Could someone take a look here? The article is about Serbian mathematician and is on AfD. TIA Pavel Vozenilek 02:32, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
I'm getting very tired of repeatedly reverting Milo Gardner's changes (some under Milogardner ( talk · contribs), some under various 172.x.x.x addresses) to Liber Abaci and Egyptian fraction, which I see as...not wrong exactly, but badly written, off-topic, giving undue weight to fringe points of view, and generally damaging to the usefulness and readability of the articles. And I'm a little worried that in doing so I'm becoming too single-minded myself and may be violating WP:OWN. Someone else want to give me a reality check, are his edits really as revert-worthy as I think they are? As an example, here is the diff from a sequence of 11 of his edits that I reverted with the somewhat abrupt summary "rv incomprehensible damage", which he took exception to. Was I too harsh? — David Eppstein 19:44, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
Wikipedia's mathematicians may wish to give their opinions at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of books in computational geometry. Michael Hardy 01:54, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
Hi, I just nominated Laplace-Runge-Lenz vector to be a Featured article candidate. Hopefully, you all think that the article is excellent and can support it. ;) But if not, please offer constructive criticisms on how it might be improved, which will be much appreciated. Thanks very much for your help! Willow 10:49, 31 December 2006 (UTC)
This section contains the following assertion
I find this dubious, although examination by a model theorist would be appreciated.-- CSTAR 19:41, 3 January 2007 (UTC)
It sounded what like he was saying that a particular mapping is an elementary equivalence embedding.
Your interpretation of this seems to be that for any n-ary relation R if I is an infinites subset of R
holds if and only if
This is certainly true for polynomial relations (e.g. in case there is a polynomial Q for which
But I don't think I understand what you said in general. Take
and
x > 0 is true for an infinite set of integers, but it's certainly not true for all reals. Am I missing something?-- CSTAR 21:51, 3 January 2007 (UTC) PS. Note also that the polynomial for all integers x, but is negative in the open interval ]0,1[. -- CSTAR 22:01, 3 January 2007 (UTC)
Hmm, it seems that trying to reason out the mathematical truth here is likely to confuse everybody, including every future editor who may try to figure out the claim. Let's revert to basic Wikipedia principles: we need to get a source for the claim, and then we can discuss whether the article accurately represents the claim made in the source. In the absence of sources, remove the claim. Henning Makholm 23:22, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
I've just finished adding quite a bit of new material to this article, which had been marked as a "stub". I would appreciate some feedback, either here or on my talk page. Is the article too long? Or just about right? I think this particular topic should be of some interest to the general reader, so I tried to keep it all as non-technical as I could. Does that approach make sense? Etc.
I could also use some advice on one thing. Rgdboer had raised a question about other meanings of the phrase "complex plane" on the article's talk page. So I added a section Complex plane#Other meanings of "complex plane" to discuss, briefly, the concepts of split-complex numbers, dual numbers, and the Cartesian product C×C. I'd like to write a little bit more for that section, but I'm not sure I understand these three objects well enough to figure out exactly what to say.
The first two "other complex planes" seem as if they'd hardly work well for analysis, except for some rather specialized applications in physics. And the two-dimensional vector space C×C is sort of tricky as well – right off the top of my head, I'm not even sure how to define a useful norm for that space. So I could use some help figuring out what else to say in that section of the article, if anybody here is willing to help.
Thanks! DavidCBryant 20:05, 6 January 2007 (UTC)
I used to be able to reach the article Methods of computing square roots by going through the category Category:Root-finding algorithms. However, now when I look in that category, the article does not appear on my screen. None the less, the file has not been edited to remove it from the category. Nor has the category been changed in a way that would have that effect. Could this be a new bug in the software for displaying the contents of a category? Help! JRSpriggs 09:25, 7 January 2007 (UTC)
Monty Hall problem 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. Gzkn 10:57, 7 January 2007 (UTC)
I have seen a few references to a proof by this paper. It is listed in Québec Science's (ISSN 0021-6127) February 2006 special issue as one of the 10 top scientific breakouts made by Quebec scientists in 2006. Can somebody more knowledgeable than myself in maths look into that? Circeus 18:17, 10 January 2007 (UTC)
I was looking at the list of missing math articles at Wikipedia:Missing science topics/Maths1 and considering writing up some stubs (or perhaps a bit more) for a few topics, but it seems to me that many of these probably aren't sufficiently notable. For example, 0-free has an article on mathworld at Zerofree, and there seem to be one or two articles on it plus a sequence at the OEIS (which means nothing, really), but that probably doesn't satisfy the notability criteria. In fact, this is probably true of most of the terms in that list (even ignoring the ones that should probably be sections in other articles).
Am I right about this? Should I remove the links for topics that don't seem to be notable? Your opinions will be appreciated. -- Sopoforic 02:39, 11 January 2007 (UTC)
It may have been mentioned above, but in case it hasn't, the PlanetMath exchange project links are categorized. See Wikipedia:WikiProject_Mathematics/PlanetMath_Exchange if you wanna help out. Lunch 17:46, 12 January 2007 (UTC)
Hello. I have put Florentin Smarandache on articles for deletion. See: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Florentin Smarandache. Please vote. Wile E. Heresiarch 06:18, 14 January 2007 (UTC)
If anyone is interested, I could use a hand at exponentiation to get the content up to par and resist the efforts of a certain editor to add nonstandard definitions for complex exponentials, roots of unity, etc. CMummert · talk 15:04, 14 January 2007 (UTC)
I can't find a topic for an important branch of lower mathematics: that which is often called commercial math or business math. It is a practical subject, emphasizing simple arithmetic, percentages, and fractions, but also covering things such as banking transactions (writing checks, for example), purchase orders and invoices, consumer and business loans, etc. All of these things have a mathematical component, or at least a computational one, and they are very widely taught in commercial courses around the world. Does this subject have an article? If not, should it? What should it be called? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Lou Sander ( talk • contribs) 00:30, 14 January 2007 (UTC).
Oops! When I copied this over from elsewhere, I didn't want to include the out-of-date signature. Then I didn't put in a new one. (Another reason ALWAYS to preview.) Sorry. Lou Sander 00:33, 14 January 2007 (UTC)
I came across this math stub and if anyone at the wikiproject would be interested in cleaning it up a bit. Or I can AFD it if it's not a real thing. Static Universe 19:30, 14 January 2007 (UTC)
The history in the article on mathematical analysis sounds suspect to me. At least it is very different then what I have been taught. I have tried bringing this up on the discussion page, but no were provided. Is anyone, or does anyone know a scholar in the history of mathematics who might take a look at it. I am reluctant to simply remove what is there because I myself can not say for wrong. Thenub314 20:58, 9 January 2007 (UTC)
This article seems problematic to me. It might be in violation of the rule against how-tos. AfD, or can it be improved, or merged somewhere? -- Trovatore 06:25, 13 January 2007 (UTC)
I don't think
computing π needs to be a how-to. It could include how-to stuff but also theretical stuff about computation of π. For example, if there's a theorem that says no algorithm can comute the π to within ε faster than thus-and-so, it could be included.
I think it's a worthy topic, and although the present form of the article is clumsy, it could be brought up to reasonable standards.
I've fixed the title; it's now the Greek letter and not the upper-case "P".
Michael Hardy 02:22, 15 January 2007 (UTC)
The idea was not to make a how to(I'm sorry if it seems that way), it was to organise all the forumlas on the main Pi page . As it is, they are spread through-out the page. I find the "Calculating pi" section to be much cleaner now. The formulae section is large and alot to sift through right now. In my opinion the most important sections (Geometry, Physics,...) should be preserved and the rest (Analysis, Miscellaneous formulæ, ...) moved to appropriate pages ( computing π, List_of_formulae_involving_π). Deathbob 02:15, 16 January 2007 (UTC)
I put Smarandache-Wellin number up for deletion; AfD discussion is here. — David Eppstein 20:59, 15 January 2007 (UTC)
Could someone have a look at this? The article's derived from a popularization, and I'm not even sure this is an exact solution to GR or a piece of topology. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 23:11, 17 January 2007 (UTC)
Margin of error 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. Kaldari 06:16, 18 January 2007 (UTC)
Yesterday I was entering a formula that involved the expression z to the (2 to the n) power. I got a very odd result ... the <math> processor did not return an error (big red "failed to parse"), but the graphics engine that converts <math> to png images wouldn't work, or something, so that all I saw on a "show preview" was the raw TeX code, without the <math></math> tags around it. Oh – it also knocked the graphics interface out of commission entirely, not just on the line where I had the stacked superscripts, but throughout the rest of the page, as well. (I was using Firefox under Linux when this happened).
I finally figured out what the problem was by firing up my other browser, Konqueror, which rendered the other formulas OK, but failed on the one line that included z to the (2 to the n) power. That's why I suspect the graphics engine (it sort of gave up under Firefox, but Konqueror got a better result).
Anyway, I have a few questions. Is there a better place to report this problem? Some sort of technical support group, or something? And is there a central repository of information about bugs in wiki-TeX, where newcomers can learn about this sort of thing without having to hack through it on their own? Thanks! DavidCBryant 15:01, 18 January 2007 (UTC)
The page Opposite (mathematics) might need some attention from any mathematicians. It was found in Special:Ancientpages, and could probably be turned into a redirect, or even deleted. -- Montchav 16:53, 8 January 2007 (UTC)
I've nominated Hectagon, Pentacontagon, and Tetracontagon for deletion since Decemyriagon was deleted. You can find the discussion here. -- Sopoforic 02:25, 22 January 2007 (UTC)
It looks like Ramanujan summation and Ramanujan's sum are about the same, or very closely related, topics. Should they be merged? -- The Anome 12:55, 22 January 2007 (UTC)
I don't see how you could possibly merge them; the topics are not remotely similar. Michael Hardy 22:44, 23 January 2007 (UTC)
I am having an argument with an anon at Triangle about what should be included in that article and what not. Comments would be welcome at Talk:Triangle#What should be included. Oleg Alexandrov ( talk) 03:17, 24 January 2007 (UTC)
The article Set is up for nomination at the Article Improvement Drive. It's such a core topic in Mathematics that I'm surprised it's not at GA status already. CloudNine 14:46, 21 January 2007 (UTC)
I'm working on a couple of articles for mathematical problems, and I'd like some opinions on a couple of issues. First, I'm not quite sure what I should do when stating the problems. They're old enough that I can quote the original statement of the problem. Assuming that the original statement is clear enough, would it be a good idea to quote it directly, rather than trying to come up with my own wording? Second, regarding solutions: in Kirkman's schoolgirl problem, I've got a copy of an arrangement that solves the problem. Would the article benefit from listing this solution? It doesn't really add anything, from a mathematical standpoint (except proving that there is a solution, I guess), but perhaps a reader would be interested in it. I do intend to add more information to it once I get a few things via ILL, but should I add the solution in the meantime? -- Sopoforic 23:37, 23 January 2007 (UTC)
I translated Halley's method from French to English. My source was fr:Itération de Halley. So I just informally put a link to it in the article, saying "*[[:fr:Itération de Halley]], French original". The original author Lachaume ( talk · contribs), asked me (at User talk:JRSpriggs#Halley's method) whether I should not be using a template. Is there a template for giving credit to sources on other Wikipedias? JRSpriggs 07:00, 25 January 2007 (UTC)
I didn't know of any template, but I think probably there should be a little more detail than just an interwiki link. At Prime minister of Italy I put a note in the References section pointing to the version I translated and stating the date it was retrieved. -- Trovatore 07:54, 25 January 2007 (UTC)
Uncle G 12:02, 25 January 2007 (UTC)
I think we really need some cleanup to be done on our articles on elementary mathematics. We put so much work into the articles on more obscure areas of mathematics, leaving our basic articles, the ones which are probably most viewed, neglected. Just by going to five random articles on elementary topics, I've basically either redone the opening paragraph or done serious work to all of them, as they were incomplete, incoherent, or misleading (see [1], [2], [3], [4], and [5]). — Mets501 ( talk) 03:08, 25 January 2007 (UTC)
There is now a "series" field in the {{ cite book}} template, as the following example illustrates. CMummert · talk 03:52, 26 January 2007 (UTC)
Mumford, David (1999). The Red Book of Varieties and Schemes. Lecture Notes in Mathematics 1358. Springer-Verlag. doi: 10.1007/b62130. ISBN 354063293X.
{{cite book | last = Mumford | first = David | authorlink = David Mumford | title = The Red Book of Varieties and Schemes | publisher = [[Springer-Verlag]] | series = Lecture Notes in Mathematics 1358 | year = 1999 | doi = 10.1007/b62130 | isbn = 354063293X }}
Due to the recent banning of Dr. Piotr Blass, I have put his primary contribution to mathematics, the Zariski surface up for deletion as its sources are questionable, and the contributions made by Dr. Blass to the page also have some issues. Seeing as barely anyone knows what a Zariski surface is, I am bringing it to attention here to try and see what should be done.— Ryūlóng ( 竜龍) 01:51, 18 January 2007 (UTC)
Piotr Blass does not appear to be the initial auther of the article, from the edit history. Richard Borcherds does so appear. Michael Hardy 01:05, 21 January 2007 (UTC)
I noticed something odd with the categories system. Take for example the article Maximum modulus principle. It is categorized in Category:Complex analysis as expected. However, if you actually visit that category, the article is just not there. Same for Argument principle, Antiderivative (complex analysis), etc., which are categorized in Category:Complex analysis but don't show up in the category itself. Anybody else noticing the same thing? Oleg Alexandrov ( talk) 05:49, 26 January 2007 (UTC)
I've seen the same problem for the last week or so with Category:Graph products. It's only showing two articles, but there are several others with that category that are not shown. — David Eppstein 06:04, 26 January 2007 (UTC)
The whole category system is vastly inferior in virtually all respects to the system of topics lists. Michael Hardy 21:07, 26 January 2007 (UTC)
Maybe some of the really elementary articles should be on the watchlists of more mathematicians. Some idiot added to product rule a proposed "alternate proof". Those parts of the "alternate proof" that were valid were no different from the proof that was already there. But after saying f(x) = u(x)v(x) the "alternate proof" section said:
and went on to rely substantially on that "hypothesis". I deleted it, and rebuked its author rather harshly---I imagine someone's going to accuse me of violating the "assume good faith" rule, but I think anyone who adds what purports to be a mathematical proof to an article should understand that which is secondary-school pupils are expected to learn about what proofs are. Michael Hardy 21:07, 26 January 2007 (UTC)
In logarithm, I wrote:
At talk:logarithm someone is disputing this and thinks my impression of what a logarithmic function is must have come from one book which I failed to identify. Perhaps others here can talk some sense into him (or into me, if need be). Michael Hardy 23:55, 26 January 2007 (UTC)
While updating User:Mathbot/List of mathematical redlinks, I made a list of redlinks which show up more than once in math articles. It is available at User:Mathbot/Most wanted redlinks (sorted by number of times each link occurs). Some of those might be worth filling in. Oleg Alexandrov ( talk) 00:17, 28 January 2007 (UTC)
Formerly, Quadratic redirected to quadratic equation.
This was inappropriate in many of the contexts that linked to it. For example, Gyro monorail has "the stability quartic must be factorised into a pair of quadratic terms"; John Muth contains "Herb Simon had shown that with quadratic costs...", and algebraic function has "of a parabola, a quadratic algebraic function in x". The quadratic equation is not relevant to any of these.
I have made a disambiguation page at quadratic. But because there are many different, albeit related uses of "quadratic", it would probably be better if the links to the quadratic article were changed to link to more specific meanings: quadratic function, quadratic polynomial, or whatever.
-- Dominus 17:38, 28 January 2007 (UTC)
Could someone take a look here? The article is about Serbian mathematician and is on AfD. TIA Pavel Vozenilek 02:32, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
I'm getting very tired of repeatedly reverting Milo Gardner's changes (some under Milogardner ( talk · contribs), some under various 172.x.x.x addresses) to Liber Abaci and Egyptian fraction, which I see as...not wrong exactly, but badly written, off-topic, giving undue weight to fringe points of view, and generally damaging to the usefulness and readability of the articles. And I'm a little worried that in doing so I'm becoming too single-minded myself and may be violating WP:OWN. Someone else want to give me a reality check, are his edits really as revert-worthy as I think they are? As an example, here is the diff from a sequence of 11 of his edits that I reverted with the somewhat abrupt summary "rv incomprehensible damage", which he took exception to. Was I too harsh? — David Eppstein 19:44, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
Wikipedia's mathematicians may wish to give their opinions at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of books in computational geometry. Michael Hardy 01:54, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
Hi, I just nominated Laplace-Runge-Lenz vector to be a Featured article candidate. Hopefully, you all think that the article is excellent and can support it. ;) But if not, please offer constructive criticisms on how it might be improved, which will be much appreciated. Thanks very much for your help! Willow 10:49, 31 December 2006 (UTC)
This section contains the following assertion
I find this dubious, although examination by a model theorist would be appreciated.-- CSTAR 19:41, 3 January 2007 (UTC)
It sounded what like he was saying that a particular mapping is an elementary equivalence embedding.
Your interpretation of this seems to be that for any n-ary relation R if I is an infinites subset of R
holds if and only if
This is certainly true for polynomial relations (e.g. in case there is a polynomial Q for which
But I don't think I understand what you said in general. Take
and
x > 0 is true for an infinite set of integers, but it's certainly not true for all reals. Am I missing something?-- CSTAR 21:51, 3 January 2007 (UTC) PS. Note also that the polynomial for all integers x, but is negative in the open interval ]0,1[. -- CSTAR 22:01, 3 January 2007 (UTC)
Hmm, it seems that trying to reason out the mathematical truth here is likely to confuse everybody, including every future editor who may try to figure out the claim. Let's revert to basic Wikipedia principles: we need to get a source for the claim, and then we can discuss whether the article accurately represents the claim made in the source. In the absence of sources, remove the claim. Henning Makholm 23:22, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
I've just finished adding quite a bit of new material to this article, which had been marked as a "stub". I would appreciate some feedback, either here or on my talk page. Is the article too long? Or just about right? I think this particular topic should be of some interest to the general reader, so I tried to keep it all as non-technical as I could. Does that approach make sense? Etc.
I could also use some advice on one thing. Rgdboer had raised a question about other meanings of the phrase "complex plane" on the article's talk page. So I added a section Complex plane#Other meanings of "complex plane" to discuss, briefly, the concepts of split-complex numbers, dual numbers, and the Cartesian product C×C. I'd like to write a little bit more for that section, but I'm not sure I understand these three objects well enough to figure out exactly what to say.
The first two "other complex planes" seem as if they'd hardly work well for analysis, except for some rather specialized applications in physics. And the two-dimensional vector space C×C is sort of tricky as well – right off the top of my head, I'm not even sure how to define a useful norm for that space. So I could use some help figuring out what else to say in that section of the article, if anybody here is willing to help.
Thanks! DavidCBryant 20:05, 6 January 2007 (UTC)
I used to be able to reach the article Methods of computing square roots by going through the category Category:Root-finding algorithms. However, now when I look in that category, the article does not appear on my screen. None the less, the file has not been edited to remove it from the category. Nor has the category been changed in a way that would have that effect. Could this be a new bug in the software for displaying the contents of a category? Help! JRSpriggs 09:25, 7 January 2007 (UTC)
Monty Hall problem 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. Gzkn 10:57, 7 January 2007 (UTC)
I have seen a few references to a proof by this paper. It is listed in Québec Science's (ISSN 0021-6127) February 2006 special issue as one of the 10 top scientific breakouts made by Quebec scientists in 2006. Can somebody more knowledgeable than myself in maths look into that? Circeus 18:17, 10 January 2007 (UTC)
I was looking at the list of missing math articles at Wikipedia:Missing science topics/Maths1 and considering writing up some stubs (or perhaps a bit more) for a few topics, but it seems to me that many of these probably aren't sufficiently notable. For example, 0-free has an article on mathworld at Zerofree, and there seem to be one or two articles on it plus a sequence at the OEIS (which means nothing, really), but that probably doesn't satisfy the notability criteria. In fact, this is probably true of most of the terms in that list (even ignoring the ones that should probably be sections in other articles).
Am I right about this? Should I remove the links for topics that don't seem to be notable? Your opinions will be appreciated. -- Sopoforic 02:39, 11 January 2007 (UTC)
It may have been mentioned above, but in case it hasn't, the PlanetMath exchange project links are categorized. See Wikipedia:WikiProject_Mathematics/PlanetMath_Exchange if you wanna help out. Lunch 17:46, 12 January 2007 (UTC)
Hello. I have put Florentin Smarandache on articles for deletion. See: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Florentin Smarandache. Please vote. Wile E. Heresiarch 06:18, 14 January 2007 (UTC)
If anyone is interested, I could use a hand at exponentiation to get the content up to par and resist the efforts of a certain editor to add nonstandard definitions for complex exponentials, roots of unity, etc. CMummert · talk 15:04, 14 January 2007 (UTC)
I can't find a topic for an important branch of lower mathematics: that which is often called commercial math or business math. It is a practical subject, emphasizing simple arithmetic, percentages, and fractions, but also covering things such as banking transactions (writing checks, for example), purchase orders and invoices, consumer and business loans, etc. All of these things have a mathematical component, or at least a computational one, and they are very widely taught in commercial courses around the world. Does this subject have an article? If not, should it? What should it be called? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Lou Sander ( talk • contribs) 00:30, 14 January 2007 (UTC).
Oops! When I copied this over from elsewhere, I didn't want to include the out-of-date signature. Then I didn't put in a new one. (Another reason ALWAYS to preview.) Sorry. Lou Sander 00:33, 14 January 2007 (UTC)
I came across this math stub and if anyone at the wikiproject would be interested in cleaning it up a bit. Or I can AFD it if it's not a real thing. Static Universe 19:30, 14 January 2007 (UTC)
The history in the article on mathematical analysis sounds suspect to me. At least it is very different then what I have been taught. I have tried bringing this up on the discussion page, but no were provided. Is anyone, or does anyone know a scholar in the history of mathematics who might take a look at it. I am reluctant to simply remove what is there because I myself can not say for wrong. Thenub314 20:58, 9 January 2007 (UTC)
This article seems problematic to me. It might be in violation of the rule against how-tos. AfD, or can it be improved, or merged somewhere? -- Trovatore 06:25, 13 January 2007 (UTC)
I don't think
computing π needs to be a how-to. It could include how-to stuff but also theretical stuff about computation of π. For example, if there's a theorem that says no algorithm can comute the π to within ε faster than thus-and-so, it could be included.
I think it's a worthy topic, and although the present form of the article is clumsy, it could be brought up to reasonable standards.
I've fixed the title; it's now the Greek letter and not the upper-case "P".
Michael Hardy 02:22, 15 January 2007 (UTC)
The idea was not to make a how to(I'm sorry if it seems that way), it was to organise all the forumlas on the main Pi page . As it is, they are spread through-out the page. I find the "Calculating pi" section to be much cleaner now. The formulae section is large and alot to sift through right now. In my opinion the most important sections (Geometry, Physics,...) should be preserved and the rest (Analysis, Miscellaneous formulæ, ...) moved to appropriate pages ( computing π, List_of_formulae_involving_π). Deathbob 02:15, 16 January 2007 (UTC)
I put Smarandache-Wellin number up for deletion; AfD discussion is here. — David Eppstein 20:59, 15 January 2007 (UTC)
Could someone have a look at this? The article's derived from a popularization, and I'm not even sure this is an exact solution to GR or a piece of topology. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 23:11, 17 January 2007 (UTC)
Margin of error 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. Kaldari 06:16, 18 January 2007 (UTC)
Yesterday I was entering a formula that involved the expression z to the (2 to the n) power. I got a very odd result ... the <math> processor did not return an error (big red "failed to parse"), but the graphics engine that converts <math> to png images wouldn't work, or something, so that all I saw on a "show preview" was the raw TeX code, without the <math></math> tags around it. Oh – it also knocked the graphics interface out of commission entirely, not just on the line where I had the stacked superscripts, but throughout the rest of the page, as well. (I was using Firefox under Linux when this happened).
I finally figured out what the problem was by firing up my other browser, Konqueror, which rendered the other formulas OK, but failed on the one line that included z to the (2 to the n) power. That's why I suspect the graphics engine (it sort of gave up under Firefox, but Konqueror got a better result).
Anyway, I have a few questions. Is there a better place to report this problem? Some sort of technical support group, or something? And is there a central repository of information about bugs in wiki-TeX, where newcomers can learn about this sort of thing without having to hack through it on their own? Thanks! DavidCBryant 15:01, 18 January 2007 (UTC)
The page Opposite (mathematics) might need some attention from any mathematicians. It was found in Special:Ancientpages, and could probably be turned into a redirect, or even deleted. -- Montchav 16:53, 8 January 2007 (UTC)
I've nominated Hectagon, Pentacontagon, and Tetracontagon for deletion since Decemyriagon was deleted. You can find the discussion here. -- Sopoforic 02:25, 22 January 2007 (UTC)
It looks like Ramanujan summation and Ramanujan's sum are about the same, or very closely related, topics. Should they be merged? -- The Anome 12:55, 22 January 2007 (UTC)
I don't see how you could possibly merge them; the topics are not remotely similar. Michael Hardy 22:44, 23 January 2007 (UTC)
I am having an argument with an anon at Triangle about what should be included in that article and what not. Comments would be welcome at Talk:Triangle#What should be included. Oleg Alexandrov ( talk) 03:17, 24 January 2007 (UTC)
The article Set is up for nomination at the Article Improvement Drive. It's such a core topic in Mathematics that I'm surprised it's not at GA status already. CloudNine 14:46, 21 January 2007 (UTC)
I'm working on a couple of articles for mathematical problems, and I'd like some opinions on a couple of issues. First, I'm not quite sure what I should do when stating the problems. They're old enough that I can quote the original statement of the problem. Assuming that the original statement is clear enough, would it be a good idea to quote it directly, rather than trying to come up with my own wording? Second, regarding solutions: in Kirkman's schoolgirl problem, I've got a copy of an arrangement that solves the problem. Would the article benefit from listing this solution? It doesn't really add anything, from a mathematical standpoint (except proving that there is a solution, I guess), but perhaps a reader would be interested in it. I do intend to add more information to it once I get a few things via ILL, but should I add the solution in the meantime? -- Sopoforic 23:37, 23 January 2007 (UTC)
I translated Halley's method from French to English. My source was fr:Itération de Halley. So I just informally put a link to it in the article, saying "*[[:fr:Itération de Halley]], French original". The original author Lachaume ( talk · contribs), asked me (at User talk:JRSpriggs#Halley's method) whether I should not be using a template. Is there a template for giving credit to sources on other Wikipedias? JRSpriggs 07:00, 25 January 2007 (UTC)
I didn't know of any template, but I think probably there should be a little more detail than just an interwiki link. At Prime minister of Italy I put a note in the References section pointing to the version I translated and stating the date it was retrieved. -- Trovatore 07:54, 25 January 2007 (UTC)
Uncle G 12:02, 25 January 2007 (UTC)
I think we really need some cleanup to be done on our articles on elementary mathematics. We put so much work into the articles on more obscure areas of mathematics, leaving our basic articles, the ones which are probably most viewed, neglected. Just by going to five random articles on elementary topics, I've basically either redone the opening paragraph or done serious work to all of them, as they were incomplete, incoherent, or misleading (see [1], [2], [3], [4], and [5]). — Mets501 ( talk) 03:08, 25 January 2007 (UTC)
There is now a "series" field in the {{ cite book}} template, as the following example illustrates. CMummert · talk 03:52, 26 January 2007 (UTC)
Mumford, David (1999). The Red Book of Varieties and Schemes. Lecture Notes in Mathematics 1358. Springer-Verlag. doi: 10.1007/b62130. ISBN 354063293X.
{{cite book | last = Mumford | first = David | authorlink = David Mumford | title = The Red Book of Varieties and Schemes | publisher = [[Springer-Verlag]] | series = Lecture Notes in Mathematics 1358 | year = 1999 | doi = 10.1007/b62130 | isbn = 354063293X }}
Due to the recent banning of Dr. Piotr Blass, I have put his primary contribution to mathematics, the Zariski surface up for deletion as its sources are questionable, and the contributions made by Dr. Blass to the page also have some issues. Seeing as barely anyone knows what a Zariski surface is, I am bringing it to attention here to try and see what should be done.— Ryūlóng ( 竜龍) 01:51, 18 January 2007 (UTC)
Piotr Blass does not appear to be the initial auther of the article, from the edit history. Richard Borcherds does so appear. Michael Hardy 01:05, 21 January 2007 (UTC)
I noticed something odd with the categories system. Take for example the article Maximum modulus principle. It is categorized in Category:Complex analysis as expected. However, if you actually visit that category, the article is just not there. Same for Argument principle, Antiderivative (complex analysis), etc., which are categorized in Category:Complex analysis but don't show up in the category itself. Anybody else noticing the same thing? Oleg Alexandrov ( talk) 05:49, 26 January 2007 (UTC)
I've seen the same problem for the last week or so with Category:Graph products. It's only showing two articles, but there are several others with that category that are not shown. — David Eppstein 06:04, 26 January 2007 (UTC)
The whole category system is vastly inferior in virtually all respects to the system of topics lists. Michael Hardy 21:07, 26 January 2007 (UTC)
Maybe some of the really elementary articles should be on the watchlists of more mathematicians. Some idiot added to product rule a proposed "alternate proof". Those parts of the "alternate proof" that were valid were no different from the proof that was already there. But after saying f(x) = u(x)v(x) the "alternate proof" section said:
and went on to rely substantially on that "hypothesis". I deleted it, and rebuked its author rather harshly---I imagine someone's going to accuse me of violating the "assume good faith" rule, but I think anyone who adds what purports to be a mathematical proof to an article should understand that which is secondary-school pupils are expected to learn about what proofs are. Michael Hardy 21:07, 26 January 2007 (UTC)
In logarithm, I wrote:
At talk:logarithm someone is disputing this and thinks my impression of what a logarithmic function is must have come from one book which I failed to identify. Perhaps others here can talk some sense into him (or into me, if need be). Michael Hardy 23:55, 26 January 2007 (UTC)
While updating User:Mathbot/List of mathematical redlinks, I made a list of redlinks which show up more than once in math articles. It is available at User:Mathbot/Most wanted redlinks (sorted by number of times each link occurs). Some of those might be worth filling in. Oleg Alexandrov ( talk) 00:17, 28 January 2007 (UTC)
Formerly, Quadratic redirected to quadratic equation.
This was inappropriate in many of the contexts that linked to it. For example, Gyro monorail has "the stability quartic must be factorised into a pair of quadratic terms"; John Muth contains "Herb Simon had shown that with quadratic costs...", and algebraic function has "of a parabola, a quadratic algebraic function in x". The quadratic equation is not relevant to any of these.
I have made a disambiguation page at quadratic. But because there are many different, albeit related uses of "quadratic", it would probably be better if the links to the quadratic article were changed to link to more specific meanings: quadratic function, quadratic polynomial, or whatever.
-- Dominus 17:38, 28 January 2007 (UTC)