are no articles on Mathbot's list older than that (except for one redirect page, but I think I fixed that). CMummert · talk 04:53, 1 February 2007 (UTC)
For some time the article modularity theorem had the incorrect title Taniyama–Shimura theorem, a name invented by an editor who wrongly thought that was what the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture was called when it was proved, and never used by mathematicians. This has been fixed on the English wikipedia, but unfortunately this mistake was copied to wikipedias in many other languages. So the corresponding page in the following languages needs to be fixed: Català Deutsch Español Français Italiano עברית 日本語 Português Русский Suomi Tiếng Việt 中文 (There are links to the pages in these languages at modularity theorem.) R.e.b. 19:45, 1 February 2007 (UTC)
Infinite monkey theorem has been nominated for a featured article review. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. Please leave your comments and help us to return the article to featured quality. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, articles are moved onto the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Remove" the article from featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. Reviewers' concerns are here. LuciferMorgan 04:54, 2 February 2007 (UTC)
See Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Ed Pegg, Jr.. Oleg Alexandrov ( talk) 16:23, 31 January 2007 (UTC)
I found number spiral a complete orphan---no other pages linked to it at all. I did a few small copy-edits and put a link to it into another article, and added the "number theory" category. Perhpas others here can figure out which other articles should link to it or other categories it should be in. It would also benefit from an illustration and perhaps other additional work. Michael Hardy 23:11, 4 February 2007 (UTC)
If it's not kept, I think it should be merged into Ulam spiral, perhaps with comments comparing and contrasting the two, and probably in terser and more efficient language than what is now in this article. Michael Hardy 02:06, 5 February 2007 (UTC)
We really need to merge polynomial factorization and factorization; most of the article factorization is in fact on polynomial factorization, but it is treated more basically. Should we merge polynomial factorization into factorization, or merge most of the stuff in factorization on polynomial factorization into polynomial factorization? — Mets501 ( talk) 04:11, 5 February 2007 (UTC)
Yesterday I was poking around through some W3C tables when I ran across a couple of HTML entities (&thetasym = #x03D1 and &weierp = #x2118) that were new to me. So I added them to the table of symbols in Fropuff's user space, and they showed up fine: ϑ and ℘.
Today the Weierstrass "p" symbol ℘ still works OK for me, but I get an ugly little hook for the "\vartheta" symbol that I should be able to produce by coding ϑ (this ought to look like – yesterday it did, and today it doesn't). I figure it has to be in my browser somewhere. I'm running SuSE Linux 9.3, and I'm using Firefox 1.06 (yeah, I should upgrade Firefox, but it's kind of a pain to do, and I haven't gotten around to it). I did shut the browser down and restart it in the interim, so that's probably how I lost the glyph for ϑ, but I don't understand how that could happen. Oh – I also have my Wiki-preferences set to render all math expressions as PNG's.
Anyway, I'm curious if other people have any insight into this phenomenon. I also think I'm starting to understand the problem with in-line <math></math> expressions a little better. Please take a look at the following line in this message.
Anyway, if everything were working right, there should be five copies of each of the symbols I'm talking about on the preceding line, in four or five different sizes. I only see three different sizes through my browser, but one of them (the {\scriptstyle} size) looks about right for rendering in-line symbols. Does it look that way to you? I'm especially curious what it looks like to Windows users. Should there be something more about different ways of rendering math symbols in the style manual for math articles? Thanks! DavidCBryant 17:36, 4 February 2007 (UTC)
To DavidCBryant: I am using: Windows 2000, version 5.0 (Build 2195: Service Pack 4). I do not understand fonts, so all I can say about that is that I use: Verdana, style regular, size 10, script western. JRSpriggs 05:38, 6 February 2007 (UTC)
One zero one ( talk · contribs · deleted contribs · nuke contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log) is editing math and physics related articles and (I think deliberately) introducing errors. They are not so easy to spot, see this edit for example. Such things are much more worrisome than plain vandalism. Something to watch for. Oleg Alexandrov ( talk) 04:23, 5 February 2007 (UTC)
I think this should be merged with Givens rotation because it's the same. See e.g. Golub/van Loan "Matrix Computations" -- Mathemaduenn 12:55, 7 February 2007 (UTC)
A few things I'd like opinions on:
First: are we (we, anybody) using the {{ Maths rating}} template? I come across articles all the time without it on them (like Polygon, for example, which I guess is top-class or high-class importance, or whatever the word is we use). I could add this to articles (talk pages, rather) when I notice it's missing, but I don't want to do it if it'd just be a waste of time.
Second: should we have a category for math problems? I don't mean like 'integrate x^2', but things like Archimedes' cattle problem, Kirkman's schoolgirl problem, Doubling the cube, etc.
Third and fourth: It seems that Mathbot hasn't removed bluelinks from the math articles listed at WP:MST since august. It's not a big deal, but should I just do it by hand? Also, there are some things listed that I don't quite know what to do with: take, for example, Mud cracks (listed on Wikipedia:Missing_science_topics/Maths18. MathWorld says that cracks in mud tend to cross each other at right angles--the Mud Cracks article on mathworld redirects to Right Angle. Mathworld cites some sources to support this, too. Should wikipedia mention that in Angle? Or maybe in Mud? (Imagine: a project mathematics banner on Mud). It seems like it'd be hard to justify putting it in there. On the other hand, it's vaguely interesting (for some definition of interesting) and apparently verifiable. What should be done?
Suggestions, as always, will be appreciated. -- Sopoforic 01:41, 8 February 2007 (UTC)
Re the rating template: I can imagine them being used to prioritize effort, but I don't know that anyone does use them in that fashion. One other use is to show our recognition of well written articles or improvements to articles by giving them better quality ratings. I have at least added a few more of these templates (and filled out the fields in some uncategorized ones) since seeing your note here. — David Eppstein 02:53, 9 February 2007 (UTC)
What do we think about: Template:Hilbert's problems. Given that we have Category:Hilbert's problems, do we think the template is useful? Paul August ☎ 19:27, 8 February 2007 (UTC)
I agree with Septentrionalis. I would prefer an other article template that simply pointed to the main Hilbert problems article. These problems are so diverse and their numbers are so uninformative about the actual content of the articles that I don't see the navbox as useful. — David Eppstein 23:03, 8 February 2007 (UTC)
The new version of Template:Hilbert's problems is much more palatable. Paul August ☎ 16:22, 9 February 2007 (UTC)
Exponential smoothing has been around for a long time. Although it appears to be on a legitimate topic, it is one of the most poorly written articles. So badly written in fact, that the difficulty of fixing it probably deters people from even trying. As EconStat ( talk · contribs) said, "I feel really sorry to see poor work like this on Wiki.". It is too far out of my field for me to fix it. If no statistician is willing to fix it, perhaps we should put it up for deletion. What do you think? JRSpriggs 06:46, 5 February 2007 (UTC)
I've done some (very badly needed!) cleanup. More is needed. Michael Hardy 21:53, 5 February 2007 (UTC)
Some time ago I was looking at free algebra's for a paper I was doing in Universal Algebra and I looked at the wp page on the subject. The definition was a sort of "abstract algebraic" or "ring theory" definition, and it got me to wondering about definitions of mathematical objects on WP. A free algebra could be defined in the language of UA, of category theory, or probably in other ways. How does one know which way to go for a WP page on a mathematical object? If someone wanted, they could easily go to dozens of articles and add in UA or category theory or whatever definitions of everything from logic operators to who knows. I was thinking of adding this question to the Math MoS, but I figured it would be ok to add it here. I think that the answer should be incorporated into the MMos, or somewhere in a policy guideline.
To answer my own question a bit, in many cases the most naive definition is best, who wants to mess with this stuff in an arithmetic page. On the other hand there are some cases where almost all of the research in a subject is done by logicians or computer scientists or whatever, so the definition they use is best. But, this is a type of WP imperialism, as many pages are defined with the CS way of looking at it due to the high number of editors with CS backgrounds, frustrating other potential users. Sometimes the subject can be safely split into how different fields look at it (such as Combinatorial game theory and Game theory), which can also help. Smmurphy( Talk) 02:15, 13 February 2007 (UTC)
Could someone have a look at Gauss-Lucas theorem. It needs to be put into context and made understandable to a general audience. − Twas Now ( talk • contribs • e-mail ) 05:04, 13 February 2007 (UTC)
Category:Claude Shannon, Category:Norbert Wiener are up for deletion at WP:CFD 132.205.44.134 00:45, 15 February 2007 (UTC)
I have a short list of missing mathematics topics. I have tried to find all relevant links to similar articles but I would appreciate if someone could have a look at it. Thank you. - Skysmith 13:44, 16 February 2007 (UTC)
Just as a reminder to perhaps newer people, there are two pages where one can see what is going on with the math articles. First, Jitse's very versatile Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Current activity, and then my own User:Mathbot/Changes to mathlists which justs lists articles added and removed from math lists.
There is a lot going on in math on Wikipedia, with at least five (or more like ten) articles created daily (my unscientific guess is that we are creating articles at a much faster rate than either PlanetMath or MathWorld). There is a lot of work however in making sure that those articles have proper style, are correct, notable, and mathematical. So, if you have time, taking a look on those pages every now and then could be a good thing. Cheers, Oleg Alexandrov ( talk) 22:28, 10 February 2007 (UTC)
The story started with an anon blanking 56 (number). Then in a few days somebody else saw the blank page and created an article about the game 56 (note that the IP of the guy who blanked, 71.233.129.128, is very similar to the IP of the guy who created the game, 71.250.232.151, although that's probably a coincidence).
I moved back 56 (game) to 56 (number) and reverted to the pre-blank version. The game itself doesn't seem notable enough to have its article. Oleg Alexandrov ( talk) 16:13, 18 February 2007 (UTC)
I've already done some hunting through Help:Images and other uploaded files and some other associated pages, and I haven't found an answer yet, so I'm asking a question here. Is there a recommended maximum size for image files embedded in a Wikipedia article? If not, should there be?
Here's why I'm asking. I was reviewing the list of new math articles when I ran across Shallow water equations. It's an interesting article. And it has a very nice animated GIF embedded in it, which illustrates waves in a bathtub evolving over a period of time. The only problem is that the graphics file (Image:Shallow_water_waves.gif) is roughly 7 Mb in size. On my machine the animation takes about 30 seconds to run. So I'd need a data transfer rate of ~250 Kb per second to view this animation in real time, and I don't have that kind of a connection.
I'm just wondering if there's some sort of convention for a really big graphics file like this one. I think it's a nice animation, especially for people who have high-speed internet connections. But roughly half of all the internet users are still using dial-up, AFAIK. Wouldn't it be nice to link to an animation file like this one as a separate article, with a caption describing the file you're about to download? DavidCBryant 17:31, 14 February 2007 (UTC)
Boy's surface kills my browser due to huge animations even with a high-bandwidth connection. I think the first animation on the page adds a lot to the understandability of the surface, but it should probably be significantly reduced in size, and one of the editors of that page seems to feel that if one animation is good more must be better. — David Eppstein 08:06, 17 February 2007 (UTC)
Saying that the Project consists of "only suggestions" sounds apologetic. I think that starting a Wikiproject with an apology or disclaimer is probably a bad idea. The overall tone of the project does not sound heavy-handed. Have others reacted badly to the existence of this project? Many of the other WikiProejcts do not start their page with such caution.
Also, there was briefly an attempt to provide some kind of realistic status. It read:
This assessment seems fair and points in an interesting direction. Should it be put back? For perspective, you might want to familiarize yourself with WP:100K.-- 199.33.32.40 22:08, 4 February 2007 (UTC)
Before you start changing the WikiProject page to state your desires for what the WikiProject should focus on, you should discuss it first on this talk page. After all, it doesn't seem like you've even participated enough in this WikiProject to get a sense of what the community thinks. Also, is there a reason that you apparently created a new account ( User:Farever) and stopped using it? Keeping track of the different IPs is kind of annoying.
Speaking for myself, non-prescriptiveness is a good thing. If it distinguishes us from other WikiProjects, that'll all for the good. I believe the main purpose of this WikiProject is to improve mathematical coverage on Wikipedia. We all have differing ideas of what this means. Some may argue that this entails more FA mathematics articles, while others disagree. I personally wonder if the our time is most effectively utilized tweaking articles to make it through the FA process. There are bigger issues, e.g. fixing the elementary mathematics articles. -- C S (Talk) 04:22, 5 February 2007 (UTC)
I would like to mark Wikipedia:WikiProject_Mathematics/Motivation and Wikipedia:WikiProject_Mathematics/Proofs as historical and direct additional conversation from them to this page instead. I looked at them today and realized that they are still gaining new comments, even though the main project page seems to describe them as historical discusions. Any objections?
Also, the 2006 update is beginning to look a little old in Feb. 2007. I would like to add a 2007 update. What are the main issues that require attention this year? There have been several comments in recent weeks about improving articles on elementary subjects, so that might be a candidate for one. CMummert · talk 13:53, 5 February 2007 (UTC)
I cleaned up the page some. I like to put links at the side so that it is easier to start reading at the top. I don't dislike images per se but I don't see how the images in the newly-added nav box actually helped the page any. And they were too big. CMummert · talk 02:27, 7 February 2007 (UTC)
I've just redone the project page in a two column layout [1]. The Nav box by CMummert caused a few layout problems so I've cut and pasted it for now and and hacked it a bit to make it work. Feel free to revert. -- Salix alba ( talk) 21:18, 7 February 2007 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2007_February_9#Category:Erd.C5.91s_number_1
The discussion has been going on since Feb.9, so speak quickly or you may not get a chance to speak at all. — David Eppstein 07:23, 19 February 2007 (UTC)
I've refrained from these discussions, because I don't have a leaning either way. One thing that disturbs me is that it seems arbitrary to have a category for say, Erdos number 6 (which I think was actually created in between these CFD debates). Is there, for example, a cutoff typically used by social network researchers? -- C S (Talk) 00:41, 21 February 2007 (UTC)
I just rewrote this article; please visit, improve the article, and offer comments. It's a vital article, so I think we should work to improve it to at least good article standard. -- N Shar 20:25, 20 February 2007 (UTC)
The articles Naive set theory and Subset use special math characters that show up as squares in IE 7. There are probably other articles like that. Can someone substitute the TeX math characters? Bubba73 (talk), 05:09, 15 February 2007 (UTC)
long plagued by in WikiPedia. I've tried to find and implement and analyze solutions, but I'm at a loss, so I thought that by sharing in some detail my own experiences / results / efforts that I can help others understand, solve, or become aware of the difficulties. I appreciate the efforts of those who've taken the time to author what appear to be many fine technical pages on WikiPedia, I simply wish that many of them were usefully accessible to me. I have to believe that my IT/PC/Browser setup is representative of or better than that of most casual Wikipedia users, so I imagine that if I (and others here) are having such difficulties that the problem must be widespread and that the solution(s) are poorly known. Yet given the substantial quantity of well authored and similarly encoded technical pages on WikiPedia, it stands to reason that the authors must be aware of the appropriate guidelines, tools, techniques, and encoding / authoring techniques to create their pages, view them correctly, and have some 'quality assurance' expectation that most of their audience should be able to view their works with reasonable success and facility. However, if that's so, I've certainly missed finding "the instructions" as to how to repeat their successes! I've been impatiently waiting for the STIX fonts and FireFox 2.x for nearly a year hoping that maybe it was just a local font and rendering engine deficiency that I could clear up with those tools, but alas it's appearing unlikely to me that it's "simply" explicable and soluble by those two issues. I'm hoping that someone who does have mathematical (et.al.) symbol display mostly or wholly working with their browser can speak up and help answer what configuration(s) are beneficial to achieve that result. Though I've often seen FireFox lauded for superior MathML et. al. display versus IE6, I'm presently (and miserably) having the opposite experience. Using a "full" default install of WinXP, fully updated recent versions of FireFox 2.0.0.1 and MS IE 6.0.x, I'm unable to correctly see a great number of Wikipedia's mathematical symbols under FireFox and I'm missing a lesser but significant number of them on MSIE 6. Following the tips of users' comments here and elsewhere I've tried both FF and IE, I've installed the recommended TeX, MTExtra, Mathematica, MathML, et. al. fonts, I've experimented with changing my default encoding's font and size to several various choices including the installed Lucida Sans Unicode, et. al. I've enabled JavaScript, Cookies, Style sheets, and web site overrides of my chosen default fonts. I've reloaded the pages containing inappropriately rendered characters many times to judge whether anything I've done has made an improvement. ...For example, with this representative page:
I notice that under MSIE, even before installing non-default fonts, automatically loaded many PNG images to display graphic representations of symbols / equations, and by so doing that it got many of them correctly displayed. Whereas on the same system under FireFox, even after correctly installing numerous additional fonts, most missing characters are still displaying TeX-like escape codes in plainly visible "text code" and the rendering is neither invoking "png image loading" to display graphic representations of the symbols/equations (like MSIE is doing), nor is FireFox apparently able to or trying to render the symbols / codes via any of the installed MathMl / Unicode fonts et. al. ...For another example:
In FireFox, the above page correctly shows a couple of dozen of the symbols; most of leftmost ones are all OK; the bottom rows as well as most of the symbols on the right sides of all rows do not display correctly; instead I see what looks like character entity references as one would type them "in code". In MSIE, the page display is just about equally broken as it is under Firefox. It's showing a combination of empty box characters and textual character entity reference codes instead of most of the characters on the right and bottom side of that page. ...I've followed the instructions / suggestions at the below couple of sites to install new Windows fonts and have verified that they're installed and recognized / available to the browser(s) and system in general:
...I'm a developer myself and am not unfamiliar with XML, MathML, fonts, UNICODE, HTML, TeX, et. al., but despite several hours worth of googling, experimentation, and looking for Wikipedia pages on tips for using its Mathematical Notations with browsers, I have yet to find a solution or even consistent diagnosis for this seemingly fundamental and oft encountered problem. Even in the context of this Talk Page there's contradictory information about whether it's the fault of the browser, missing fonts, user configurations of browser fonts, et. al. If it were just a browser issue, I would expect that in either MSIE6 or FFox2 I'd have "mostly successful" experiences; I do not. If it was a missing font issue, I'd expect that having installed all the platform default as well as dozens of commended added technical / symbol / mathematical fonts would have mostly solved the problem; it has not. If it was mostly a local problem, I'd expect that most Wikipedia pages would look uniformly good / bad and act consistently; they do not; the following page displays much more successfully than the second following one:
If it was "mostly just my errant setup" I wouldn't expect to see evidences of other users reporting similar problems, so many contradictory hypotheses about the problems, and I'd have expected to find some kind of FAQ / guide suggesting "the standard configurations" that'd be working for most people who had followed suit. Another example:
...looks mostly bad and unrendered in FireFox 2, whereas on the same system, IE6 renders it mostly fine though it's clearly resorting to WikiPedia server-side provided png graphic renderings of the equations / symbols instead of using any local font. Another example, this looks to be an excellent and useful test matrix of characters / symbols:
On both MSIE6 and FireFox2 (cum MANY additionally installed technical font sets) the page's table is mostly absent correctly rendered symbols. A great number of them (but still perhaps well less than half) are properly rendered in FireFox. A significantly lesser number of them correctly render in MSIE6; mainly the first 22 rows from the top are mostly OK in MSIE, whereas most of the rest of the table is not rendered. If it was a local font issue, I'd expect relatively uniform "pass/fail" between the two simultaneously active browsers. Clearly from the quaternion WikiPedia page there must be, at least in THAT case, a different stylesheet or something Wikipedia is using to tell MSIE to graphically load many of the page's equations, whereas doing something different and more unsuccessful for FireFox. Does ANYONE have these pages mostly / fully working, and, if so, what's the secret, please?!
Overall I'd say that most work very poorly in FireFox, and the ones that work 'well' in MSIE are exclusively ones where, somehow, a graphical versus textual representation is provided 'server side' via Style Sheet or some other mechanism to cause MSIE to not even try to display most of the symbols / equations via local font or rendering technologies. Obviously that .png bitmap graphic approach leaves a lot to be desired (scalability, searchability, accessability, et. al.), but at least it's a visual "on screen" step forward wrt. total gibberish. It must be a choice that's not consistently or fully implemented server side, though, since many of the pages don't try to do that in MSIE and in such cases the result is no better than in FireFox. I haven't extensively experimented with this issue in LINUX, though I've encountered similar problems sufficiently often with FireFox/LINUX to suggest to me that there's nothing uniquely beneficial about LINUX's browser / fonts that makes it work much better than I've experienced under MS Windows. If anything LINUX tends to lack some of the more 'common' TrueType / UNICODE fonts that are 'often' available on MS Windows platforms, so OS platform doesn't seem to be the essential problem. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 216.99.216.242 ( talk) 09:10, 22 February 2007 (UTC).
The article Checking if a coin is fair is up for deletion. People who read this page might want to take a look at it. DavidCBryant 14:59, 15 February 2007 (UTC)
Felix A. Keller and Keller's Expression
Keller keeps adding himself and his unimportant and obvious expression to the page about e. He has done this at least four times since 2004. Now he has promoted himself and his expression to a pair of articles.
See Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Felix A. Keller to discuss.
-- Dominus 16:51, 15 February 2007 (UTC)
Some articles about individual mathematicians who were important in the development of math are rated as top importance, e.g. Leonard Euler and Gottfried Liebniz, or mid importance, e.g. al-Khwarizmi. But shouldn't all of those articles be rated as low importance, because who developed the concepts is not relevant to math, it is historical trivia, wikiproject mathematics should really only concerned with articles that focus on technical aspects of mathematics. Prb4 19:55, 15 February 2007 (UTC)
I find this talk about 'historical trivia' to be actually offensive. What is more, the proposition that mathematics articles should be only about mathematics, narrowly defined, makes no sense in terms of the needs of the general reader; which is where WP aims, in principle. Further, I know from past comments that mathematicians themselves can find historical context helpful. Charles Matthews 19:31, 18 February 2007 (UTC)
I was reviewing Complementary sequences and noticed that the only math-related tag on the article was for the category "Elementary mathematics" (which seems strange, since Golay codes aren't all that elementary). Anyway, that got me curious about other topics associated with error correcting codes. I couldn't find any corresponding topics in the list of mathematics categories. So then I looked at several of the articles in list of algebraic coding theory topics and found that some of these are "math" articles (because they carry category tags like "finite fields") and some of them aren't (because they carry category tags like "error detection and correction").
So now I have a question. What's the preferred procedure in a situation like this? Is it OK to add another category to the list of mathematics categories? What if that category is likely to drag in a bunch of articles that aren't really math articles? Would it be better to add some more specific tag (like "finite fields") to some of the articles (in, say, "error detection and correction") that seem entirely mathematical? Frankly, I'm a little bit confused by the existing hodge-podge of "categories" on Wikipedia! DavidCBryant 17:58, 18 February 2007 (UTC)
I've just done some cleanup on complementary sequences. Using an asterisk for ordinary multiplication, as if we were restricted to plain ASCII, is uncouth; we're not primitive troglodytes. Also, notice this difference:
Michael Hardy 21:13, 19 February 2007 (UTC)
Oleg is mistaken as to which subspecies I represent. I'm a hothead, not a grump. Michael Hardy 20:39, 21 February 2007 (UTC)
Hi all! It would be a nice thing to try to set some rules concerning notation for the probabilty and expectation symbols. In the various probability/statistics articles I've seen at least three notations: , and finally . Personally, I prefer the latter, as it's the accepted notation of the scientific community (sometimes the letters are bold, i.e. P and E but always straight). I have not seen nevertheless any guide that woud explain such a thing. Some article even go as far as to right ... Let's make a public discussion about this resulting in some agreement and guide for wikipedia math community. Amir Aliev 21:05, 21 February 2007 (UTC)
I see that the notations listed above do not include this:
produced in TeX by \Pr .
I come here by way of a mathematician Johann Christoph Wichmannshausen, who is up for deletion and is in the Mathematics Genealogy Project. I am unfamiliar with the importance of this genealogy tree, but I notice that a number of academics provide their "genealogy" on their personal website, so my initial assumption was that people higher up in the tree should be considered notable by default. Is that reasonable? Are there some rules of thumb that can be used to assist in determining WP:N using the "Mathematics Genealogy Project" data? John Vandenberg 00:36, 22 February 2007 (UTC)
While reviewing some of the "new" math articles I ran across this one. Someone hit it with a "cleanup" tag in November, 2005. The tag exhorts editors to "discuss this issue on the talk page". Interestingly, the talk page is still a red link, 15 months after the tag was placed. Apparently the person who tagged the article didn't even care enough to list any specific concerns right then and there, on that talk page. Like a graffiti artist, he tagged the article and moved on.
Last week I reviewed an article consisting of 28 words (plus 107 words of encrustations from various templates affixed by editors who apparently don't think others can judge a page unless there's a neon sign on it). I put a PROD tag on that one, but one of the author's sockpuppets deleted the tag, so I had to learn about the AfD process. Now the article itself (135 words, including the barnacles) is gone, and in its place we have a (roughly) 350-word archived discussion.
I understand why some of this happens. Maybe it's just that I haven't been here long enough to get used to it yet. But it seems that some of these processes aren't really helping to make Wikipedia any better. Can some of these labyrinthine processes be straightened out, or even eliminated, somehow? For example, could the code underlying a "cleanup" tag prevent its insertion while the associated talk page is a red link? If somebody really thinks an article needs cleanup, shouldn't that editor be encouraged to identify a specific problem before waving a big red flag at everybody else? DavidCBryant 16:25, 22 February 2007 (UTC)
Talk:Indian_mathematics#Request_for_comment:_Reliable_Sources_for_Indian_Mathematics Feedback is requested for a problem on the Indian mathematics page, where two users have a disagreement about what constitutes reliable sources for claims in the article. 05:29, 23 February 2007 (UTC)
There needs to be some merging with the articles Faulhaber's formula, Power sum and Power Sum. I don't know that much about mathematics to clean those up. -- Montchav 11:22, 24 February 2007 (UTC)
Many articles about special classes of natural numbers are categorized in Category:Integer sequences, apparently solely because the numbers in the class form a sequence. See for example Practical number, Vampire number, or Square-free integer. I think it would be better to have a Category:Number classes with subcategories Category:Base-dependent number classes and Category:Divisor-based number classes (and, of course, appropriate cross-references between "class" and "sequence" categories). Several articles currently in Category:Number theory would also be moved to the subcategory, leaving only very important or well-known classes such as Prime number or Perfect number as direct members of Category:Number theory.
Any reasons why this would be a bad idea? Any better suggestions for category names? Category names are cumbersome to change, so it would e best to get them right from the start. – Henning Makholm 20:39, 24 February 2007 (UTC)
The article Enneper-Weierstrass parameterization needs some quick cleanup that I am unable to provide. It says:
The formula here needs to be re-typeset, but it also does not appear to be strictly correct: where are the differentials? What are the limits of integration?
-- Dominus 08:09, 27 February 2007 (UTC)
Uncle G 10:54, 29 January 2007 (UTC)
It wouldn't hurt to have some intelligent people comment on the above AfD, since the first several comments were written by silly gullible people. Michael Hardy 23:40, 29 January 2007 (UTC)
Out of curiosity, I made a version of Special:Ancientpages just for math articles: User:CMummert/Oldpages. It lists articles on Mathbot's list whose last edit was in 2005. There are no articles on Mathbot's list older than that (except for one redirect page, but I think I fixed that). CMummert · talk 04:53, 1 February 2007 (UTC)
For some time the article modularity theorem had the incorrect title Taniyama–Shimura theorem, a name invented by an editor who wrongly thought that was what the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture was called when it was proved, and never used by mathematicians. This has been fixed on the English wikipedia, but unfortunately this mistake was copied to wikipedias in many other languages. So the corresponding page in the following languages needs to be fixed: Català Deutsch Español Français Italiano עברית 日本語 Português Русский Suomi Tiếng Việt 中文 (There are links to the pages in these languages at modularity theorem.) R.e.b. 19:45, 1 February 2007 (UTC)
Infinite monkey theorem has been nominated for a featured article review. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. Please leave your comments and help us to return the article to featured quality. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, articles are moved onto the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Remove" the article from featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. Reviewers' concerns are here. LuciferMorgan 04:54, 2 February 2007 (UTC)
See Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Ed Pegg, Jr.. Oleg Alexandrov ( talk) 16:23, 31 January 2007 (UTC)
I found number spiral a complete orphan---no other pages linked to it at all. I did a few small copy-edits and put a link to it into another article, and added the "number theory" category. Perhpas others here can figure out which other articles should link to it or other categories it should be in. It would also benefit from an illustration and perhaps other additional work. Michael Hardy 23:11, 4 February 2007 (UTC)
If it's not kept, I think it should be merged into Ulam spiral, perhaps with comments comparing and contrasting the two, and probably in terser and more efficient language than what is now in this article. Michael Hardy 02:06, 5 February 2007 (UTC)
We really need to merge polynomial factorization and factorization; most of the article factorization is in fact on polynomial factorization, but it is treated more basically. Should we merge polynomial factorization into factorization, or merge most of the stuff in factorization on polynomial factorization into polynomial factorization? — Mets501 ( talk) 04:11, 5 February 2007 (UTC)
Yesterday I was poking around through some W3C tables when I ran across a couple of HTML entities (&thetasym = #x03D1 and &weierp = #x2118) that were new to me. So I added them to the table of symbols in Fropuff's user space, and they showed up fine: ϑ and ℘.
Today the Weierstrass "p" symbol ℘ still works OK for me, but I get an ugly little hook for the "\vartheta" symbol that I should be able to produce by coding ϑ (this ought to look like – yesterday it did, and today it doesn't). I figure it has to be in my browser somewhere. I'm running SuSE Linux 9.3, and I'm using Firefox 1.06 (yeah, I should upgrade Firefox, but it's kind of a pain to do, and I haven't gotten around to it). I did shut the browser down and restart it in the interim, so that's probably how I lost the glyph for ϑ, but I don't understand how that could happen. Oh – I also have my Wiki-preferences set to render all math expressions as PNG's.
Anyway, I'm curious if other people have any insight into this phenomenon. I also think I'm starting to understand the problem with in-line <math></math> expressions a little better. Please take a look at the following line in this message.
Anyway, if everything were working right, there should be five copies of each of the symbols I'm talking about on the preceding line, in four or five different sizes. I only see three different sizes through my browser, but one of them (the {\scriptstyle} size) looks about right for rendering in-line symbols. Does it look that way to you? I'm especially curious what it looks like to Windows users. Should there be something more about different ways of rendering math symbols in the style manual for math articles? Thanks! DavidCBryant 17:36, 4 February 2007 (UTC)
To DavidCBryant: I am using: Windows 2000, version 5.0 (Build 2195: Service Pack 4). I do not understand fonts, so all I can say about that is that I use: Verdana, style regular, size 10, script western. JRSpriggs 05:38, 6 February 2007 (UTC)
One zero one ( talk · contribs · deleted contribs · nuke contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log) is editing math and physics related articles and (I think deliberately) introducing errors. They are not so easy to spot, see this edit for example. Such things are much more worrisome than plain vandalism. Something to watch for. Oleg Alexandrov ( talk) 04:23, 5 February 2007 (UTC)
I think this should be merged with Givens rotation because it's the same. See e.g. Golub/van Loan "Matrix Computations" -- Mathemaduenn 12:55, 7 February 2007 (UTC)
A few things I'd like opinions on:
First: are we (we, anybody) using the {{ Maths rating}} template? I come across articles all the time without it on them (like Polygon, for example, which I guess is top-class or high-class importance, or whatever the word is we use). I could add this to articles (talk pages, rather) when I notice it's missing, but I don't want to do it if it'd just be a waste of time.
Second: should we have a category for math problems? I don't mean like 'integrate x^2', but things like Archimedes' cattle problem, Kirkman's schoolgirl problem, Doubling the cube, etc.
Third and fourth: It seems that Mathbot hasn't removed bluelinks from the math articles listed at WP:MST since august. It's not a big deal, but should I just do it by hand? Also, there are some things listed that I don't quite know what to do with: take, for example, Mud cracks (listed on Wikipedia:Missing_science_topics/Maths18. MathWorld says that cracks in mud tend to cross each other at right angles--the Mud Cracks article on mathworld redirects to Right Angle. Mathworld cites some sources to support this, too. Should wikipedia mention that in Angle? Or maybe in Mud? (Imagine: a project mathematics banner on Mud). It seems like it'd be hard to justify putting it in there. On the other hand, it's vaguely interesting (for some definition of interesting) and apparently verifiable. What should be done?
Suggestions, as always, will be appreciated. -- Sopoforic 01:41, 8 February 2007 (UTC)
Re the rating template: I can imagine them being used to prioritize effort, but I don't know that anyone does use them in that fashion. One other use is to show our recognition of well written articles or improvements to articles by giving them better quality ratings. I have at least added a few more of these templates (and filled out the fields in some uncategorized ones) since seeing your note here. — David Eppstein 02:53, 9 February 2007 (UTC)
What do we think about: Template:Hilbert's problems. Given that we have Category:Hilbert's problems, do we think the template is useful? Paul August ☎ 19:27, 8 February 2007 (UTC)
I agree with Septentrionalis. I would prefer an other article template that simply pointed to the main Hilbert problems article. These problems are so diverse and their numbers are so uninformative about the actual content of the articles that I don't see the navbox as useful. — David Eppstein 23:03, 8 February 2007 (UTC)
The new version of Template:Hilbert's problems is much more palatable. Paul August ☎ 16:22, 9 February 2007 (UTC)
Exponential smoothing has been around for a long time. Although it appears to be on a legitimate topic, it is one of the most poorly written articles. So badly written in fact, that the difficulty of fixing it probably deters people from even trying. As EconStat ( talk · contribs) said, "I feel really sorry to see poor work like this on Wiki.". It is too far out of my field for me to fix it. If no statistician is willing to fix it, perhaps we should put it up for deletion. What do you think? JRSpriggs 06:46, 5 February 2007 (UTC)
I've done some (very badly needed!) cleanup. More is needed. Michael Hardy 21:53, 5 February 2007 (UTC)
Some time ago I was looking at free algebra's for a paper I was doing in Universal Algebra and I looked at the wp page on the subject. The definition was a sort of "abstract algebraic" or "ring theory" definition, and it got me to wondering about definitions of mathematical objects on WP. A free algebra could be defined in the language of UA, of category theory, or probably in other ways. How does one know which way to go for a WP page on a mathematical object? If someone wanted, they could easily go to dozens of articles and add in UA or category theory or whatever definitions of everything from logic operators to who knows. I was thinking of adding this question to the Math MoS, but I figured it would be ok to add it here. I think that the answer should be incorporated into the MMos, or somewhere in a policy guideline.
To answer my own question a bit, in many cases the most naive definition is best, who wants to mess with this stuff in an arithmetic page. On the other hand there are some cases where almost all of the research in a subject is done by logicians or computer scientists or whatever, so the definition they use is best. But, this is a type of WP imperialism, as many pages are defined with the CS way of looking at it due to the high number of editors with CS backgrounds, frustrating other potential users. Sometimes the subject can be safely split into how different fields look at it (such as Combinatorial game theory and Game theory), which can also help. Smmurphy( Talk) 02:15, 13 February 2007 (UTC)
Could someone have a look at Gauss-Lucas theorem. It needs to be put into context and made understandable to a general audience. − Twas Now ( talk • contribs • e-mail ) 05:04, 13 February 2007 (UTC)
Category:Claude Shannon, Category:Norbert Wiener are up for deletion at WP:CFD 132.205.44.134 00:45, 15 February 2007 (UTC)
I have a short list of missing mathematics topics. I have tried to find all relevant links to similar articles but I would appreciate if someone could have a look at it. Thank you. - Skysmith 13:44, 16 February 2007 (UTC)
Just as a reminder to perhaps newer people, there are two pages where one can see what is going on with the math articles. First, Jitse's very versatile Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Current activity, and then my own User:Mathbot/Changes to mathlists which justs lists articles added and removed from math lists.
There is a lot going on in math on Wikipedia, with at least five (or more like ten) articles created daily (my unscientific guess is that we are creating articles at a much faster rate than either PlanetMath or MathWorld). There is a lot of work however in making sure that those articles have proper style, are correct, notable, and mathematical. So, if you have time, taking a look on those pages every now and then could be a good thing. Cheers, Oleg Alexandrov ( talk) 22:28, 10 February 2007 (UTC)
The story started with an anon blanking 56 (number). Then in a few days somebody else saw the blank page and created an article about the game 56 (note that the IP of the guy who blanked, 71.233.129.128, is very similar to the IP of the guy who created the game, 71.250.232.151, although that's probably a coincidence).
I moved back 56 (game) to 56 (number) and reverted to the pre-blank version. The game itself doesn't seem notable enough to have its article. Oleg Alexandrov ( talk) 16:13, 18 February 2007 (UTC)
I've already done some hunting through Help:Images and other uploaded files and some other associated pages, and I haven't found an answer yet, so I'm asking a question here. Is there a recommended maximum size for image files embedded in a Wikipedia article? If not, should there be?
Here's why I'm asking. I was reviewing the list of new math articles when I ran across Shallow water equations. It's an interesting article. And it has a very nice animated GIF embedded in it, which illustrates waves in a bathtub evolving over a period of time. The only problem is that the graphics file (Image:Shallow_water_waves.gif) is roughly 7 Mb in size. On my machine the animation takes about 30 seconds to run. So I'd need a data transfer rate of ~250 Kb per second to view this animation in real time, and I don't have that kind of a connection.
I'm just wondering if there's some sort of convention for a really big graphics file like this one. I think it's a nice animation, especially for people who have high-speed internet connections. But roughly half of all the internet users are still using dial-up, AFAIK. Wouldn't it be nice to link to an animation file like this one as a separate article, with a caption describing the file you're about to download? DavidCBryant 17:31, 14 February 2007 (UTC)
Boy's surface kills my browser due to huge animations even with a high-bandwidth connection. I think the first animation on the page adds a lot to the understandability of the surface, but it should probably be significantly reduced in size, and one of the editors of that page seems to feel that if one animation is good more must be better. — David Eppstein 08:06, 17 February 2007 (UTC)
Saying that the Project consists of "only suggestions" sounds apologetic. I think that starting a Wikiproject with an apology or disclaimer is probably a bad idea. The overall tone of the project does not sound heavy-handed. Have others reacted badly to the existence of this project? Many of the other WikiProejcts do not start their page with such caution.
Also, there was briefly an attempt to provide some kind of realistic status. It read:
This assessment seems fair and points in an interesting direction. Should it be put back? For perspective, you might want to familiarize yourself with WP:100K.-- 199.33.32.40 22:08, 4 February 2007 (UTC)
Before you start changing the WikiProject page to state your desires for what the WikiProject should focus on, you should discuss it first on this talk page. After all, it doesn't seem like you've even participated enough in this WikiProject to get a sense of what the community thinks. Also, is there a reason that you apparently created a new account ( User:Farever) and stopped using it? Keeping track of the different IPs is kind of annoying.
Speaking for myself, non-prescriptiveness is a good thing. If it distinguishes us from other WikiProjects, that'll all for the good. I believe the main purpose of this WikiProject is to improve mathematical coverage on Wikipedia. We all have differing ideas of what this means. Some may argue that this entails more FA mathematics articles, while others disagree. I personally wonder if the our time is most effectively utilized tweaking articles to make it through the FA process. There are bigger issues, e.g. fixing the elementary mathematics articles. -- C S (Talk) 04:22, 5 February 2007 (UTC)
I would like to mark Wikipedia:WikiProject_Mathematics/Motivation and Wikipedia:WikiProject_Mathematics/Proofs as historical and direct additional conversation from them to this page instead. I looked at them today and realized that they are still gaining new comments, even though the main project page seems to describe them as historical discusions. Any objections?
Also, the 2006 update is beginning to look a little old in Feb. 2007. I would like to add a 2007 update. What are the main issues that require attention this year? There have been several comments in recent weeks about improving articles on elementary subjects, so that might be a candidate for one. CMummert · talk 13:53, 5 February 2007 (UTC)
I cleaned up the page some. I like to put links at the side so that it is easier to start reading at the top. I don't dislike images per se but I don't see how the images in the newly-added nav box actually helped the page any. And they were too big. CMummert · talk 02:27, 7 February 2007 (UTC)
I've just redone the project page in a two column layout [1]. The Nav box by CMummert caused a few layout problems so I've cut and pasted it for now and and hacked it a bit to make it work. Feel free to revert. -- Salix alba ( talk) 21:18, 7 February 2007 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2007_February_9#Category:Erd.C5.91s_number_1
The discussion has been going on since Feb.9, so speak quickly or you may not get a chance to speak at all. — David Eppstein 07:23, 19 February 2007 (UTC)
I've refrained from these discussions, because I don't have a leaning either way. One thing that disturbs me is that it seems arbitrary to have a category for say, Erdos number 6 (which I think was actually created in between these CFD debates). Is there, for example, a cutoff typically used by social network researchers? -- C S (Talk) 00:41, 21 February 2007 (UTC)
I just rewrote this article; please visit, improve the article, and offer comments. It's a vital article, so I think we should work to improve it to at least good article standard. -- N Shar 20:25, 20 February 2007 (UTC)
The articles Naive set theory and Subset use special math characters that show up as squares in IE 7. There are probably other articles like that. Can someone substitute the TeX math characters? Bubba73 (talk), 05:09, 15 February 2007 (UTC)
long plagued by in WikiPedia. I've tried to find and implement and analyze solutions, but I'm at a loss, so I thought that by sharing in some detail my own experiences / results / efforts that I can help others understand, solve, or become aware of the difficulties. I appreciate the efforts of those who've taken the time to author what appear to be many fine technical pages on WikiPedia, I simply wish that many of them were usefully accessible to me. I have to believe that my IT/PC/Browser setup is representative of or better than that of most casual Wikipedia users, so I imagine that if I (and others here) are having such difficulties that the problem must be widespread and that the solution(s) are poorly known. Yet given the substantial quantity of well authored and similarly encoded technical pages on WikiPedia, it stands to reason that the authors must be aware of the appropriate guidelines, tools, techniques, and encoding / authoring techniques to create their pages, view them correctly, and have some 'quality assurance' expectation that most of their audience should be able to view their works with reasonable success and facility. However, if that's so, I've certainly missed finding "the instructions" as to how to repeat their successes! I've been impatiently waiting for the STIX fonts and FireFox 2.x for nearly a year hoping that maybe it was just a local font and rendering engine deficiency that I could clear up with those tools, but alas it's appearing unlikely to me that it's "simply" explicable and soluble by those two issues. I'm hoping that someone who does have mathematical (et.al.) symbol display mostly or wholly working with their browser can speak up and help answer what configuration(s) are beneficial to achieve that result. Though I've often seen FireFox lauded for superior MathML et. al. display versus IE6, I'm presently (and miserably) having the opposite experience. Using a "full" default install of WinXP, fully updated recent versions of FireFox 2.0.0.1 and MS IE 6.0.x, I'm unable to correctly see a great number of Wikipedia's mathematical symbols under FireFox and I'm missing a lesser but significant number of them on MSIE 6. Following the tips of users' comments here and elsewhere I've tried both FF and IE, I've installed the recommended TeX, MTExtra, Mathematica, MathML, et. al. fonts, I've experimented with changing my default encoding's font and size to several various choices including the installed Lucida Sans Unicode, et. al. I've enabled JavaScript, Cookies, Style sheets, and web site overrides of my chosen default fonts. I've reloaded the pages containing inappropriately rendered characters many times to judge whether anything I've done has made an improvement. ...For example, with this representative page:
I notice that under MSIE, even before installing non-default fonts, automatically loaded many PNG images to display graphic representations of symbols / equations, and by so doing that it got many of them correctly displayed. Whereas on the same system under FireFox, even after correctly installing numerous additional fonts, most missing characters are still displaying TeX-like escape codes in plainly visible "text code" and the rendering is neither invoking "png image loading" to display graphic representations of the symbols/equations (like MSIE is doing), nor is FireFox apparently able to or trying to render the symbols / codes via any of the installed MathMl / Unicode fonts et. al. ...For another example:
In FireFox, the above page correctly shows a couple of dozen of the symbols; most of leftmost ones are all OK; the bottom rows as well as most of the symbols on the right sides of all rows do not display correctly; instead I see what looks like character entity references as one would type them "in code". In MSIE, the page display is just about equally broken as it is under Firefox. It's showing a combination of empty box characters and textual character entity reference codes instead of most of the characters on the right and bottom side of that page. ...I've followed the instructions / suggestions at the below couple of sites to install new Windows fonts and have verified that they're installed and recognized / available to the browser(s) and system in general:
...I'm a developer myself and am not unfamiliar with XML, MathML, fonts, UNICODE, HTML, TeX, et. al., but despite several hours worth of googling, experimentation, and looking for Wikipedia pages on tips for using its Mathematical Notations with browsers, I have yet to find a solution or even consistent diagnosis for this seemingly fundamental and oft encountered problem. Even in the context of this Talk Page there's contradictory information about whether it's the fault of the browser, missing fonts, user configurations of browser fonts, et. al. If it were just a browser issue, I would expect that in either MSIE6 or FFox2 I'd have "mostly successful" experiences; I do not. If it was a missing font issue, I'd expect that having installed all the platform default as well as dozens of commended added technical / symbol / mathematical fonts would have mostly solved the problem; it has not. If it was mostly a local problem, I'd expect that most Wikipedia pages would look uniformly good / bad and act consistently; they do not; the following page displays much more successfully than the second following one:
If it was "mostly just my errant setup" I wouldn't expect to see evidences of other users reporting similar problems, so many contradictory hypotheses about the problems, and I'd have expected to find some kind of FAQ / guide suggesting "the standard configurations" that'd be working for most people who had followed suit. Another example:
...looks mostly bad and unrendered in FireFox 2, whereas on the same system, IE6 renders it mostly fine though it's clearly resorting to WikiPedia server-side provided png graphic renderings of the equations / symbols instead of using any local font. Another example, this looks to be an excellent and useful test matrix of characters / symbols:
On both MSIE6 and FireFox2 (cum MANY additionally installed technical font sets) the page's table is mostly absent correctly rendered symbols. A great number of them (but still perhaps well less than half) are properly rendered in FireFox. A significantly lesser number of them correctly render in MSIE6; mainly the first 22 rows from the top are mostly OK in MSIE, whereas most of the rest of the table is not rendered. If it was a local font issue, I'd expect relatively uniform "pass/fail" between the two simultaneously active browsers. Clearly from the quaternion WikiPedia page there must be, at least in THAT case, a different stylesheet or something Wikipedia is using to tell MSIE to graphically load many of the page's equations, whereas doing something different and more unsuccessful for FireFox. Does ANYONE have these pages mostly / fully working, and, if so, what's the secret, please?!
Overall I'd say that most work very poorly in FireFox, and the ones that work 'well' in MSIE are exclusively ones where, somehow, a graphical versus textual representation is provided 'server side' via Style Sheet or some other mechanism to cause MSIE to not even try to display most of the symbols / equations via local font or rendering technologies. Obviously that .png bitmap graphic approach leaves a lot to be desired (scalability, searchability, accessability, et. al.), but at least it's a visual "on screen" step forward wrt. total gibberish. It must be a choice that's not consistently or fully implemented server side, though, since many of the pages don't try to do that in MSIE and in such cases the result is no better than in FireFox. I haven't extensively experimented with this issue in LINUX, though I've encountered similar problems sufficiently often with FireFox/LINUX to suggest to me that there's nothing uniquely beneficial about LINUX's browser / fonts that makes it work much better than I've experienced under MS Windows. If anything LINUX tends to lack some of the more 'common' TrueType / UNICODE fonts that are 'often' available on MS Windows platforms, so OS platform doesn't seem to be the essential problem. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 216.99.216.242 ( talk) 09:10, 22 February 2007 (UTC).
The article Checking if a coin is fair is up for deletion. People who read this page might want to take a look at it. DavidCBryant 14:59, 15 February 2007 (UTC)
Felix A. Keller and Keller's Expression
Keller keeps adding himself and his unimportant and obvious expression to the page about e. He has done this at least four times since 2004. Now he has promoted himself and his expression to a pair of articles.
See Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Felix A. Keller to discuss.
-- Dominus 16:51, 15 February 2007 (UTC)
Some articles about individual mathematicians who were important in the development of math are rated as top importance, e.g. Leonard Euler and Gottfried Liebniz, or mid importance, e.g. al-Khwarizmi. But shouldn't all of those articles be rated as low importance, because who developed the concepts is not relevant to math, it is historical trivia, wikiproject mathematics should really only concerned with articles that focus on technical aspects of mathematics. Prb4 19:55, 15 February 2007 (UTC)
I find this talk about 'historical trivia' to be actually offensive. What is more, the proposition that mathematics articles should be only about mathematics, narrowly defined, makes no sense in terms of the needs of the general reader; which is where WP aims, in principle. Further, I know from past comments that mathematicians themselves can find historical context helpful. Charles Matthews 19:31, 18 February 2007 (UTC)
I was reviewing Complementary sequences and noticed that the only math-related tag on the article was for the category "Elementary mathematics" (which seems strange, since Golay codes aren't all that elementary). Anyway, that got me curious about other topics associated with error correcting codes. I couldn't find any corresponding topics in the list of mathematics categories. So then I looked at several of the articles in list of algebraic coding theory topics and found that some of these are "math" articles (because they carry category tags like "finite fields") and some of them aren't (because they carry category tags like "error detection and correction").
So now I have a question. What's the preferred procedure in a situation like this? Is it OK to add another category to the list of mathematics categories? What if that category is likely to drag in a bunch of articles that aren't really math articles? Would it be better to add some more specific tag (like "finite fields") to some of the articles (in, say, "error detection and correction") that seem entirely mathematical? Frankly, I'm a little bit confused by the existing hodge-podge of "categories" on Wikipedia! DavidCBryant 17:58, 18 February 2007 (UTC)
I've just done some cleanup on complementary sequences. Using an asterisk for ordinary multiplication, as if we were restricted to plain ASCII, is uncouth; we're not primitive troglodytes. Also, notice this difference:
Michael Hardy 21:13, 19 February 2007 (UTC)
Oleg is mistaken as to which subspecies I represent. I'm a hothead, not a grump. Michael Hardy 20:39, 21 February 2007 (UTC)
Hi all! It would be a nice thing to try to set some rules concerning notation for the probabilty and expectation symbols. In the various probability/statistics articles I've seen at least three notations: , and finally . Personally, I prefer the latter, as it's the accepted notation of the scientific community (sometimes the letters are bold, i.e. P and E but always straight). I have not seen nevertheless any guide that woud explain such a thing. Some article even go as far as to right ... Let's make a public discussion about this resulting in some agreement and guide for wikipedia math community. Amir Aliev 21:05, 21 February 2007 (UTC)
I see that the notations listed above do not include this:
produced in TeX by \Pr .
I come here by way of a mathematician Johann Christoph Wichmannshausen, who is up for deletion and is in the Mathematics Genealogy Project. I am unfamiliar with the importance of this genealogy tree, but I notice that a number of academics provide their "genealogy" on their personal website, so my initial assumption was that people higher up in the tree should be considered notable by default. Is that reasonable? Are there some rules of thumb that can be used to assist in determining WP:N using the "Mathematics Genealogy Project" data? John Vandenberg 00:36, 22 February 2007 (UTC)
While reviewing some of the "new" math articles I ran across this one. Someone hit it with a "cleanup" tag in November, 2005. The tag exhorts editors to "discuss this issue on the talk page". Interestingly, the talk page is still a red link, 15 months after the tag was placed. Apparently the person who tagged the article didn't even care enough to list any specific concerns right then and there, on that talk page. Like a graffiti artist, he tagged the article and moved on.
Last week I reviewed an article consisting of 28 words (plus 107 words of encrustations from various templates affixed by editors who apparently don't think others can judge a page unless there's a neon sign on it). I put a PROD tag on that one, but one of the author's sockpuppets deleted the tag, so I had to learn about the AfD process. Now the article itself (135 words, including the barnacles) is gone, and in its place we have a (roughly) 350-word archived discussion.
I understand why some of this happens. Maybe it's just that I haven't been here long enough to get used to it yet. But it seems that some of these processes aren't really helping to make Wikipedia any better. Can some of these labyrinthine processes be straightened out, or even eliminated, somehow? For example, could the code underlying a "cleanup" tag prevent its insertion while the associated talk page is a red link? If somebody really thinks an article needs cleanup, shouldn't that editor be encouraged to identify a specific problem before waving a big red flag at everybody else? DavidCBryant 16:25, 22 February 2007 (UTC)
Talk:Indian_mathematics#Request_for_comment:_Reliable_Sources_for_Indian_Mathematics Feedback is requested for a problem on the Indian mathematics page, where two users have a disagreement about what constitutes reliable sources for claims in the article. 05:29, 23 February 2007 (UTC)
There needs to be some merging with the articles Faulhaber's formula, Power sum and Power Sum. I don't know that much about mathematics to clean those up. -- Montchav 11:22, 24 February 2007 (UTC)
Many articles about special classes of natural numbers are categorized in Category:Integer sequences, apparently solely because the numbers in the class form a sequence. See for example Practical number, Vampire number, or Square-free integer. I think it would be better to have a Category:Number classes with subcategories Category:Base-dependent number classes and Category:Divisor-based number classes (and, of course, appropriate cross-references between "class" and "sequence" categories). Several articles currently in Category:Number theory would also be moved to the subcategory, leaving only very important or well-known classes such as Prime number or Perfect number as direct members of Category:Number theory.
Any reasons why this would be a bad idea? Any better suggestions for category names? Category names are cumbersome to change, so it would e best to get them right from the start. – Henning Makholm 20:39, 24 February 2007 (UTC)
The article Enneper-Weierstrass parameterization needs some quick cleanup that I am unable to provide. It says:
The formula here needs to be re-typeset, but it also does not appear to be strictly correct: where are the differentials? What are the limits of integration?
-- Dominus 08:09, 27 February 2007 (UTC)