Sorry to bring this up again, but two of us disagree rather strongly on whether one should define first the neighbourhood of a point, or the neighbourhood of a set, with no compromise in sight.
While the issue may be trivial, the concept of neighbourhood is important enough in mathematics, that perhaps more people should get involved. The discussion is at Talk:Neighbourhood (mathematics)#Which comes first: neighborhood of a point or of a set?. Thanks. Oleg Alexandrov ( talk) 01:46, 1 June 2007 (UTC)
Why does Template talk:Numerical algorithms exist when its template does not? JRSpriggs 08:18, 1 June 2007 (UTC)
I have been going through the Z articles, and I have found quite a few stubs in the zero section, Zero_ideal, Zero_set, Zero_tensor, Zerosumfree_monoid, Zero_matrix, Zero_module, Zero_order. Is there any way we can unify these articles in a meaningful way. As it stands I don't see these articles growing all that much. Perhaps we could create something along the lines of the List of prime numbers article. Maybe "List of mathematics terms that include zero".-- Cronholm144 05:50, 2 June 2007 (UTC)
I will take the silence as a "go for it C" and create something in my sandbox :) -- Cronholm144 18:15, 2 June 2007 (UTC)
Done List_of_zero_terms with redirects in place. I didn't redirect Zero matirx, just relisted it. Now all of the horribly weak stubs can grow together in one place. Feel free to move the page to a better name, just be sure to warn me so I can reset the redirects to the appropriate locations-- Cronholm144 18:46, 2 June 2007 (UTC)
It often happens to me that I want to include a reference to, say, Hartshorne's book "Algebraic Geometry". It is somewhat annoying to always look for it at some page where the reference already is. Is this only a problem / issue of mine or do also other people wish there would be a BibTex-like system on Wikipedia? In the simplest case it would be a page including references to (at least) major math books. It might look like
Robin Hartshorne (1997). Algebraic Geometry. Springer-Verlag. ISBN 0-387-90244-9. | {{cite book | author = [[Robin Hartshorne]] | year = 1997 | title = [[Hartshorne%27s_Algebraic_Geometry|Algebraic Geometry]] | publisher = [[Springer Science+Business Media|Springer-Verlag]] | id = ISBN 0-387-90244-9 }} |
---|
Jakob.scholbach 17:35, 30 May 2007 (UTC)
PS. Of course, much more helpful would be a mechanism generating the above reference by something like {{cite book | id = Hartshorne_AG }} . Jakob.scholbach 17:47, 30 May 2007 (UTC)
{{cite book |author=David Eugene Smith, Yoshio Mikami, |title=History of Japanese Mathematics |publisher=Open Court Publishing Co ,U.S |location= |year= |pages= |isbn=0-875-48170-1 |oclc= |doi= }}
{{
cite book}}
: CS1 maint: extra punctuation (
link) CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (
link){{citation | last1=Smith | first1=David Eugene | author1-link=David Eugene Smith | last2=Mikami | first2=Yoshio | pages=pp. 130–132 | title=A history of Japanese mathematics | place=Chicago | publisher=[[Open Court Publishing Company|Open Court Publishing]] | year=1914 | ISBN=978-0-87548-170-8 | url=http://www.archive.org/details/historyofjapanes00smituoft }}
{{
citation}}
: |pages=
has extra text (
help){{citation | last =Laczkovich | first =Miklós | author-link =Miklós Laczkovich | title =Equidecomposability and discrepancy: A solution to Tarski's circle squaring problem | journal =Journal für die reine und angewandte Mathematik ([[Crelle's Journal|Crelle’s Journal]]) | volume =404 | pages =77–117 | year =1990 | url= http://dz-srv1.sub.uni-goettingen.de/sub/digbib/loader?ht=VIEW&did=D262326 | id ={{ISSN|0075-4102}}<!--MR 91b:51034--> }}
So, I understand that there is some interest in a Wikiproject-wide list of references. I'm willing to put some effort into it, but I don't know the inner mechanisms of Wikipedia. Is it possible to create and maintain etc. a database inside Wikipedia? Otherwise I would volunteer to set up some reference database outside WP which can be edited by everybody. A mere list of references is a nice thing, but is still kind of a hassle to manually look for the item one needs, especially when the lists grows bigger and bigger as everybody adds his favourite references. It is probably also unefficient because everytime the whole list has to be saved when someone adds a new entry. The advantage, pointed out by KMSrq, of including an URL is definitely something we should not miss, because giving an URL is (at least for me personally) practically more important than the volume no. and the journal's name, at least until one is actually writing a paper and needs the paper-reference, but then good old BibTex does the job anyway. Besides the URL of the paper or book (if there is one) it would also be nice to allow the URL of a review, for example like on MathScinet. Concerning Joseph's remarks: different editions of a book are no particular problem, I guess, they should just be listed as different database entries. Whether to give a wikilink to the author's page or not might be decided by the user by checking or unchecking some checkbox "wikilink the author(s)" etc. Jakob.scholbach 17:30, 3 June 2007 (UTC)
Hey everyone, It's June first and you know what that means... A new Mathematics Collaboration of the Month! The victor, by an overwhelming margin of 3 votes, is Integral. Everyone here should be able to contribute on this one (no excuses this time!). With a little polish and elbow grease, this article will be at A class in no time at all. See you there-- Cronholm144 06:21, 1 June 2007 (UTC)
There is a proposed policy at Wikipedia:Flagged revisions about stable versions. The idea is that some pages would be "flagged" and then the flagged version would be shown by default to users who aren't logged in. This has obvious implications for vandalism fighting and quality control.
This has been in development for years, but now the code is apparently finished modulo final approval. Although it is still not certain that flagged versions will be enabled on en.wikipedia.org, the proposal is an attempt to determine some community consensus on the issue. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 17:40, 3 June 2007 (UTC)
User:Geometry guy is perhaps the most prolific assigner of "ratings" on math article talk pages. He ranke deformation theory as of "mid" importance and degrees of freedom (statistics) as low.
Is there some standard according to which that is not idiotic? (I'd have said "low" for the former and "high" for the latter. And "high" for any other topic that, like this one, is covered every statistics course from kindergarten through Ph.D.-level.)
Has anyone attempted to codify standards for these ratings? Michael Hardy 22:35, 1 June 2007 (UTC)
OK, at Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Wikipedia 1.0/Assessment it says "low" means "Subject is peripheral knowledge, possibly trivial." By that standard, ranking degrees of freedom (statistics) as "low" is profoundly illiterate. Nothing kinder can be said about it. Michael Hardy 22:38, 1 June 2007 (UTC)
Hello all, thank you for your comments. I am attempting to do two things simultaneously right now. The first is to make up for the patchy coverage of the maths rating scheme by attaching maths ratings to approximately 1/3 of the 15000 articles in the List of mathematics articles. The second is to try and refine and understand what importance ratings are for, and how to assess them. These two processes feed into each other.
Importance ratings are always going to be subjective and will fluctuate, but the goal of the second task is to reduce this subjectivity and fluctuation. In the meantime, however, the first task is flawed in many ways: first, I (and others who join me in this effort) will make subjective judgements; second, we will make mistakes; third, the criteria on which these judgements are made have not yet been fully elucidated. I can only ask others to have patience, and also bear in mind that this is a wiki: anyone can fix or update a maths rating. I am saddened by how the harder I work, the more complaints I receive on my talk page. No one needs to complain: just fix the rating.
Importance seems to cause more trouble than anything else. I am beginning to wonder if it should be renamed "priority" (which is the term used by some other WikiProjects): it is not about how important a subject is, but how high a priority it is for us to have a good article on the subject (in the context of related articles.) This does not mean that there will be fewer mistakes, only (I hope) that editors will be less upset by them. Anyway, I think that the word "priority" should at least be mentioned much more in our assessment pages. Recent experiences only serve to reinforce my opinion that the terms "peripheral" and "trivial" should be eliminated as soon as possible from the summary of the low-priority rating. (These words are not actually part of the WP 1.0 scheme, which uses the term "specialist" instead, although this is problematic as well.) I will try to fix this tomorrow.
In the meantime, bear in mind that there is a lower importance rating than "low": unrated. If you know an article which has not been rated which you think should be, please rate it. So far, I have got as far as Dei, so if your favourite article comes before this in the alphabet, don't come to my talk page to complain: assess it! Best wishes to all... Geometry guy 00:09, 2 June 2007 (UTC)
I am grateful to all for both supportive and critical comments. I would emphasise that anyone can adjust ratings. It can be a thankless task sometimes, but please don't be discouraged by disagreement! I have been trying to build on the discussions held here previously to improve the importance page and hence provide better guidance for these ratings, but it is still work in progress. I am acutely aware that this is a high priority, and I will try and push it forward later today. Geometry guy 02:13, 2 June 2007 (UTC)
One difficulty with statistics is that coverage is feeble by comparison to most math topics. One can readily imagine 30 or 40 articles in a list of topics related to degrees of freedom in statistics, but they're not there. Similarly analysis of variance is a vast topic on which one could write several thick volumes, but the article is pretty stubby. Michael Hardy 01:06, 4 June 2007 (UTC)
The article Non Universality in Computation has come to my attention. While the papers by Selim Akl that it cites don't appear to be completely incorrect, they are not actually reflective of classical computability theory because they place restrictions on the models of computation that are not permitted in the standard theory of computability. In particular, the papers assume some sort of time scale such that "computers" must complete calculations in a certain number of steps, which is incompatible with the standard definitions.
So while the articles are not completely incorrect, some of the claims that Akl makes are not correct, or overstated at least, and these claims are repeated in the WP article. The claims were also added to the Turing machine article, but someone else removed them.
I think that there is a place on WP for this information, once it has been rephrased to use standard terminology. But the article as it stands is likely to leave readers with false impressions.
I have asked the author of the WP article, User:Ewakened, to comment here, and I would appreciate hearing other opinions on the matter. CMummert · talk 23:12, 29 May 2007 (UTC)
My username was recently changed from CMummert to CBM ( log). This change will be seen in page histories and your watchlist, if my user pages are on it. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 14:32, 4 June 2007 (UTC)
Prod had expired; de-prodded. -- Trovatore 03:54, 5 June 2007 (UTC)
After viewing the Determinant article I was surprised to see that cofactor expansion (obviously one method for determining the determinant of a square matrix) doesn't have an article nor does it even serve as a redirect. I thought that I should bring it to the attention of the Wikiproject.-- Jersey Devil 20:28, 2 June 2007 (UTC)
Is the Cofactor expansion not the same thing as the Laplace expansion ? Jheald 15:29, 3 June 2007 (UTC)
The recently created article Lie algebra bundle starts with the word 'definition' and consists of a rather dull definition and a list of 9 references. I cannot even think of a tag to place on it (if it's not straight AfD) — any ideas? Arcfrk 18:03, 6 June 2007 (UTC)
{{
Wikify}}
tag. --
Lambiam
Talk
19:46, 6 June 2007 (UTC)
A relatively recent addition, but in a desperate state. It is pretty hard even to work out what it is about. Has anyone heard of this problem? If so, can you elucidate? Geometry guy 16:26, 29 May 2007 (UTC)
I have rewritten Problem of points and think it to be in decent shape now. However the somewhat related article Chevalier de Méré is in need of somebody's loving attention. The current article, translated from French, tells an improbable story that de Méré managed to bankrupt himself by betting even odds on being able to throw at least one six in four throws of one fair die, and complained to Pascal that he had expected a 4*1/6 chance of winning. However, one easily computes that de Méré would actually have a few percent's advantage on such a bet, not likely to bankrupt him unless he bet his entire fortune on a single game. My sources agree that what de Méré actually asked of Pascal was an explanation of why the known better-than-even chances for throwing one six in four does not scale to better-than-even chances of throwing one double-six in twenty-four throws of two dice each. However even here the disadvantage is less than a percent, not likely to drive a non-idiotic gambler into immediate bankruptcy.
I might take a stab at this myself, but my available sources are very sparse with actual biographical information about de Méré. Anybody got something better? – Henning Makholm 22:08, 3 June 2007 (UTC)
This turned into a really nice article. Thanks and congratulations to everyone who worked on it, particularly Henning Makholm. -- Dominus 15:01, 7 June 2007 (UTC)
I nominated one of us, David Eppstein, for administrator. If you are familiar with David's work, you are welcome to voice your opinion at Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/David Eppstein. Oleg Alexandrov ( talk) 16:39, 31 May 2007 (UTC)
There's some discussion about deleting it at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/1000000000000 (number) 2nd nomin. Someone asked "Is there a Wikiproject or something discussing these? [large numbers]". I thought perhaps the members of this wikiproject might be interested. -- Itub 12:55, 7 June 2007 (UTC)
Wikiproject numbers is the project that you want.-- Cronholm 144 14:40, 7 June 2007 (UTC)
I thought I would start a new section on this, so that the old ones can be archived. Today I have done some of the things I promised to do.
Erm, I guess I should have said explicitly: please start making comments on Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Wikipedia 1.0/Importance, either here, or on the talk page. Geometry guy 23:42, 2 June 2007 (UTC)
I've now bitten the bullet, and drafted the "context" section. I added some information on the scope of the assessment project as well. Also, we didn't discuss articles about mathematicians: I raised the issue before, but no one commented on it. Anyway, I have proposed that we don't make substantial use of the WikiProject Biography scheme, since I believe it is flawed, particularly in the mathematics context. Full details at Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Wikipedia 1.0/Importance. The latter page is now rather long and verbose, but I thought it would be better to do it that way while the guidelines are still being developed. Geometry guy 18:03, 3 June 2007 (UTC)
Okay it looks like the plan to use X-Priority instead of X-Importance will go ahead, but the term "importance" will still be used frequently (as in "Articles by importance", "importance level" and so on). I will now also use the new importance table to update our summary table. This will be hard to get right, so other editors' input may be crucial! Geometry guy 20:37, 6 June 2007 (UTC)
Summary table now updated at: Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Wikipedia 1.0/Assessment. Geometry guy 11:45, 7 June 2007 (UTC)
I've been looking at the new math pages for a couple of months now, and one thing I've observed really has me puzzled. From time to time, somebody hangs a "category" tag on a redirect page.
That really doesn't make any sense to me. What purpose does such a tag serve? I would just take the tags off, but I've encountered a few editors who seem quite vehement about keeping them in place (although they haven't explained why this matters in terms that I can understand). So I'm asking the question here. Should we have a general policy about category tags on redirect pages? Thanks! DavidCBryant 16:39, 7 June 2007 (UTC)
The discussions on Wikipedia talk:Good articles aimed at reforming the GA system seem to be going nowhere. Would there be support here for removing GA as one of the visible article quality classes on the maths rating template? The GA rating doesn't seem to have much to do with how we view the quality of math articles, and doesn't really fit into a linear scale with the other stub-start-b-a classes. Removing it from the scale would free us to assign GA articles "start" class if we feel they deserve it (for instance, Geometry Guy's "start" rating of Klee's measure problem, which I fully agree with), and it would avoid confusion about how GA and our own A-class rating system are supposed to interact. In any case if this change is made the GA status would still be visible in the separate GA banner on the talk page. — David Eppstein 20:21, 2 June 2007 (UTC)
From the above there does not appear to be consensus for removing GA-Class from our ratings, especially while this is still used and accepted by most of the rest of Wikipedia 1.0. On the other hand, we are exceptional in having a B+ class rating, and there seems to be some consensus that GA-Class amounts to B+ Class with external quality assurance (at least in issues of presentation and policy).
I therefore believe that we should update our grading scheme to reflect this consensus. I also think that the other practical suggestions I made are worthy of consideration:
Please comment on these concrete suggestions. Geometry guy 20:45, 5 June 2007 (UTC)
I'm going to start tweaking our grading scheme descriptors both to cover this issue, and also the issue that our articles often start off being technically correct but inaccessible, rather than accessible but needing expert input. I won't move on the two numbered issues yet (although I am sorely tempted to get rid of the lime green ;) Geometry guy 20:45, 6 June 2007 (UTC)
(unindent) As far as I am aware, it has never been a requirement to pass good article to achieve A-class, neither here nor within WP 1.0 in general. I believe that there is consensus for this policy (not merely "no consensus" for its contrary). I am not aware of there being a false impression about this: plenty of A-Class articles have not passed WP:GA. Anyway, I report with pleasure (and from the above it sounds like Jitse will be happy to) that I have now replaced the horrible B+ colour with the same green used for GA-Class. This should further clarify our policy, as will some changes to the B+ and GA descriptors which I promised to make above. Geometry guy 17:47, 7 June 2007 (UTC)
I've now updated our quality grading scheme to clarify the issues discussed in this forum. Tomorrow, I will use this, together with any comments, to refine Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Wikipedia 1.0/Assessment. Geometry guy 20:30, 7 June 2007 (UTC)
I've now refined and updated the Assessment page. Geometry guy 20:35, 8 June 2007 (UTC)
E (mathematical constant) was just nominated for Good Article status by Disavian ( talk · contribs). If anyone wants to polish it to try to get it to pass, go for it. JRSpriggs 07:32, 8 June 2007 (UTC)
Started monumental paper, please feel free to chip in. Thanks: -- Sadi Carnot 15:30, 10 June 2007 (UTC)
I've nominated Fermat's last theorem for A-Class review. This article gets a lot of attention, pop-culture links, and (of course) vandalism, so I thought it might be worth giving the mathematical content a brush-up. Geometry guy 20:17, 11 June 2007 (UTC)
Just to clarify: this article was promoted to A-Class last October, before A-Class review was introduced in March. I (and a few others, it seems: see the article talk page) do not believe it currently meets the criteria, so some input would be most welcome. Geometry guy 23:08, 11 June 2007 (UTC)
Does anyone have an explanation for strange behaviour of the
Current activity page? I've noticed in the past that certain articles keep reappearing in the tables of supposedly newly created articles (e.g.
Transformation geometry). However, recently it seems that the majority of 'New articles' are not only old, but were not even been edited on the date under which they are listed. For example, look at the list for June 10 (as an even more specific example, see
Cartan's criterion, which hasn't been edited for weeks). It does make one wonder whether, conversely, all new (or renamed) articles are faithfully represented in the table. And a related question: if the name of a new article is stricken out, what does it mean? (certainly, not that it was deleted!)
Arcfrk
05:06, 11 June 2007 (UTC)
Yes the weird activity is due to me. I added in Category:Modal logic and Category:Economics curves with a bunch of other categories the other day (as remarked above by David), but did not check these two carefully enough. They have a huge amount of nonmath, especially the first, so I cut them out. Sorry for the mass changes. I don't know what to do about these two categories. Comments? Oleg Alexandrov ( talk) 03:07, 12 June 2007 (UTC)
Please take a look at talk:Boolean algebra#Revisiting naming. -- Trovatore 23:26, 13 June 2007 (UTC)
I've put together a tentative infobox for articles on specific graphs (and, in a few cases, graph families). I'd like some feedback on the template before I deploy it on 19 articles, particularly from someone who knows more about graph theory and can better point out which properties are most important to mention. ~ Booya Bazooka 22:49, 10 June 2007 (UTC)
Template:Infobox graph is now operational. ~ Booya Bazooka 20:13, 14 June 2007 (UTC)
The proposal to delete Zaimi-Marku inequality may well make sense, but the people commenting at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Zaimi-Marku inequality aren't being very intelligent about it yet. Michael Hardy 23:49, 15 June 2007 (UTC)
The following articles are very weak and I am planning on prodding or AfDing them unless there is an objection here.
Any and all feedback is appreciated. Cheers-- Cronholm 144 05:00, 14 June 2007 (UTC)
I have found a webpage on the Lemniscate of Gerono that compared its equation to the rather similar equation of the Kampyle of Eudoxus. In the conviction that this was the source of confusion resulting in the wrong equation to be ascribed to the Kampyle, I've rewritten the latter article (still a stub) and moved it to Kampyle of Eudoxus. For simplicity, I've omitted a parameter making this a family of similar curves, where the similarity transformations (rescaling) leave the origin fixed; after all, other similarity transformations (e.g., rotation) are usually not dealt with either. -- Lambiam Talk 22:49, 14 June 2007 (UTC)
I've proposed that the two articles named Partial fraction decomposition and Partial fraction decomposition over the reals be merged into the article named Partial fraction. You can explain why this is a terrible idea at, respectively:
-- Lambiam Talk 08:13, 18 June 2007 (UTC)
Hello again everyone, thanks for your swift action on the K articles ( Kappa statistic is the only one left). I have found more articles in need of attention so here goes. :)-- Cronholm 144 06:26, 17 June 2007 (UTC)
I guess I need to make myself a little more clear. These articles will be on AfD if they don't improve.-- Cronholm 144 06:26, 17 June 2007 (UTC)
I have cleaned up everything but Kendall's W (which was already done before I got there, thanks Lambiam and David) and Jarnik's theorem. Furthermore, I think that the latter might be wrong, the Jarnik's theorem I found has to do with diophantine approximation. I need input on this one. Also I am going to dab Kappa statistic if their are no more objections. cheers-- Cronholm 144 04:21, 18 June 2007 (UTC)
I guess I will give it more time, hopefully Michael will fix it. I saw him playing with it.-- Cronholm 144 17:46, 18 June 2007 (UTC)
The term "Boolean algebra" usually means (to mathematicians) a type of algebraic structure, and (to non-mathematicians) a way of manipulating propositional variables. My last try at gathering a consensus on how to disambiguate, went nowhere, and we still have the problem. I'm trying again at talk:Boolean algebra#naming -- trying again, hopefully with a statement of the problem that takes into account what I learned from the last discussion. -- Trovatore 08:08, 20 June 2007 (UTC)
We have two meanings, and two articles. What's wrong with a dab header from each to the other? Why do we need to have everybody click through a dab page? Septentrionalis PMAnderson 18:06, 20 June 2007 (UTC)
Could someone take a look at the above page? It's newly created, and a little incoherent at the moment. I've wikified a couple of the links, but anyone who's familiar with the term might want to have a look. Thanks! -- simxp ( talk) 10:21, 20 June 2007 (UTC)
Over at integral, the fabulous Mathematics Collaboration of the Month, Loisel and I are discussing an image purporting to show the difference between Riemannian and Lebesgue integration. There is some prior unresolved discomfort with the image at Lebesgue integration, and the section of that article in which the image appears ends with the completely unacceptable remark: "See the discussion page." (May I just say, yuck.) The French, German, Russian, and Japanese pages do not use the image.
I'm keen on fostering intuition, and work hard to provide appropriate images. The question for all you analysts and pedagogues: Is this image correct and helpful? Please come share your views! Thanks.
(Feel free to guide evolution of the integral article in other ways as well; one prior view is here.) -- KSmrq T 18:00, 17 June 2007 (UTC)
I think this discussion is resolved with the following reference:
Loisel 22:10, 18 June 2007 (UTC)
Ordinarily, for math articles I'm not too much about "compromise" and "NPOV" and "no original research", because math is typically true or false. Unforunately in this case, it is quite obvious that there are strong opinions. In this situation, I will resort to WP:NPOV, WP:VER and WP:NOR. If you want to modify this part of the article, you are welcome to do it, subject to WP:NPOV, where you must phrase things in a neutral way, WP:VER, where you must cite a source which says pretty much exactly what you want to say, and WP:NOR, where you cannot come up with your own explanation.
As far as I know, Rudin and Lang have said nothing on this subject. You are welcome to find a source that says something else. You are also welcome to add something like "Rudin and Lang draw no such analogy between the Riemann and Lebesgue integral". Loisel 00:30, 19 June 2007 (UTC)
Ah, if you want, you can actually give a formula, by gluing the right bits of Folland, which does give a formula in terms of the horizontal slices of the function, like the picture. Loisel 00:47, 19 June 2007 (UTC)
I have two copies of Rudin (real and complex, and principles of analysis), which one were you looking at? Also, I am compiling a bevy of resources that talk about Lebesgue, I think I will stick all of the excerpts in my sandbox and link them here if there are no objections.-- Cronholm 144 00:53, 19 June 2007 (UTC)
R&C analysis is the one that discusses the Lebesgue integral (chapter I). I may be wrong, but your PoA one is probably the first year Riemann integral text, in which case it does not talk about the Lebesgue integral. I don't think his other books discuss the Lebesgue integral either. Loisel 01:07, 19 June 2007 (UTC)
Thanks, I will look there first. I have found four books so far and I am about halfway through my books.-- Cronholm 144 01:12, 19 June 2007 (UTC)
Here it is User:Cronholm144/Lebesgue. I gathered together all the resources that bothered to address the integration geometrically(many didn't). From my own reading, I can see how the picture could be misleading, if we are to include it, (I am leaning against it) we must be extremely careful about how we explain it. The possibility exists that the reader might just see the picture and and come away with a flawed understanding of the concept. It seems to me that it might be more of a liability than help.-- Cronholm 144 02:04, 19 June 2007 (UTC)
I feel some of Geometry Guy's comments need to be expanded on, particularly the comment on how the picture does not match the usual definition of the Lebesgue integration but does match an "unusual" definition. The picture, to me, clearly indicates a definition of the Lebesgue integral as an improper Riemann integral. I think Loisel would agree that what is "really going on" is we are taking limits of sums as the mesh of the subintervals of the range gets smaller; each sum has a term that looks like (length of subinterval with bottom endpoint y) * (measure of all domain points x that map to greater than y). The function that for every y gives the measure of all domain points x that map to greater than y is in fact a Riemann integrable function, as it is monotone decreasing.
Let me emphasize there is no need for simple functions here, because we are doing a Riemann integration. I think part of the problem in this whole discussion is that Loisel wants to do something like I just explained but also wants to use the machinery of simple functions. However, when using simple functions, the ahem, simplest thing to do is take the sum in the obvious way, i.e. each value of the simple function gets multiplied by measure of the value's preimage, not to create these "slabs" as in the picture. On the other hand, if one wants to think of the Lebesgue integral as the result of slicing up the range and doing an analogous thing to the Riemann integral, one can! It is then in fact a real (improper) Riemann integral. -- C S (Talk) 02:32, 19 June 2007 (UTC)
Illustration of a Riemann integral (top) and a Lebesgue integral? JPD ( talk) 10:58, 19 June 2007 (UTC)
The visual distinction here is almost invisible to me, and I know what point is being made. What's wrong with the traditional illustration of the Lebesgue integral, with horizontal slabs? Septentrionalis PMAnderson 02:15, 20 June 2007 (UTC)
To add something concrete to the discussion, see (green) Rudin's proof of theorem 1.17 on simple functions: every non-negative measurable function is the pointwise limit of a non-decreasing sequence of simple functions. The technique is to divide up the range into finer and finer rectangles. The link with Lebesgue integration is clear: monotone convergence. Silly rabbit 12:55, 20 June 2007 (UTC)
So here's an idea I'll throw out for a new image, which maybe can be hammered out into something agreeable to everyone. Draw a function that oscillates infinitely many times. Start with some up and down humps that get smaller and smaller, then put some "dot dot dots", then some more humps that get larger. When you draw horizontal slabs for a level, there will now be pieces that get smaller and smaller. So hopefully the idea that is conveyed is that for a slab level you need to multiply the height of a slab by a "width", but here the "width" must be some kind of measure thing.
This kind of picture would (hopefully) avoid the the "it's just inverting the function and Riemann integrating" pitfall that several people have mentioned. On the other hand, it illustrates a right way to interpret the Lebesgue integral as a Riemann integral that has been discussed above. In particular, it still captures this slicing up the range idea, while indicating that all the "nastiness" gets pushed to understanding measures of these preimage sets. Boy, I guess it'd be nice if I actually made a picture, but I'll leave that to someone more industrious for now. -- C S (Talk) 18:50, 20 June 2007 (UTC)
Interest in maintaining the portal seems to be at an all-time-low. I guess it had been heroically and almost single-handedly maintained by Fropuff for a while, but he appears to be less active on Wikipedia these days: Tompw was another vital contributor, who may or may not still be interested in the project. The "article of the week" would have broken last week and this week, if I had not repeated Golden ratio and then copied an old portal article (the Pythagorean theorem) into the latest slot.
Although I maintained the page in Fropuff's absense (with Fractal, Map projection and Golden ratio, and thanks to suggestions and advice from this forum), I doubt I am sufficiently heroic to keep this up on my own (and admire Fropuff all the more that he did). I would therefore propose to continue the process, which I started this week with Pythagorean theorem, to recycle old portal articles in order, omitting only those which no longer meet our standards. Comments welcome, volunteers even more so.
In addition to this proposal, there is a more general point I would like to make. One of the reasons I would prefer to reuse old portal articles (for the time being) is that it is extremely difficult to find additional mathematics articles which are suitable. Among our articles of Bplus quality and above, the ones that are sufficiently accessible and appealing for the portal have already been used. Some editors may have noticed that in {{ maths rating}}s, I am being a bit harsh on articles that are less accessible than they could be (and have tweaked the B and Bplus descriptors in the grading scheme to reflect this). This does not mean I believe that an article on an advanced mathematical topic should be accessible to the layman, only that each article should be as accessible as is appropriate for its content.
I encourage everyone to create more articles that could appear on the portal! Geometry guy 19:59, 19 June 2007 (UTC)
A "{{
prod}}" template has been added to the article
Somer pseudoprime, suggesting that it be deleted according to the
proposed deletion process. All contributions are appreciated, but the article may not satisfy Wikipedia's
criteria for inclusion, and the deletion notice explains why (see also "
What Wikipedia is not" and
Wikipedia's deletion policy). You may contest the proposed deletion by removing the {{dated prod}}
notice, but please explain why you disagree with the proposed deletion in your edit summary or on
its talk page. Also, please consider improving the article to address the issues raised. Even though removing the deletion notice will prevent deletion through the
proposed deletion process, the article may still be deleted if it matches any of the
speedy deletion criteria or it can be sent to
Articles for Deletion, where it may be deleted if
consensus to delete is reached.
I'm including this warning here rather than on the page creator's page because the creator was an anonymous IP address that hasn't been active since 2005, and since it's likely to get more appropriate attention here. — David Eppstein 04:06, 20 June 2007 (UTC)
I've nominated Non-universality in computation for deletion. See also Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mathematics/Archive 26#Help with article in "unconventional computation". -- Lambiam Talk 13:04, 20 June 2007 (UTC)
I always write
rather than
Should we have a norm prescribing this usage?
I think the usage above makes sense only if the list of references has an item labelled
Opinions? Michael Hardy 18:49, 23 June 2007 (UTC)
In response to a request made some time ago, I have, from time to time, been checking unsigned ratings and signing and dating them.
In the course of doing this I found a few FA-Class articles which don't, in my opinion, currently meet the featured article criteria (which is a requirement for FA-Class in the grading scheme). The articles I have in mind are Cryptography, Galileo Galilei and Monty Hall problem, which I reckon are about Bplus-Class.
Now I can't sign a rating I don't agree with, and I don't want to pass them over. Does anyone think these meet the criteria? Geometry guy 12:39, 23 June 2007 (UTC)
PS. There are also a few good articles I am not sure about: see Nash equilibrium, Best response and Probability theory.
PPS. Category:Mathematics articles with no comments now has less than 200 articles in it, so why not take a look and sign a maths rating today! :)
In addition to
Nash equilibrium,
Best response and
Probability theory,
Sylvester's sequence appears not to meet the
criteria. The problem is again
the lead, which at the moment is a definition/first section, rather than an overview. This should be fairly easy to fix, but I think other editors may be able to do a better job than I can. Anyone?
Geometry guy
15:28, 24 June 2007 (UTC)
Another exiting post by me, everyone! E for some inexplicable reason is in quite a poor state. Here are some things I have found:
These are not problem articles but all of the polytope articles are stubs.
Is some kind of merger in order?
Yes, I believe that would be appropriate, E just happened to be the catalyst. To start things off, should there be a merger? or are the free-standing stubs just an inevitability?-- Cronholm 144 10:32, 24 June 2007 (UTC)
Fair enough, I will treat WP:PAT articles the same way that I treat WP Numbers articles. I will think to myself "my goodness, that seems rather indiscriminate...oh well" and move on :)-- Cronholm 144 11:17, 24 June 2007 (UTC) P.S. Even E 7.5 is unmergeable?
I think these mostly belong to the category of articles that are mathematical enough to be on the List of mathematics articles but not relevant enough to WPM to need a maths rating. The one I'd be most tempted to rate is Edge of chaos; the one I'd be most tempted to remove from the List of mathematics articles is Eddy covariance (check "What links here" for that one). Geometry guy 11:21, 24 June 2007 (UTC)
Okay, as long as we are fine with them being listed(I though maybe some of them had slipped through the cracks).-- Cronholm 144 11:26, 24 June 2007 (UTC)
Okay then, I will try to expand it. Does anyone have a copy of his original paper? It was published in the journal of research for the national bureau of standards, I think.-- Cronholm 144 09:57, 24 June 2007 (UTC)
You don't have to worry about upsetting me, at least, but this article is a shame. EDST is an extremely important branch of contemporary set theory but our coverage is minimal. For example we don't have an article on Glimm–Effros dichotomy, a result on simple invariants (or lack thereof) in mathematics. Trovatore is an expert in the area, but I'll take a stab at expanding the article myself. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 13:06, 24 June 2007 (UTC)
Fair enough, Suggestions? .Notable sources? It hasn't changed much since 2003(!). I can go Googling and JSTORing but it would be good if I had an author or two. -- Cronholm 144 09:09, 24 June 2007 (UTC)
The article has an identity crisis, and you should ask Charles Matthews, who edited it recently, for suitable references. Lang's Diophantine Geometry would be good as a general reference. Arcfrk 10:13, 24 June 2007 (UTC)
Are you referring to Lang's Survey of Diophantine Geometry or are there two different books?
I will ask him (BTW, the threat of deletion is a great motivator, notice that no one has commented anywhere but the prod section...sigh, I merely propose that the articles be proposed to be deleted, if no one comments like at Jarnik's theorem, then I PROD them)--
Cronholm
144
10:30, 24 June 2007 (UTC)
I've added two clean-up tags to this. CBM has edited it, and may be able to come up with references. Geometry guy 11:41, 24 June 2007 (UTC)
I am only 50 articles in so there is more to come. :)-- Cronholm 144 08:28, 24 June 2007 (UTC)
By the way, I am willing to make most/all of these changes myself, I just need direction and consensus before editing, I would like a little more participation than at the J articles(are my constant posts scaring you away? :( ). Anyway, Cheers-- Cronholm 144 08:38, 24 June 2007 (UTC).
Cool link, :) but you know this just means more delightful comments from me. In all seriousness though, I plan to go through every math article pruning and posting as I go. I imagine this will take several months but the combined effect could burn people out(including me). The only worry that I have is that a subpage will go the way of the dodo and the math portal. I think that I will wait and see how it goes. In any case, I plan to post fewer articles next time. -- Cronholm 144 13:19, 24 June 2007 (UTC)
This looks like it might be a fairly interesting AFD discussion. I expect there may be conflicting opinions even among members of the WikiProject, so I thought I would advertise it here. -- C S (Talk) 14:34, 24 June 2007 (UTC)
After the discussion a couple of days ago, I programmed a database to facilitate the creation and use of consistent and correct and complete references like this (automatically generated) one:
Eisenbud, David. Commutative algebra with a view toward algebraic geometry. Heidelberg, New York: Springer-Verlag.
ISBN
0-387-94269-6. {{
cite book}}
: Check |authorlink=
value (
help)
You may find the first result of these efforts here.
Right now, there are three intertwined databases, one for books, one for authors and a third one for publishers. The design of the database is intended to meet the needs of WP references, e.g. books are linked to their (co)authors etc., hence wikilinks to authors will appear (if there are any). Besides this, the main distinction between the database and this Template of User:Diberri is, that one may look up a book by its title, which seems more reasonable than by its ISBN.
I think, at the current state it's reasonable to call this a feasibility study. I would like to hear people's ideas about it, whether it's a reasonable thing to pursue further. Obviously, right now the database is practically void, so besides further programming (which I volunteer to do), it needs willing people to inhale life to it, i.e. data. This may probably be done automatically or semi-automatically, using the references which already exist in WP articles (or Math articles or whatever). At the moment this latter feature is not yet programmed, other reasonable things like looking up the ISBN database when one has the ISBN of a book, adding a similar database for articles in journals etc. are also not yet done. If the database is considered to be useful to you guys, I will implement these shortly, as well as other ideas emerging of your impressions. So, tell me what you think. Thanks. Jakob.scholbach 03:41, 18 June 2007 (UTC)
Thanks. Is it possible to parse the Mathematics WP articles and automatically retrieve all the contained references? Jakob.scholbach 17:04, 19 June 2007 (UTC)
{{
citation}}
templates? (I hope!) --
KSmrq
T
02:58, 20 June 2007 (UTC)Can I say that I really detest the inversion of names in references? I really find it a negative, searching the site as much as I do, to have to search "Gauss, C. F." and so on with all the variants of "C. F. Gauss". In other words, it doubles what you have to do with an exhaustive search. The virtues of inversion seem to be mostly in the world where one does searches by scanning down columns. In other words, this is a paper habit. Charles Matthews 21:01, 25 June 2007 (UTC)
A certain User:Karada has been linking every occurrence of the phrase natural topology to the non-existent article natural topology. I've reverted a few of them, but there are many more articles to go through. To the best of my knowledge, natural topology typically does not have a prescribed meaning (in the sense of natural transformation) although I can easily imagine some uses where the term is "natural" in the categorical sense. Since there is no article on the subject, is there a consensus here that these edits should be reverted? Silly rabbit 19:50, 24 June 2007 (UTC)
Another possibility is to write an article, such as natural (mathematics) covering the basic (imprecise) uses of the word natural in mathematics. I have no idea what such an article might look like, though. Thoughts? Volunteers? Silly rabbit 20:02, 24 June 2007 (UTC)
I think it's usually a bad idea to write such articles, but if our hand is forced, then we have to be very upfront and clear about the fact that the term has no precise meaning (and hope no one asks for a citation, because hardly anyone bothers to note explicitly that terms with no precise meaning have no precise meaning). This is a very dangerous situation and can easily result in disaster articles like definable real number that can neither be easily fixed nor deleted. -- Trovatore 20:27, 24 June 2007 (UTC)
By the way, if by chance Karada is right and the paper from the Springer journal does intend a precise meaning for the phrase "natural topology", then it must be a meaning from some specific subfield of functional analysis, and any article written about it should have a title with a parenthetical disambig phrase for that subfield. Otherwise there's the danger that the usual usages of the phrase, which have no precise meaning, will be inappropriately linked to the article for that precise meaning. -- Trovatore 20:35, 24 June 2007 (UTC)
A few thoughts:
My impression of the topic is that the meaning of "natural" is sociological or psychological: it has nothing to do with coarseness or making things continuous, it just means that there is one topology that most experts on the topic would pick as the most appropriate to use. I think that trying to nail the term down any further would be a mistake. The best we can hope for is a stubby article that says as much and points to a widely-varying collection of uses of "natural topology" in the literature to back up that point. But to do so would most likely be original research by synthesis. — David Eppstein 06:19, 25 June 2007 (UTC)
I wonder if it would help to keep in mind a distinction between "a natural topology" and "the natural topology". In quite a few contexts people write "Equip it with the natural topology". It seems to me that something quite specific is meant here, and a link to an article which explains that could be helpful. On the other hand, in the ordinal example, the language "any ordinal has a natural topology: the order topology" is quite different. Here we don't want to link to natural topology, only to topological space and order topology: if we had to link the word "natural", then probably the best we could do is link it to wiktionary!
PS. Just curious, and I haven't thought it through, but what are the left and right order topologies in this case? Geometry guy 11:05, 25 June 2007 (UTC)
I have noticed lead problems with most mathematics articles, at least as far as the general editing advice at WP:LEAD goes. For instance, they often fail to give an adequate summary of the article. I realize that there are possibly good reasons for not abiding by some of the lead recommendations in many math articles in the spirit of Wikipedia:Make technical articles accessible. Does the math project offer any more specific guidelines on the lead? Silly rabbit 14:46, 25 June 2007 (UTC)
Perhaps we should start a new thread, since clearly my question doesn't have an easier answer (along the lines of "Why yes, SR. That was discussed 8 months ago in [this thread]. See [this new policy recommendation].") A case study is my recent foray into bringing exterior algebra up to scratch. The lead has definite problems: it aims to give both a summary of the article and to be partially accessible to a general audience. I think its clear that these objectives are incompatible here (unless some more brilliant editor wants to take a stab at it.) Silly rabbit 20:08, 25 June 2007 (UTC)
I'm inclined to say any mathematics article that begins with the word "Let..." is horribly wrong in its intro. My favorite example of this sort of thing remains an article on something other than mathematics. It's called schismatic temperament. Given the usual meanings of those two words, I guessed that it was about a psychiatric disorder. Nothing in the first sentence (when I first looked at it) told the lay reader that it was not about chemistry, politics, fiction writing, etc. I changed it so that it starts with the words "In music,...". Such a brief phrase, but worth a lot. (Of course, there's more to lead sections than that.) Michael Hardy 22:35, 26 June 2007 (UTC)
User:Gregbard has created a new {{ Logic}} template and put it at the bottom of some logic articles, including a few in math logic. Now, I have to say it's quite a bit slicker than the navigational templates we've seen in the past. It's relatively unobtrusive, just a thin horizontal bar across the bottom of the article with a "show" button in the right-hand corner. If you click on "show" it pops up a bunch of subfields and related articles.
There's at least one of his categorizations I don't entirely agree with, but that can be dealt with. The question is, is this sufficiently different from the nav templates we've rejected in the past, to reconsider whether to allow it? I'm undecided myself. -- Trovatore 08:58, 27 June 2007 (UTC)
I've recently started to receive emails containing "temporary passwords" to my WP login account. I beleive that these are what one gets if one checks the "I forgot my passord" box on the WP login page. As it happens, I haven't forgotten it, and someone else is making these requests. Being slightly paranoid, I am concerned that someone is hoping to catch one of these emails in-flight (they're mailed out in cleartext, so the temporary password is clearly visible), and is thus hoping to hack my account. Any recommendations on how I should deal with this? Ignore? Retry? Abort? linas 23:56, 27 June 2007 (UTC)
Hey everyone, June is almost over and it is time for a new collaboration of the month WP:MATHCOTM and we need some votes so we can decide what article will receive this high honor. Mosey on down and place your vote or go ahead and suggest a previously unlisted article, all contributions are welcome!-- Cronholm 144 22:15, 28 June 2007 (UTC)
P.S. I think this diff [7] demonstrate the raw power of a good collaboration. Thanks again to everyone who worked hard on Integral
I have discovered, to my great surprise, that there is no Category:Symplectic geometry. All symplectic articles are being filed under Category:Symplectic topology instead, even though the vast majority of them is really about geometry. I was wondering what people here think of renaming the category? Arcfrk 06:12, 26 June 2007 (UTC)
I thought the point was that Dusa McDuff said the subject could now be called symplectic topology; and many people were going along with that. Just creating a supercat Category:Symplectic geometry, and moving out things that would be annoying to have in Category:Symplectic topologyy, seems an obvious solution. Charles Matthews 14:04, 29 June 2007 (UTC)
A discussion on the reference desk brought to my attention the existence of two similar articles: (1) adjoint endomorphism, to which "adjoint representation of a Lie algebra" redirects, and (2) adjoint representation. Could someone with a little time and interest look into this apparent duplication? -- KSmrq T 04:48, 29 June 2007 (UTC)
This article has had a merge tag on for a while now, and it's beyond my knowledge to assess it. Could someone here take a look. Cheers Kevin 08:38, 29 June 2007 (UTC)
Sorry to bring this up again, but two of us disagree rather strongly on whether one should define first the neighbourhood of a point, or the neighbourhood of a set, with no compromise in sight.
While the issue may be trivial, the concept of neighbourhood is important enough in mathematics, that perhaps more people should get involved. The discussion is at Talk:Neighbourhood (mathematics)#Which comes first: neighborhood of a point or of a set?. Thanks. Oleg Alexandrov ( talk) 01:46, 1 June 2007 (UTC)
Why does Template talk:Numerical algorithms exist when its template does not? JRSpriggs 08:18, 1 June 2007 (UTC)
I have been going through the Z articles, and I have found quite a few stubs in the zero section, Zero_ideal, Zero_set, Zero_tensor, Zerosumfree_monoid, Zero_matrix, Zero_module, Zero_order. Is there any way we can unify these articles in a meaningful way. As it stands I don't see these articles growing all that much. Perhaps we could create something along the lines of the List of prime numbers article. Maybe "List of mathematics terms that include zero".-- Cronholm144 05:50, 2 June 2007 (UTC)
I will take the silence as a "go for it C" and create something in my sandbox :) -- Cronholm144 18:15, 2 June 2007 (UTC)
Done List_of_zero_terms with redirects in place. I didn't redirect Zero matirx, just relisted it. Now all of the horribly weak stubs can grow together in one place. Feel free to move the page to a better name, just be sure to warn me so I can reset the redirects to the appropriate locations-- Cronholm144 18:46, 2 June 2007 (UTC)
It often happens to me that I want to include a reference to, say, Hartshorne's book "Algebraic Geometry". It is somewhat annoying to always look for it at some page where the reference already is. Is this only a problem / issue of mine or do also other people wish there would be a BibTex-like system on Wikipedia? In the simplest case it would be a page including references to (at least) major math books. It might look like
Robin Hartshorne (1997). Algebraic Geometry. Springer-Verlag. ISBN 0-387-90244-9. | {{cite book | author = [[Robin Hartshorne]] | year = 1997 | title = [[Hartshorne%27s_Algebraic_Geometry|Algebraic Geometry]] | publisher = [[Springer Science+Business Media|Springer-Verlag]] | id = ISBN 0-387-90244-9 }} |
---|
Jakob.scholbach 17:35, 30 May 2007 (UTC)
PS. Of course, much more helpful would be a mechanism generating the above reference by something like {{cite book | id = Hartshorne_AG }} . Jakob.scholbach 17:47, 30 May 2007 (UTC)
{{cite book |author=David Eugene Smith, Yoshio Mikami, |title=History of Japanese Mathematics |publisher=Open Court Publishing Co ,U.S |location= |year= |pages= |isbn=0-875-48170-1 |oclc= |doi= }}
{{
cite book}}
: CS1 maint: extra punctuation (
link) CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (
link){{citation | last1=Smith | first1=David Eugene | author1-link=David Eugene Smith | last2=Mikami | first2=Yoshio | pages=pp. 130–132 | title=A history of Japanese mathematics | place=Chicago | publisher=[[Open Court Publishing Company|Open Court Publishing]] | year=1914 | ISBN=978-0-87548-170-8 | url=http://www.archive.org/details/historyofjapanes00smituoft }}
{{
citation}}
: |pages=
has extra text (
help){{citation | last =Laczkovich | first =Miklós | author-link =Miklós Laczkovich | title =Equidecomposability and discrepancy: A solution to Tarski's circle squaring problem | journal =Journal für die reine und angewandte Mathematik ([[Crelle's Journal|Crelle’s Journal]]) | volume =404 | pages =77–117 | year =1990 | url= http://dz-srv1.sub.uni-goettingen.de/sub/digbib/loader?ht=VIEW&did=D262326 | id ={{ISSN|0075-4102}}<!--MR 91b:51034--> }}
So, I understand that there is some interest in a Wikiproject-wide list of references. I'm willing to put some effort into it, but I don't know the inner mechanisms of Wikipedia. Is it possible to create and maintain etc. a database inside Wikipedia? Otherwise I would volunteer to set up some reference database outside WP which can be edited by everybody. A mere list of references is a nice thing, but is still kind of a hassle to manually look for the item one needs, especially when the lists grows bigger and bigger as everybody adds his favourite references. It is probably also unefficient because everytime the whole list has to be saved when someone adds a new entry. The advantage, pointed out by KMSrq, of including an URL is definitely something we should not miss, because giving an URL is (at least for me personally) practically more important than the volume no. and the journal's name, at least until one is actually writing a paper and needs the paper-reference, but then good old BibTex does the job anyway. Besides the URL of the paper or book (if there is one) it would also be nice to allow the URL of a review, for example like on MathScinet. Concerning Joseph's remarks: different editions of a book are no particular problem, I guess, they should just be listed as different database entries. Whether to give a wikilink to the author's page or not might be decided by the user by checking or unchecking some checkbox "wikilink the author(s)" etc. Jakob.scholbach 17:30, 3 June 2007 (UTC)
Hey everyone, It's June first and you know what that means... A new Mathematics Collaboration of the Month! The victor, by an overwhelming margin of 3 votes, is Integral. Everyone here should be able to contribute on this one (no excuses this time!). With a little polish and elbow grease, this article will be at A class in no time at all. See you there-- Cronholm144 06:21, 1 June 2007 (UTC)
There is a proposed policy at Wikipedia:Flagged revisions about stable versions. The idea is that some pages would be "flagged" and then the flagged version would be shown by default to users who aren't logged in. This has obvious implications for vandalism fighting and quality control.
This has been in development for years, but now the code is apparently finished modulo final approval. Although it is still not certain that flagged versions will be enabled on en.wikipedia.org, the proposal is an attempt to determine some community consensus on the issue. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 17:40, 3 June 2007 (UTC)
User:Geometry guy is perhaps the most prolific assigner of "ratings" on math article talk pages. He ranke deformation theory as of "mid" importance and degrees of freedom (statistics) as low.
Is there some standard according to which that is not idiotic? (I'd have said "low" for the former and "high" for the latter. And "high" for any other topic that, like this one, is covered every statistics course from kindergarten through Ph.D.-level.)
Has anyone attempted to codify standards for these ratings? Michael Hardy 22:35, 1 June 2007 (UTC)
OK, at Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Wikipedia 1.0/Assessment it says "low" means "Subject is peripheral knowledge, possibly trivial." By that standard, ranking degrees of freedom (statistics) as "low" is profoundly illiterate. Nothing kinder can be said about it. Michael Hardy 22:38, 1 June 2007 (UTC)
Hello all, thank you for your comments. I am attempting to do two things simultaneously right now. The first is to make up for the patchy coverage of the maths rating scheme by attaching maths ratings to approximately 1/3 of the 15000 articles in the List of mathematics articles. The second is to try and refine and understand what importance ratings are for, and how to assess them. These two processes feed into each other.
Importance ratings are always going to be subjective and will fluctuate, but the goal of the second task is to reduce this subjectivity and fluctuation. In the meantime, however, the first task is flawed in many ways: first, I (and others who join me in this effort) will make subjective judgements; second, we will make mistakes; third, the criteria on which these judgements are made have not yet been fully elucidated. I can only ask others to have patience, and also bear in mind that this is a wiki: anyone can fix or update a maths rating. I am saddened by how the harder I work, the more complaints I receive on my talk page. No one needs to complain: just fix the rating.
Importance seems to cause more trouble than anything else. I am beginning to wonder if it should be renamed "priority" (which is the term used by some other WikiProjects): it is not about how important a subject is, but how high a priority it is for us to have a good article on the subject (in the context of related articles.) This does not mean that there will be fewer mistakes, only (I hope) that editors will be less upset by them. Anyway, I think that the word "priority" should at least be mentioned much more in our assessment pages. Recent experiences only serve to reinforce my opinion that the terms "peripheral" and "trivial" should be eliminated as soon as possible from the summary of the low-priority rating. (These words are not actually part of the WP 1.0 scheme, which uses the term "specialist" instead, although this is problematic as well.) I will try to fix this tomorrow.
In the meantime, bear in mind that there is a lower importance rating than "low": unrated. If you know an article which has not been rated which you think should be, please rate it. So far, I have got as far as Dei, so if your favourite article comes before this in the alphabet, don't come to my talk page to complain: assess it! Best wishes to all... Geometry guy 00:09, 2 June 2007 (UTC)
I am grateful to all for both supportive and critical comments. I would emphasise that anyone can adjust ratings. It can be a thankless task sometimes, but please don't be discouraged by disagreement! I have been trying to build on the discussions held here previously to improve the importance page and hence provide better guidance for these ratings, but it is still work in progress. I am acutely aware that this is a high priority, and I will try and push it forward later today. Geometry guy 02:13, 2 June 2007 (UTC)
One difficulty with statistics is that coverage is feeble by comparison to most math topics. One can readily imagine 30 or 40 articles in a list of topics related to degrees of freedom in statistics, but they're not there. Similarly analysis of variance is a vast topic on which one could write several thick volumes, but the article is pretty stubby. Michael Hardy 01:06, 4 June 2007 (UTC)
The article Non Universality in Computation has come to my attention. While the papers by Selim Akl that it cites don't appear to be completely incorrect, they are not actually reflective of classical computability theory because they place restrictions on the models of computation that are not permitted in the standard theory of computability. In particular, the papers assume some sort of time scale such that "computers" must complete calculations in a certain number of steps, which is incompatible with the standard definitions.
So while the articles are not completely incorrect, some of the claims that Akl makes are not correct, or overstated at least, and these claims are repeated in the WP article. The claims were also added to the Turing machine article, but someone else removed them.
I think that there is a place on WP for this information, once it has been rephrased to use standard terminology. But the article as it stands is likely to leave readers with false impressions.
I have asked the author of the WP article, User:Ewakened, to comment here, and I would appreciate hearing other opinions on the matter. CMummert · talk 23:12, 29 May 2007 (UTC)
My username was recently changed from CMummert to CBM ( log). This change will be seen in page histories and your watchlist, if my user pages are on it. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 14:32, 4 June 2007 (UTC)
Prod had expired; de-prodded. -- Trovatore 03:54, 5 June 2007 (UTC)
After viewing the Determinant article I was surprised to see that cofactor expansion (obviously one method for determining the determinant of a square matrix) doesn't have an article nor does it even serve as a redirect. I thought that I should bring it to the attention of the Wikiproject.-- Jersey Devil 20:28, 2 June 2007 (UTC)
Is the Cofactor expansion not the same thing as the Laplace expansion ? Jheald 15:29, 3 June 2007 (UTC)
The recently created article Lie algebra bundle starts with the word 'definition' and consists of a rather dull definition and a list of 9 references. I cannot even think of a tag to place on it (if it's not straight AfD) — any ideas? Arcfrk 18:03, 6 June 2007 (UTC)
{{
Wikify}}
tag. --
Lambiam
Talk
19:46, 6 June 2007 (UTC)
A relatively recent addition, but in a desperate state. It is pretty hard even to work out what it is about. Has anyone heard of this problem? If so, can you elucidate? Geometry guy 16:26, 29 May 2007 (UTC)
I have rewritten Problem of points and think it to be in decent shape now. However the somewhat related article Chevalier de Méré is in need of somebody's loving attention. The current article, translated from French, tells an improbable story that de Méré managed to bankrupt himself by betting even odds on being able to throw at least one six in four throws of one fair die, and complained to Pascal that he had expected a 4*1/6 chance of winning. However, one easily computes that de Méré would actually have a few percent's advantage on such a bet, not likely to bankrupt him unless he bet his entire fortune on a single game. My sources agree that what de Méré actually asked of Pascal was an explanation of why the known better-than-even chances for throwing one six in four does not scale to better-than-even chances of throwing one double-six in twenty-four throws of two dice each. However even here the disadvantage is less than a percent, not likely to drive a non-idiotic gambler into immediate bankruptcy.
I might take a stab at this myself, but my available sources are very sparse with actual biographical information about de Méré. Anybody got something better? – Henning Makholm 22:08, 3 June 2007 (UTC)
This turned into a really nice article. Thanks and congratulations to everyone who worked on it, particularly Henning Makholm. -- Dominus 15:01, 7 June 2007 (UTC)
I nominated one of us, David Eppstein, for administrator. If you are familiar with David's work, you are welcome to voice your opinion at Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/David Eppstein. Oleg Alexandrov ( talk) 16:39, 31 May 2007 (UTC)
There's some discussion about deleting it at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/1000000000000 (number) 2nd nomin. Someone asked "Is there a Wikiproject or something discussing these? [large numbers]". I thought perhaps the members of this wikiproject might be interested. -- Itub 12:55, 7 June 2007 (UTC)
Wikiproject numbers is the project that you want.-- Cronholm 144 14:40, 7 June 2007 (UTC)
I thought I would start a new section on this, so that the old ones can be archived. Today I have done some of the things I promised to do.
Erm, I guess I should have said explicitly: please start making comments on Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Wikipedia 1.0/Importance, either here, or on the talk page. Geometry guy 23:42, 2 June 2007 (UTC)
I've now bitten the bullet, and drafted the "context" section. I added some information on the scope of the assessment project as well. Also, we didn't discuss articles about mathematicians: I raised the issue before, but no one commented on it. Anyway, I have proposed that we don't make substantial use of the WikiProject Biography scheme, since I believe it is flawed, particularly in the mathematics context. Full details at Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Wikipedia 1.0/Importance. The latter page is now rather long and verbose, but I thought it would be better to do it that way while the guidelines are still being developed. Geometry guy 18:03, 3 June 2007 (UTC)
Okay it looks like the plan to use X-Priority instead of X-Importance will go ahead, but the term "importance" will still be used frequently (as in "Articles by importance", "importance level" and so on). I will now also use the new importance table to update our summary table. This will be hard to get right, so other editors' input may be crucial! Geometry guy 20:37, 6 June 2007 (UTC)
Summary table now updated at: Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Wikipedia 1.0/Assessment. Geometry guy 11:45, 7 June 2007 (UTC)
I've been looking at the new math pages for a couple of months now, and one thing I've observed really has me puzzled. From time to time, somebody hangs a "category" tag on a redirect page.
That really doesn't make any sense to me. What purpose does such a tag serve? I would just take the tags off, but I've encountered a few editors who seem quite vehement about keeping them in place (although they haven't explained why this matters in terms that I can understand). So I'm asking the question here. Should we have a general policy about category tags on redirect pages? Thanks! DavidCBryant 16:39, 7 June 2007 (UTC)
The discussions on Wikipedia talk:Good articles aimed at reforming the GA system seem to be going nowhere. Would there be support here for removing GA as one of the visible article quality classes on the maths rating template? The GA rating doesn't seem to have much to do with how we view the quality of math articles, and doesn't really fit into a linear scale with the other stub-start-b-a classes. Removing it from the scale would free us to assign GA articles "start" class if we feel they deserve it (for instance, Geometry Guy's "start" rating of Klee's measure problem, which I fully agree with), and it would avoid confusion about how GA and our own A-class rating system are supposed to interact. In any case if this change is made the GA status would still be visible in the separate GA banner on the talk page. — David Eppstein 20:21, 2 June 2007 (UTC)
From the above there does not appear to be consensus for removing GA-Class from our ratings, especially while this is still used and accepted by most of the rest of Wikipedia 1.0. On the other hand, we are exceptional in having a B+ class rating, and there seems to be some consensus that GA-Class amounts to B+ Class with external quality assurance (at least in issues of presentation and policy).
I therefore believe that we should update our grading scheme to reflect this consensus. I also think that the other practical suggestions I made are worthy of consideration:
Please comment on these concrete suggestions. Geometry guy 20:45, 5 June 2007 (UTC)
I'm going to start tweaking our grading scheme descriptors both to cover this issue, and also the issue that our articles often start off being technically correct but inaccessible, rather than accessible but needing expert input. I won't move on the two numbered issues yet (although I am sorely tempted to get rid of the lime green ;) Geometry guy 20:45, 6 June 2007 (UTC)
(unindent) As far as I am aware, it has never been a requirement to pass good article to achieve A-class, neither here nor within WP 1.0 in general. I believe that there is consensus for this policy (not merely "no consensus" for its contrary). I am not aware of there being a false impression about this: plenty of A-Class articles have not passed WP:GA. Anyway, I report with pleasure (and from the above it sounds like Jitse will be happy to) that I have now replaced the horrible B+ colour with the same green used for GA-Class. This should further clarify our policy, as will some changes to the B+ and GA descriptors which I promised to make above. Geometry guy 17:47, 7 June 2007 (UTC)
I've now updated our quality grading scheme to clarify the issues discussed in this forum. Tomorrow, I will use this, together with any comments, to refine Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Wikipedia 1.0/Assessment. Geometry guy 20:30, 7 June 2007 (UTC)
I've now refined and updated the Assessment page. Geometry guy 20:35, 8 June 2007 (UTC)
E (mathematical constant) was just nominated for Good Article status by Disavian ( talk · contribs). If anyone wants to polish it to try to get it to pass, go for it. JRSpriggs 07:32, 8 June 2007 (UTC)
Started monumental paper, please feel free to chip in. Thanks: -- Sadi Carnot 15:30, 10 June 2007 (UTC)
I've nominated Fermat's last theorem for A-Class review. This article gets a lot of attention, pop-culture links, and (of course) vandalism, so I thought it might be worth giving the mathematical content a brush-up. Geometry guy 20:17, 11 June 2007 (UTC)
Just to clarify: this article was promoted to A-Class last October, before A-Class review was introduced in March. I (and a few others, it seems: see the article talk page) do not believe it currently meets the criteria, so some input would be most welcome. Geometry guy 23:08, 11 June 2007 (UTC)
Does anyone have an explanation for strange behaviour of the
Current activity page? I've noticed in the past that certain articles keep reappearing in the tables of supposedly newly created articles (e.g.
Transformation geometry). However, recently it seems that the majority of 'New articles' are not only old, but were not even been edited on the date under which they are listed. For example, look at the list for June 10 (as an even more specific example, see
Cartan's criterion, which hasn't been edited for weeks). It does make one wonder whether, conversely, all new (or renamed) articles are faithfully represented in the table. And a related question: if the name of a new article is stricken out, what does it mean? (certainly, not that it was deleted!)
Arcfrk
05:06, 11 June 2007 (UTC)
Yes the weird activity is due to me. I added in Category:Modal logic and Category:Economics curves with a bunch of other categories the other day (as remarked above by David), but did not check these two carefully enough. They have a huge amount of nonmath, especially the first, so I cut them out. Sorry for the mass changes. I don't know what to do about these two categories. Comments? Oleg Alexandrov ( talk) 03:07, 12 June 2007 (UTC)
Please take a look at talk:Boolean algebra#Revisiting naming. -- Trovatore 23:26, 13 June 2007 (UTC)
I've put together a tentative infobox for articles on specific graphs (and, in a few cases, graph families). I'd like some feedback on the template before I deploy it on 19 articles, particularly from someone who knows more about graph theory and can better point out which properties are most important to mention. ~ Booya Bazooka 22:49, 10 June 2007 (UTC)
Template:Infobox graph is now operational. ~ Booya Bazooka 20:13, 14 June 2007 (UTC)
The proposal to delete Zaimi-Marku inequality may well make sense, but the people commenting at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Zaimi-Marku inequality aren't being very intelligent about it yet. Michael Hardy 23:49, 15 June 2007 (UTC)
The following articles are very weak and I am planning on prodding or AfDing them unless there is an objection here.
Any and all feedback is appreciated. Cheers-- Cronholm 144 05:00, 14 June 2007 (UTC)
I have found a webpage on the Lemniscate of Gerono that compared its equation to the rather similar equation of the Kampyle of Eudoxus. In the conviction that this was the source of confusion resulting in the wrong equation to be ascribed to the Kampyle, I've rewritten the latter article (still a stub) and moved it to Kampyle of Eudoxus. For simplicity, I've omitted a parameter making this a family of similar curves, where the similarity transformations (rescaling) leave the origin fixed; after all, other similarity transformations (e.g., rotation) are usually not dealt with either. -- Lambiam Talk 22:49, 14 June 2007 (UTC)
I've proposed that the two articles named Partial fraction decomposition and Partial fraction decomposition over the reals be merged into the article named Partial fraction. You can explain why this is a terrible idea at, respectively:
-- Lambiam Talk 08:13, 18 June 2007 (UTC)
Hello again everyone, thanks for your swift action on the K articles ( Kappa statistic is the only one left). I have found more articles in need of attention so here goes. :)-- Cronholm 144 06:26, 17 June 2007 (UTC)
I guess I need to make myself a little more clear. These articles will be on AfD if they don't improve.-- Cronholm 144 06:26, 17 June 2007 (UTC)
I have cleaned up everything but Kendall's W (which was already done before I got there, thanks Lambiam and David) and Jarnik's theorem. Furthermore, I think that the latter might be wrong, the Jarnik's theorem I found has to do with diophantine approximation. I need input on this one. Also I am going to dab Kappa statistic if their are no more objections. cheers-- Cronholm 144 04:21, 18 June 2007 (UTC)
I guess I will give it more time, hopefully Michael will fix it. I saw him playing with it.-- Cronholm 144 17:46, 18 June 2007 (UTC)
The term "Boolean algebra" usually means (to mathematicians) a type of algebraic structure, and (to non-mathematicians) a way of manipulating propositional variables. My last try at gathering a consensus on how to disambiguate, went nowhere, and we still have the problem. I'm trying again at talk:Boolean algebra#naming -- trying again, hopefully with a statement of the problem that takes into account what I learned from the last discussion. -- Trovatore 08:08, 20 June 2007 (UTC)
We have two meanings, and two articles. What's wrong with a dab header from each to the other? Why do we need to have everybody click through a dab page? Septentrionalis PMAnderson 18:06, 20 June 2007 (UTC)
Could someone take a look at the above page? It's newly created, and a little incoherent at the moment. I've wikified a couple of the links, but anyone who's familiar with the term might want to have a look. Thanks! -- simxp ( talk) 10:21, 20 June 2007 (UTC)
Over at integral, the fabulous Mathematics Collaboration of the Month, Loisel and I are discussing an image purporting to show the difference between Riemannian and Lebesgue integration. There is some prior unresolved discomfort with the image at Lebesgue integration, and the section of that article in which the image appears ends with the completely unacceptable remark: "See the discussion page." (May I just say, yuck.) The French, German, Russian, and Japanese pages do not use the image.
I'm keen on fostering intuition, and work hard to provide appropriate images. The question for all you analysts and pedagogues: Is this image correct and helpful? Please come share your views! Thanks.
(Feel free to guide evolution of the integral article in other ways as well; one prior view is here.) -- KSmrq T 18:00, 17 June 2007 (UTC)
I think this discussion is resolved with the following reference:
Loisel 22:10, 18 June 2007 (UTC)
Ordinarily, for math articles I'm not too much about "compromise" and "NPOV" and "no original research", because math is typically true or false. Unforunately in this case, it is quite obvious that there are strong opinions. In this situation, I will resort to WP:NPOV, WP:VER and WP:NOR. If you want to modify this part of the article, you are welcome to do it, subject to WP:NPOV, where you must phrase things in a neutral way, WP:VER, where you must cite a source which says pretty much exactly what you want to say, and WP:NOR, where you cannot come up with your own explanation.
As far as I know, Rudin and Lang have said nothing on this subject. You are welcome to find a source that says something else. You are also welcome to add something like "Rudin and Lang draw no such analogy between the Riemann and Lebesgue integral". Loisel 00:30, 19 June 2007 (UTC)
Ah, if you want, you can actually give a formula, by gluing the right bits of Folland, which does give a formula in terms of the horizontal slices of the function, like the picture. Loisel 00:47, 19 June 2007 (UTC)
I have two copies of Rudin (real and complex, and principles of analysis), which one were you looking at? Also, I am compiling a bevy of resources that talk about Lebesgue, I think I will stick all of the excerpts in my sandbox and link them here if there are no objections.-- Cronholm 144 00:53, 19 June 2007 (UTC)
R&C analysis is the one that discusses the Lebesgue integral (chapter I). I may be wrong, but your PoA one is probably the first year Riemann integral text, in which case it does not talk about the Lebesgue integral. I don't think his other books discuss the Lebesgue integral either. Loisel 01:07, 19 June 2007 (UTC)
Thanks, I will look there first. I have found four books so far and I am about halfway through my books.-- Cronholm 144 01:12, 19 June 2007 (UTC)
Here it is User:Cronholm144/Lebesgue. I gathered together all the resources that bothered to address the integration geometrically(many didn't). From my own reading, I can see how the picture could be misleading, if we are to include it, (I am leaning against it) we must be extremely careful about how we explain it. The possibility exists that the reader might just see the picture and and come away with a flawed understanding of the concept. It seems to me that it might be more of a liability than help.-- Cronholm 144 02:04, 19 June 2007 (UTC)
I feel some of Geometry Guy's comments need to be expanded on, particularly the comment on how the picture does not match the usual definition of the Lebesgue integration but does match an "unusual" definition. The picture, to me, clearly indicates a definition of the Lebesgue integral as an improper Riemann integral. I think Loisel would agree that what is "really going on" is we are taking limits of sums as the mesh of the subintervals of the range gets smaller; each sum has a term that looks like (length of subinterval with bottom endpoint y) * (measure of all domain points x that map to greater than y). The function that for every y gives the measure of all domain points x that map to greater than y is in fact a Riemann integrable function, as it is monotone decreasing.
Let me emphasize there is no need for simple functions here, because we are doing a Riemann integration. I think part of the problem in this whole discussion is that Loisel wants to do something like I just explained but also wants to use the machinery of simple functions. However, when using simple functions, the ahem, simplest thing to do is take the sum in the obvious way, i.e. each value of the simple function gets multiplied by measure of the value's preimage, not to create these "slabs" as in the picture. On the other hand, if one wants to think of the Lebesgue integral as the result of slicing up the range and doing an analogous thing to the Riemann integral, one can! It is then in fact a real (improper) Riemann integral. -- C S (Talk) 02:32, 19 June 2007 (UTC)
Illustration of a Riemann integral (top) and a Lebesgue integral? JPD ( talk) 10:58, 19 June 2007 (UTC)
The visual distinction here is almost invisible to me, and I know what point is being made. What's wrong with the traditional illustration of the Lebesgue integral, with horizontal slabs? Septentrionalis PMAnderson 02:15, 20 June 2007 (UTC)
To add something concrete to the discussion, see (green) Rudin's proof of theorem 1.17 on simple functions: every non-negative measurable function is the pointwise limit of a non-decreasing sequence of simple functions. The technique is to divide up the range into finer and finer rectangles. The link with Lebesgue integration is clear: monotone convergence. Silly rabbit 12:55, 20 June 2007 (UTC)
So here's an idea I'll throw out for a new image, which maybe can be hammered out into something agreeable to everyone. Draw a function that oscillates infinitely many times. Start with some up and down humps that get smaller and smaller, then put some "dot dot dots", then some more humps that get larger. When you draw horizontal slabs for a level, there will now be pieces that get smaller and smaller. So hopefully the idea that is conveyed is that for a slab level you need to multiply the height of a slab by a "width", but here the "width" must be some kind of measure thing.
This kind of picture would (hopefully) avoid the the "it's just inverting the function and Riemann integrating" pitfall that several people have mentioned. On the other hand, it illustrates a right way to interpret the Lebesgue integral as a Riemann integral that has been discussed above. In particular, it still captures this slicing up the range idea, while indicating that all the "nastiness" gets pushed to understanding measures of these preimage sets. Boy, I guess it'd be nice if I actually made a picture, but I'll leave that to someone more industrious for now. -- C S (Talk) 18:50, 20 June 2007 (UTC)
Interest in maintaining the portal seems to be at an all-time-low. I guess it had been heroically and almost single-handedly maintained by Fropuff for a while, but he appears to be less active on Wikipedia these days: Tompw was another vital contributor, who may or may not still be interested in the project. The "article of the week" would have broken last week and this week, if I had not repeated Golden ratio and then copied an old portal article (the Pythagorean theorem) into the latest slot.
Although I maintained the page in Fropuff's absense (with Fractal, Map projection and Golden ratio, and thanks to suggestions and advice from this forum), I doubt I am sufficiently heroic to keep this up on my own (and admire Fropuff all the more that he did). I would therefore propose to continue the process, which I started this week with Pythagorean theorem, to recycle old portal articles in order, omitting only those which no longer meet our standards. Comments welcome, volunteers even more so.
In addition to this proposal, there is a more general point I would like to make. One of the reasons I would prefer to reuse old portal articles (for the time being) is that it is extremely difficult to find additional mathematics articles which are suitable. Among our articles of Bplus quality and above, the ones that are sufficiently accessible and appealing for the portal have already been used. Some editors may have noticed that in {{ maths rating}}s, I am being a bit harsh on articles that are less accessible than they could be (and have tweaked the B and Bplus descriptors in the grading scheme to reflect this). This does not mean I believe that an article on an advanced mathematical topic should be accessible to the layman, only that each article should be as accessible as is appropriate for its content.
I encourage everyone to create more articles that could appear on the portal! Geometry guy 19:59, 19 June 2007 (UTC)
A "{{
prod}}" template has been added to the article
Somer pseudoprime, suggesting that it be deleted according to the
proposed deletion process. All contributions are appreciated, but the article may not satisfy Wikipedia's
criteria for inclusion, and the deletion notice explains why (see also "
What Wikipedia is not" and
Wikipedia's deletion policy). You may contest the proposed deletion by removing the {{dated prod}}
notice, but please explain why you disagree with the proposed deletion in your edit summary or on
its talk page. Also, please consider improving the article to address the issues raised. Even though removing the deletion notice will prevent deletion through the
proposed deletion process, the article may still be deleted if it matches any of the
speedy deletion criteria or it can be sent to
Articles for Deletion, where it may be deleted if
consensus to delete is reached.
I'm including this warning here rather than on the page creator's page because the creator was an anonymous IP address that hasn't been active since 2005, and since it's likely to get more appropriate attention here. — David Eppstein 04:06, 20 June 2007 (UTC)
I've nominated Non-universality in computation for deletion. See also Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mathematics/Archive 26#Help with article in "unconventional computation". -- Lambiam Talk 13:04, 20 June 2007 (UTC)
I always write
rather than
Should we have a norm prescribing this usage?
I think the usage above makes sense only if the list of references has an item labelled
Opinions? Michael Hardy 18:49, 23 June 2007 (UTC)
In response to a request made some time ago, I have, from time to time, been checking unsigned ratings and signing and dating them.
In the course of doing this I found a few FA-Class articles which don't, in my opinion, currently meet the featured article criteria (which is a requirement for FA-Class in the grading scheme). The articles I have in mind are Cryptography, Galileo Galilei and Monty Hall problem, which I reckon are about Bplus-Class.
Now I can't sign a rating I don't agree with, and I don't want to pass them over. Does anyone think these meet the criteria? Geometry guy 12:39, 23 June 2007 (UTC)
PS. There are also a few good articles I am not sure about: see Nash equilibrium, Best response and Probability theory.
PPS. Category:Mathematics articles with no comments now has less than 200 articles in it, so why not take a look and sign a maths rating today! :)
In addition to
Nash equilibrium,
Best response and
Probability theory,
Sylvester's sequence appears not to meet the
criteria. The problem is again
the lead, which at the moment is a definition/first section, rather than an overview. This should be fairly easy to fix, but I think other editors may be able to do a better job than I can. Anyone?
Geometry guy
15:28, 24 June 2007 (UTC)
Another exiting post by me, everyone! E for some inexplicable reason is in quite a poor state. Here are some things I have found:
These are not problem articles but all of the polytope articles are stubs.
Is some kind of merger in order?
Yes, I believe that would be appropriate, E just happened to be the catalyst. To start things off, should there be a merger? or are the free-standing stubs just an inevitability?-- Cronholm 144 10:32, 24 June 2007 (UTC)
Fair enough, I will treat WP:PAT articles the same way that I treat WP Numbers articles. I will think to myself "my goodness, that seems rather indiscriminate...oh well" and move on :)-- Cronholm 144 11:17, 24 June 2007 (UTC) P.S. Even E 7.5 is unmergeable?
I think these mostly belong to the category of articles that are mathematical enough to be on the List of mathematics articles but not relevant enough to WPM to need a maths rating. The one I'd be most tempted to rate is Edge of chaos; the one I'd be most tempted to remove from the List of mathematics articles is Eddy covariance (check "What links here" for that one). Geometry guy 11:21, 24 June 2007 (UTC)
Okay, as long as we are fine with them being listed(I though maybe some of them had slipped through the cracks).-- Cronholm 144 11:26, 24 June 2007 (UTC)
Okay then, I will try to expand it. Does anyone have a copy of his original paper? It was published in the journal of research for the national bureau of standards, I think.-- Cronholm 144 09:57, 24 June 2007 (UTC)
You don't have to worry about upsetting me, at least, but this article is a shame. EDST is an extremely important branch of contemporary set theory but our coverage is minimal. For example we don't have an article on Glimm–Effros dichotomy, a result on simple invariants (or lack thereof) in mathematics. Trovatore is an expert in the area, but I'll take a stab at expanding the article myself. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 13:06, 24 June 2007 (UTC)
Fair enough, Suggestions? .Notable sources? It hasn't changed much since 2003(!). I can go Googling and JSTORing but it would be good if I had an author or two. -- Cronholm 144 09:09, 24 June 2007 (UTC)
The article has an identity crisis, and you should ask Charles Matthews, who edited it recently, for suitable references. Lang's Diophantine Geometry would be good as a general reference. Arcfrk 10:13, 24 June 2007 (UTC)
Are you referring to Lang's Survey of Diophantine Geometry or are there two different books?
I will ask him (BTW, the threat of deletion is a great motivator, notice that no one has commented anywhere but the prod section...sigh, I merely propose that the articles be proposed to be deleted, if no one comments like at Jarnik's theorem, then I PROD them)--
Cronholm
144
10:30, 24 June 2007 (UTC)
I've added two clean-up tags to this. CBM has edited it, and may be able to come up with references. Geometry guy 11:41, 24 June 2007 (UTC)
I am only 50 articles in so there is more to come. :)-- Cronholm 144 08:28, 24 June 2007 (UTC)
By the way, I am willing to make most/all of these changes myself, I just need direction and consensus before editing, I would like a little more participation than at the J articles(are my constant posts scaring you away? :( ). Anyway, Cheers-- Cronholm 144 08:38, 24 June 2007 (UTC).
Cool link, :) but you know this just means more delightful comments from me. In all seriousness though, I plan to go through every math article pruning and posting as I go. I imagine this will take several months but the combined effect could burn people out(including me). The only worry that I have is that a subpage will go the way of the dodo and the math portal. I think that I will wait and see how it goes. In any case, I plan to post fewer articles next time. -- Cronholm 144 13:19, 24 June 2007 (UTC)
This looks like it might be a fairly interesting AFD discussion. I expect there may be conflicting opinions even among members of the WikiProject, so I thought I would advertise it here. -- C S (Talk) 14:34, 24 June 2007 (UTC)
After the discussion a couple of days ago, I programmed a database to facilitate the creation and use of consistent and correct and complete references like this (automatically generated) one:
Eisenbud, David. Commutative algebra with a view toward algebraic geometry. Heidelberg, New York: Springer-Verlag.
ISBN
0-387-94269-6. {{
cite book}}
: Check |authorlink=
value (
help)
You may find the first result of these efforts here.
Right now, there are three intertwined databases, one for books, one for authors and a third one for publishers. The design of the database is intended to meet the needs of WP references, e.g. books are linked to their (co)authors etc., hence wikilinks to authors will appear (if there are any). Besides this, the main distinction between the database and this Template of User:Diberri is, that one may look up a book by its title, which seems more reasonable than by its ISBN.
I think, at the current state it's reasonable to call this a feasibility study. I would like to hear people's ideas about it, whether it's a reasonable thing to pursue further. Obviously, right now the database is practically void, so besides further programming (which I volunteer to do), it needs willing people to inhale life to it, i.e. data. This may probably be done automatically or semi-automatically, using the references which already exist in WP articles (or Math articles or whatever). At the moment this latter feature is not yet programmed, other reasonable things like looking up the ISBN database when one has the ISBN of a book, adding a similar database for articles in journals etc. are also not yet done. If the database is considered to be useful to you guys, I will implement these shortly, as well as other ideas emerging of your impressions. So, tell me what you think. Thanks. Jakob.scholbach 03:41, 18 June 2007 (UTC)
Thanks. Is it possible to parse the Mathematics WP articles and automatically retrieve all the contained references? Jakob.scholbach 17:04, 19 June 2007 (UTC)
{{
citation}}
templates? (I hope!) --
KSmrq
T
02:58, 20 June 2007 (UTC)Can I say that I really detest the inversion of names in references? I really find it a negative, searching the site as much as I do, to have to search "Gauss, C. F." and so on with all the variants of "C. F. Gauss". In other words, it doubles what you have to do with an exhaustive search. The virtues of inversion seem to be mostly in the world where one does searches by scanning down columns. In other words, this is a paper habit. Charles Matthews 21:01, 25 June 2007 (UTC)
A certain User:Karada has been linking every occurrence of the phrase natural topology to the non-existent article natural topology. I've reverted a few of them, but there are many more articles to go through. To the best of my knowledge, natural topology typically does not have a prescribed meaning (in the sense of natural transformation) although I can easily imagine some uses where the term is "natural" in the categorical sense. Since there is no article on the subject, is there a consensus here that these edits should be reverted? Silly rabbit 19:50, 24 June 2007 (UTC)
Another possibility is to write an article, such as natural (mathematics) covering the basic (imprecise) uses of the word natural in mathematics. I have no idea what such an article might look like, though. Thoughts? Volunteers? Silly rabbit 20:02, 24 June 2007 (UTC)
I think it's usually a bad idea to write such articles, but if our hand is forced, then we have to be very upfront and clear about the fact that the term has no precise meaning (and hope no one asks for a citation, because hardly anyone bothers to note explicitly that terms with no precise meaning have no precise meaning). This is a very dangerous situation and can easily result in disaster articles like definable real number that can neither be easily fixed nor deleted. -- Trovatore 20:27, 24 June 2007 (UTC)
By the way, if by chance Karada is right and the paper from the Springer journal does intend a precise meaning for the phrase "natural topology", then it must be a meaning from some specific subfield of functional analysis, and any article written about it should have a title with a parenthetical disambig phrase for that subfield. Otherwise there's the danger that the usual usages of the phrase, which have no precise meaning, will be inappropriately linked to the article for that precise meaning. -- Trovatore 20:35, 24 June 2007 (UTC)
A few thoughts:
My impression of the topic is that the meaning of "natural" is sociological or psychological: it has nothing to do with coarseness or making things continuous, it just means that there is one topology that most experts on the topic would pick as the most appropriate to use. I think that trying to nail the term down any further would be a mistake. The best we can hope for is a stubby article that says as much and points to a widely-varying collection of uses of "natural topology" in the literature to back up that point. But to do so would most likely be original research by synthesis. — David Eppstein 06:19, 25 June 2007 (UTC)
I wonder if it would help to keep in mind a distinction between "a natural topology" and "the natural topology". In quite a few contexts people write "Equip it with the natural topology". It seems to me that something quite specific is meant here, and a link to an article which explains that could be helpful. On the other hand, in the ordinal example, the language "any ordinal has a natural topology: the order topology" is quite different. Here we don't want to link to natural topology, only to topological space and order topology: if we had to link the word "natural", then probably the best we could do is link it to wiktionary!
PS. Just curious, and I haven't thought it through, but what are the left and right order topologies in this case? Geometry guy 11:05, 25 June 2007 (UTC)
I have noticed lead problems with most mathematics articles, at least as far as the general editing advice at WP:LEAD goes. For instance, they often fail to give an adequate summary of the article. I realize that there are possibly good reasons for not abiding by some of the lead recommendations in many math articles in the spirit of Wikipedia:Make technical articles accessible. Does the math project offer any more specific guidelines on the lead? Silly rabbit 14:46, 25 June 2007 (UTC)
Perhaps we should start a new thread, since clearly my question doesn't have an easier answer (along the lines of "Why yes, SR. That was discussed 8 months ago in [this thread]. See [this new policy recommendation].") A case study is my recent foray into bringing exterior algebra up to scratch. The lead has definite problems: it aims to give both a summary of the article and to be partially accessible to a general audience. I think its clear that these objectives are incompatible here (unless some more brilliant editor wants to take a stab at it.) Silly rabbit 20:08, 25 June 2007 (UTC)
I'm inclined to say any mathematics article that begins with the word "Let..." is horribly wrong in its intro. My favorite example of this sort of thing remains an article on something other than mathematics. It's called schismatic temperament. Given the usual meanings of those two words, I guessed that it was about a psychiatric disorder. Nothing in the first sentence (when I first looked at it) told the lay reader that it was not about chemistry, politics, fiction writing, etc. I changed it so that it starts with the words "In music,...". Such a brief phrase, but worth a lot. (Of course, there's more to lead sections than that.) Michael Hardy 22:35, 26 June 2007 (UTC)
User:Gregbard has created a new {{ Logic}} template and put it at the bottom of some logic articles, including a few in math logic. Now, I have to say it's quite a bit slicker than the navigational templates we've seen in the past. It's relatively unobtrusive, just a thin horizontal bar across the bottom of the article with a "show" button in the right-hand corner. If you click on "show" it pops up a bunch of subfields and related articles.
There's at least one of his categorizations I don't entirely agree with, but that can be dealt with. The question is, is this sufficiently different from the nav templates we've rejected in the past, to reconsider whether to allow it? I'm undecided myself. -- Trovatore 08:58, 27 June 2007 (UTC)
I've recently started to receive emails containing "temporary passwords" to my WP login account. I beleive that these are what one gets if one checks the "I forgot my passord" box on the WP login page. As it happens, I haven't forgotten it, and someone else is making these requests. Being slightly paranoid, I am concerned that someone is hoping to catch one of these emails in-flight (they're mailed out in cleartext, so the temporary password is clearly visible), and is thus hoping to hack my account. Any recommendations on how I should deal with this? Ignore? Retry? Abort? linas 23:56, 27 June 2007 (UTC)
Hey everyone, June is almost over and it is time for a new collaboration of the month WP:MATHCOTM and we need some votes so we can decide what article will receive this high honor. Mosey on down and place your vote or go ahead and suggest a previously unlisted article, all contributions are welcome!-- Cronholm 144 22:15, 28 June 2007 (UTC)
P.S. I think this diff [7] demonstrate the raw power of a good collaboration. Thanks again to everyone who worked hard on Integral
I have discovered, to my great surprise, that there is no Category:Symplectic geometry. All symplectic articles are being filed under Category:Symplectic topology instead, even though the vast majority of them is really about geometry. I was wondering what people here think of renaming the category? Arcfrk 06:12, 26 June 2007 (UTC)
I thought the point was that Dusa McDuff said the subject could now be called symplectic topology; and many people were going along with that. Just creating a supercat Category:Symplectic geometry, and moving out things that would be annoying to have in Category:Symplectic topologyy, seems an obvious solution. Charles Matthews 14:04, 29 June 2007 (UTC)
A discussion on the reference desk brought to my attention the existence of two similar articles: (1) adjoint endomorphism, to which "adjoint representation of a Lie algebra" redirects, and (2) adjoint representation. Could someone with a little time and interest look into this apparent duplication? -- KSmrq T 04:48, 29 June 2007 (UTC)
This article has had a merge tag on for a while now, and it's beyond my knowledge to assess it. Could someone here take a look. Cheers Kevin 08:38, 29 June 2007 (UTC)