I'm thinking that we might want to reorganize slightly a set of articles. In particular:
Notice that we have Metric space and Metric (mathematics) both. I think that, if it isn't justified to have both an article for the (quasi)(pseudo)(hemi)(semi)(grape-flavoured)metric as well as the corresponding space, the main article ought to be for the (...)metric rather than the space, as the metric is the more 'basic' object.
It wouldn't really be much work to rewrite the articles to match this, but I'd like opinions on whether it's a good idea before I do such a thing. Also, it seems to me that regardless of whether these are to be moved as I suggested, we need to use consistent terminology throughout this set of articles. I can look into fixing this later today. -- Sopoforic 11:51, 25 February 2007 (UTC)
Since Oleg included Category:Coding theory in the list of math articles a few days ago, I've been trying to review all of those new articles, to be sure they make sense. LT code doesn't make much sense to me, the way it's written. I'd appreciate an independent review by somebody here who understands algebraic coding theory.
From reading a little bit about "Luby Transforms" from other sources, it seems the best way to describe them is to think of the encoding and decoding process in terms of the "Exclusive Or" operation. Since the exclusive or of any bit string with itself is identically zero, it's pretty easy to understand how this randomized encoding strategy works. But I sure can't get that out of the existing article, no matter how hard I try.
I think I understand LT codes well enough to rewrite the article. But I'd appreciate some reassurance from someone who has previous experience with them. Thanks! DavidCBryant 01:02, 26 February 2007 (UTC)
I nominated Category:Important publication and all its subcategories for deletion at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2007 February 28. Comments welcome. Oleg Alexandrov ( talk) 03:21, 28 February 2007 (UTC)
I notice that Independent set is redirected to by Maximum independent set, and has 30-40 references. Since Maximal independent set is somewhat stubby and has only one reference (excluding lists), would it make sense also to merge and redirect this one? If not, I'll add enough of a definition to Independent set to refer back to it. Hv 07:11, 28 February 2007 (UTC)
The following four articles:
overlap and should be merged. Statisticians call it data-snooping bias when it's accidental, data dredging if it's intentional (and data mining, before that term got taken over for something else). Testing hypotheses suggested by the data describes the same thing, and also doesn't seem to be a commonly used phrase. Overfitting is what it's called if an algorithm did it (through overparameterization) rather than a human (through pattern recognition), and indeed what the machine learning community calls it. The machine learning community have studied overfitting ad nauseum since it's the problem with tuning parameters to any supervised learning algorithm. In machine learning you always partition data into a training set and testing set, and even use cross-validation (the data dredging article calls using two sets of data "randomization"; "partitioning" would be a better descriptor).
I can see keeping overfitting separate since it's an extreme version of data-snooping bias, but the other three are definitely mergeable. Thoughts? — Quarl ( talk) 2007-02-28 08:49Z
Hello everyone. I was wondering if I couldn't ask for a little assistance from you fine people over here to look over our data at Wikipedia:WikiProject_Vandalism_studies/Study1. While the math isn't hard obviously, something might catch your skilled eyes that we'd miss. Also, if you have any suggestions of other things we should do with the numbers (been a while since college adv stats) we'd love to hear it on the talk page. Thanks you guys. JoeSmack Talk 17:57, 28 February 2007 (UTC)
The effort to remove Infinite monkey theorem from FA has resumed at Wikipedia:Featured article review/Infinite monkey theorem, despite an admission that the original nomination is not based on an FA criterion and near-cons4ensus that the citation complaints are groundless. I think we have three courses:
This is not, of course, an exclusive or. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 04:30, 1 March 2007 (UTC)
I've just stumbles across Wikipedia:WikiProject League of Copyeditors, it might be possible to enlist their help in getting keeping FA status. -- Salix alba ( talk) 19:43, 5 March 2007 (UTC)
Reviewers should keep the criteria for featured articles in mind when supporting or opposing a nomination. However, please note that (unlike actual featured articles) A-Class articles are not expected to fully meet all of the criteria; an objection should indicate a substantive problem with the article. In particular, objections over relatively minor issues of writing style or formatting should be avoided at this stage; a comprehensive, accurate, well-sourced, and decently-written article should qualify for A-Class status even if it could use some further copyediting.
which seems quite sensible. -- Salix alba ( talk) 09:17, 2 March 2007 (UTC)
Getting back to Infinite monkey theorem, I announce that my work here is done. The benefit solely from deleting the phrases "the chance is not zero, it must be one", "each individual monkey is finite", and "probably an urban myth" already justify the effort. Obviously I also expect the article to now survive FARC. Melchoir 09:01, 3 March 2007 (UTC)
How can I draw geometric diagrams to include in Wikipedia (with free software)? For example, I would like to be able to make diagrams like those in Penrose tiling. Thanks. JRSpriggs 09:03, 2 March 2007 (UTC)
One of Oleg Alexandrov's bots automatically updates the table Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Mathematics articles by quality statistics. Here is a static version from when this message was posted:
Mathematics articles |
Importance | ||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Top | High | Mid | Low | Total | |||
Quality | |||||||
FA | 5 | 3 | 2 | 2 | 12 | ||
A | 9 | 6 | 1 | 16 | |||
GA | 2 | 7 | 7 | 16 | |||
B | 50 | 47 | 31 | 13 | 141 | ||
Start | 22 | 30 | 30 | 29 | 111 | ||
Stub | 5 | 16 | 30 | 51 | |||
Unassessed | |||||||
Total | 88 | 98 | 87 | 74 | 347 |
There is no line for B+ articles here, because WP 1.0 does not include B+ as one of their ratings - it is a project-specific rating. There are currently 38 math articles rated B+, which is about 10% of all rated articles. The math rating template already puts all B+ articles into both the B+ and B-class categories, so B+ articles are included in the B line of the table. But this duplication does not seem to be well known.
The upshot of this is that when an article is rated B+, it is not easy to find that out except by browsing categories. There are several options here:
I am posting this message here to gather opinions about what to do. CMummert · talk 16:22, 1 March 2007 (UTC)
Here is an example of the type of thing that can be done with a project-specific table. Unlike WP 1.0 bot, this program sorts out the B+ articles and uses backlinks to sort the articles by field. Of course there is room for improvement. CMummert · talk 20:21, 1 March 2007 (UTC)
{{Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Table}}
The central question here is: What ratings are useful for the project? Let's assume that that ratings themselves are useful, so the question is just how many different grades we need and what they mean. Right now, there are 5 that we can assign, which I understand as follows:
I find it hard to distinguish between Start class and B class. What criteria could be used to distinguish between Start, B and a new B- class? Wouldn't it be easier to just add some guidance like "When in doubt between B class and Start class, go with Start class"? CMummert · talk 14:30, 2 March 2007 (UTC)
I made the following change to the Integer factorization:
An IP editor reverted this leaving this comment on the edit summary: The empty product is 1 (See explaination in the article on the fundamental theorem of arithmetic) [6]
I don't understand how this makes my contribution incorrect. I understand that 1 is the product of no numbers (like how anything to the zero power is 1). But the question of prime factorization is whether a number can be written as the product of prime numbers, so how does that fact say anything about whether 1 can be represented in such a way?-- Jersey Devil 17:52, 2 March 2007 (UTC)
If you think the prime factorization of 1 is confusing, just try thinking about the prime factorization of 0. It's divisible by every prime power! — David Eppstein 19:06, 2 March 2007 (UTC)
This discussion highlights a phenomenon we've seen many times before. (Until recently, I was involved in a similar discussion about 0^0 at the page Exponentiation.) The point was made there, and I'll make it here, that we here at Wikipedia need not argue about the logic of any given convention. We report what is out there in the literature. On the Exponentiation page, we have a section on 0^0 that describes two different conventions in the literature without judging either as being correct or incorrect. (We mathematicians have a hard time admitting that sometimes two different statements can both be correct, Continuum hypothesis aside, since they are matters of convention.) Why not the same thing here? If there are books that say that 1 can be written as the product of primes, fine. Just report the source of the statement. Alongside it, we absolutely have to report that most books restrict any such statement to integers n > 1, whether they "need to" or not. VectorPosse 23:51, 2 March 2007 (UTC)
For a source, see Hardy and Wright: Number Theory. As far as I know, there is no source which denies that 1 is an empty prime product. Editors can write around this convention if they like, but other editors are likely to follow it; it is simplest. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 03:49, 3 March 2007 (UTC)
Strayer's Elementary Number Theory states the Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic only for integers strictly greater than 1. Then there is an exercise explaining why the statement of the theorem would be (should be?) untrue for 1. So there's the opposing sources I mentioned above. By the way, I'm not sure a book has to deny explicitly that 1 is an empty prime to be a source for the convention that we should restrict attention to integers greater than 1. I think it's also a matter of debate which convention is simpler. (Simpler in terms of the necessary hypotheses, or simpler for the lay reader?) But maybe this discussion has reached the point at which it should be taken to the talk page. VectorPosse 06:10, 3 March 2007 (UTC)
I believe it would be a good idea to add a page with formulas used in mathematics. They could be grouped into categories of different areas of math with explanations and examples of the equation. This would be of great help for many students.-- Trd89 23:16, 2 March 2007 (UTC)
This site would be used for formulas and not identities. for example what (a+b)3 factors down to-- Trd89 03:04, 3 March 2007 (UTC)
Essentially, you are asking us to take virtually all the articles on mathematics (since they all contain formulas) and strip out the words that give context and meaning to the formulas, then combine the resulting mess into one MONSTER article which be would thousands of times longer than the limit for an article. This is the dumbest idea yet. JRSpriggs 12:34, 3 March 2007 (UTC)
I think the idea to add formula only-pages would cause unnecessary redundancy. The formulae are already where they belong to in an encyclopedia — in those articles that handle their topic. Ocolon 18:01, 3 March 2007 (UTC)
See also Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of well known mathematical formulas. — Quarl ( talk) 2007-03-04 09:57Z
I have made the request elsewhere, but am copying a version here:
When a formula is described on Wikipedia, a one or two sentence non-mathematical introduction is included - aimed at persons who are outside their field with the given topic.
"It was developed by [abc] in [date]. This formula is used in the area of [xyz] and its purpose is to do [def]."
(Can someone archive part of this talkpage - getting slightly long).
Jackiespeel 18:54, 5 March 2007 (UTC)
How feasible would it be to create either a graph of theorems and axioms or a crossindexed table of examples, like the one at the back of "Counterexamples in Topology"? I know it would be quite an undertaking, but either would be pretty great. Prc314 23:40, 6 March 2007 (UTC)
I wanted to help, and looked at the Wikipedia:Pages_needing_attention/Mathematics page. Is it possible to sort these items according to topic, i.e. algebra analysis etc. This would help to guide people (like me) with only special knowledge to the articles needing help much quicker. Thanks. Jakob.scholbach 02:06, 7 March 2007 (UTC)
Could someone review Structure theorem for finitely generated modules over a principal ideal domain? It has been recently created and caught by our bot as copyvio, but apparently it is a false positive (and would like a member of this project to review it and decide if it is notable enough for Wikipedia (as the only reference is a PDF). If it is suitable, please tag the article appropriately. If it is not, please prod, afd or inform me so that I can proceed. Thanks in advance! -- ReyBrujo 03:08, 7 March 2007 (UTC)
Recently there has been a small media storm (e.g. [7]) over the revelation that Essjay, a bureaucrat and Wikia community manager, has misrepresented himself, in particular his credentials as a professor of theology at a university. Jimbo Wales initially stated that he regarded this as only utilizing a pseudonym; after learning more details, Jimbo came to the conclusion that Essjay had used his false credentials to bolster his arguments in editorial discussions and so asked him to resign his positions of trust (which he did). Essjay has subsequently left Wikipedia [8].
Jimbo has on his talk page proposed an optional procedure similar to Amazon's "real name" mechanism. Editors wishing to verify their credentials may do so. Jimbo envisions a related policy whereby someone stating unverified credentials would somehow be discouraged for doing so.
Now what does have to do with us? And why am I posting these comments? Well, I've been reading the comments on Jimbo's talk page with regards to this proposal. It struck me that there are several issues that our community is quite unique and perhaps suggestive of a model of how the ideal verification system should work.
Let me basically break up these issues into two groups: 1) trust-based editing, 2) dealing with cranks.
1) There have been arguments against Jimbo's proposal because people understand this (perhaps wrongly) to be about using credentials to bolster one's editing, e.g. "Your edit should be reverted because you don't have a Ph.D. and I do!" I'll try and abstain as much as possible from getting into the issues of whether this is a correct understanding or not of the ramifications of the proposal; my desire is only to explain why our WikiProject experience is relevant to the proposal. In our WikiProject we have a number of credentialed (or near-credentialed :-) ) experts. Somehow we manage to give these people the necessary respect without kow-towing to their authority, and conversely these expert editors manage to not act like such, but utilize policy to justify their edits and decisions.
One explanation for this is that such experts manage to show their expertise in their edits and are generally good at learning the relevant policies in a timely fashion. The expertise is viewed favorably by other editors, who often make the transition to Wikipedia easier for these editors. Speaking for myself, I judge an editor based on his/her edits, but find that credentials often help in understanding someone's background and expertise.
Another explanation is that we are sufficiently insulated from the rest of the community (including a number of trolls and vandals) that we don't have the same issues. This explanation is partly bolstered by the increasingly frequent disconnect between mathematics editors and long-standing non-mathematical editors in discussions on citations, articles reviews, etc. On the other hand, my experience with the second set of issues suggests that the occasional problematic editors we do deal with often require as much effort or even more effort than non-math editors deal with.
2) A number of project members have experience (either directly or indirectly) of cranks, particularly on Wikipedia. A common argument going on right now on Jimbo's talk page is whether policy by itself can handle cranks adequately. Some suggest that the use of credentials can be useful for say, mediators, in determining crankiness. It seems to me that some project members have dealt with such cranks for often very extended amounts of times (with some ongoing). This suggests that it is not as easy for experts to deal with cranks as some have asserted in response to Jimbo's proposal. In my experience, the hardest cranks to handle are the ones that offer myriad citations, sometimes to hard to obtain documents, that can take days or weeks to investigate (by going to the university library, waiting for interlibrary loan, or whatever) and refute.
I think it would be helpful for people to go to Jimbo's talk page and explain their experience, particularly with respect to these two kinds of issues. Somehow we've struck a right balance between relying on credentials but also on a person's body of editing. I think this is something the rest of Wikipedia can learn from, or at least to consider why it may not be viable for all of Wikipedia. -- C S (Talk) 21:04, 6 March 2007 (UTC)
Both of these pages begin by suggesting that the design-of-experiments usage is the principal topic of the article. That is ridiculous. Then they treat the usage that everyone learns in high school, and independent variable gives a stupid definition by non-essentials: the variable plotted on the x-axis.
Also, there should be a conspicuous link to statistical independence, since that is where the topic of independent random variables is treated.
I'm leaning toward (1) redirecting "dependent variable" to "independent variable" and making the latter to into a disambiguation page.
Another problem is how to direct the many links to these pages. I suspect some of them are already pointing to an inappropriate place.
Michael Hardy 22:54, 9 March 2007 (UTC)
It's not compmletely unrelated, but it's certainly quite a different thing. Hence the need for a disambiguation page. Michael Hardy 02:54, 11 March 2007 (UTC)
OK, I've reorganized it, and NOT as a disambiguation page. I moved "independent variable" to dependent and independent variables and redirected "dependent variable" to the latter, after pasting some material from "dependent variable" into "dependent and independent variables". I put in a dablink to statistical independence, where the concept of independent random variables is treated. Michael Hardy 23:49, 11 March 2007 (UTC)
In lots of math articles in the Wikipedia, theorems etc. are stated without proper reference. (E.g. the properties of Étale cohomology). In research articles, ideally all statements (except those the author believes to be known by everybody) are cited very concretely, i.e. [..., Theorem ...] etc. I would propose this for Wikipedia articles, too. What do you think? Jakob.scholbach 05:32, 8 March 2007 (UTC)
I've finally got round to creating a Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Resources page. The aim of this page is to list good sources to help in referencing of mathematics articles. -- Salix alba ( talk) 09:44, 12 March 2007 (UTC)
A raw version of a translator is available, by joint effort of User:Oleg Alexandrov and myself. Jmath666 06:57, 25 February 2007 (UTC)
If you insist on getting inline TeX out of this thing, can you at least use \scriptstyle when it's inline? Michael Hardy 03:15, 28 February 2007 (UTC)
By the way, is there some permanent place to make a link on Wikipedia to such tools? Jmath666 22:18, 8 March 2007 (UTC)
There is now a separate user page for the translation. Jmath666 00:09, 15 March 2007 (UTC)
I've started something called the Mathematics Construction WikiProject (not in development yet), which focuses on making sure that information on an article is verifiable and attributed with reliable sources. If we can do something like this on this WikiProject, it'd be great! Sr13 ( T| C) 03:03, 10 March 2007 (UTC)
Is there any consensus how to format categories? Sometime one sees (mathbf) or A, sometimes (mathcal). Jakob.scholbach 22:49, 13 March 2007 (UTC)
Has anyone ever heard of this? Or should we put it up for deletion as un-notable? JRSpriggs 06:18, 22 February 2007 (UTC)
Oh, a propos of nothing much, I do recall the "J" notation for the integers, from high school. I think the Houghton–Mifflin series of books use it. -- Trovatore 08:42, 27 February 2007 (UTC)
I removed the Werdnabot invocation. I have been following Werdnabot closely; and it just has too many bugs that manifest themselves in unexpected ways. Like on Tuesday, it did not put any edit summaries into its edits for no apparent reason. Thus we go back to manual archiving. JRSpriggs 08:10, 7 March 2007 (UTC)
2 or 3 years ago, before Wikipedia was as popular/well known/... as now, I looked at the Mathematics and Computer Science articles and was extremely impressed. I remember noting a correction of a fault in a Taylor/MacLaurin series. It was no more than minor proof reading but within a day somebody had replied "True, why didn't you correct it yourself?"
A couple of years on it all seems to be going seriously downhill. Hard to believe but it just might be better to divide the subject into "Mathematics" and "Popular Mathematics". In the Mathematics section there are NO links to JAVA/COBOL/IGNORANT animations - that sort of nonsense can be viewed in "Popular Mathematics".
2 more possible rules -
Colin M Davidson 62.251.121.16 20:01, 12 March 2007 (UTC)
Klein's bottle (or surface) is historically important. There should be some reference in any self respecting body of knowledge. - More so if it has lead to an interesting branch of mathematics. I am very disturbed by the "silly picture". The picture is 2nd rate (JAVA/COBOL?) and very misleading. We can only be grateful for the writer's text - something along the lines of "But don't try to do this in 3 dimensions."
Restricting pictures to Euclidean geometry is clearly extreme but it seems a better starting point than accepting anything that Tom, Dick or Harry throws into the mill.
Colin M Davidson 62.251.121.16 20:42, 15 March 2007 (UTC)
When you put quotation marks around the words "silly picture", that means either that someone called it that or that someone would call it that but you wouldn't. Yet your words make it appear that that's not what you meant. Michael Hardy 23:50, 15 March 2007 (UTC)
I can't tell which picture Colin M. Davidson is talking about since they all look good to me. The top one is the standard image of this particular surface, looks like it was done with Mathematica, illustrates exactly the key feature of this immersion. Aside from the two other Mathematica pictures, we have a square-folding diagram, a photograph of a "real" Klein bottle, and the Futurama comic. I find the other two Mathematica pictures quite useful, though the one illustrating dissection of the Klein bottle into two Möbius strips could, I suppose, use a better angle; in particular it's nice to have alternative embeddings shown in the article since, as it is impossible to depict the surface accurately in three, let alone two dimensions, and only one picture. Really, the pictures may be the best part of the article, especially for someone interested just in an overview of the surface. Ryan Reich 00:24, 16 March 2007 (UTC)
From Colin M Davidson's other edits and remarks (e.g., at Talk:Dijkstra's algorithm#EWD would have cried) I deduce that he might be referring to the 'external links' of the Klein bottle article. (Indeed, they lead to one animation and one home page.) Colin, if this is correct, you could have said so from the beginning... The natural thing was to look for pictures in the article itself, since this is what your text seemed to indicate. JoergenB 20:17, 17 March 2007 (UTC)
Is there a page depicting all commonly used symbols like ℤ or ∪ (not in the < math >... < / math> environment) -- and also how to type them? It always takes me an eternity to find them on other pages like union (set theory) etc. Thanks. Jakob.scholbach 16:13, 15 March 2007 (UTC)
No, it wouldn't always be better. If we were using TeX in the normal way, it would be better. But often on Wikipedia when TeX is inline, it gets misaligned or is far too big with comical effect. Michael Hardy 23:48, 15 March 2007 (UTC)
I nominated one of us, CMummert, for admin. If you are familiar with his work, you can comment/vote at Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/CMummert. Oleg Alexandrov ( talk) 03:16, 16 March 2007 (UTC)
New user Greg Kuperberg is giving Grubber a hard time at Talk:Cyclic group, arguing about the best notation to use in the article. It seems Greg Kuperberg wants to push for a certain notation because he uses it and it is used in some current research papers.
My understanding of wikipedia policy is that we always use the most common notation. We copy standards, we do not create them. For articles in mathematics, the most common notation is the notation used in authoritative textbooks on the subject. Perhaps someone can point me to a relevant wikipedia policy or provide some backup for Grubber. MathMartin 16:50, 16 March 2007 (UTC)
See list of cycles and Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of cycles. Michael Hardy 22:24, 18 March 2007 (UTC)
As several editors have expressed an interest in it, I have created a proposal for an A-class review process for this project. If you are interested, please discuss it at the associated talk page. CMummert · talk 00:36, 6 March 2007 (UTC)
I have moved the proposal to Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/A-class rating. Please feel free to nominate articles! CMummert · talk 13:08, 20 March 2007 (UTC)
We've been having a discussion on calibration of the mathematical importance rating system over on Talk:Penrose tiling that might be of more general interest to the participants here. — David Eppstein 18:40, 17 March 2007 (UTC)
David: Your proposed criteria at Talk:Penrose tiling seem excellent at first, but I am worried about them. It seems to me that the principal criterion you have offered for judging the importance of an article is whether you would be embarassed to find that the article was not in the encyclopedia. This seems initially like a reasonable idea, particularly since your examples all elicit about the same level of embarrassment for me as you say they would for you. But I worry that not everyone will be similarly embarrassed by the same things.
If personal embarrassment is used as a criterion, and if there is a consensus about the degree to which individuals would be embarrassed by the hypothetical ommission of articles, then all is well. But I fear that using embarrassment as a criterion will only turn the vague and subjective arguments about "importance" that we have now into equally vague and subjective arguments about personal embarrassment. Nothing will have been gained, and perhaps it will be even worse, since the terms of the discussion will encourage participants to rant and flame about about their personal emotions. Consider how much worse it would be to describe the importance of an article in terms of the rage and fury you would feel if the article were omitted---it should be clear that this way of framing the issue would be unlikely to promote respectful, rational discussions. Using embarrassment as the measure, rather than of rage, would ameliorate the potential problem here, but not eliminate it, I think.
I do not have a useful alternative to offer, but I am concerned that bringing embarrassment into the official guidlines is a step in the wrong direction, and could turn out to be a grave mistake. I hope that the WP:M community can come up with something less likely to promote flame wars. -- Dominus 13:50, 19 March 2007 (UTC)
The E8 (mathematics) lie group hit the news today, which coverage of a full enumeration on the BBC and slashdot, see talk page for links. The article is very technical and could do with some attept to describe it in laymans terms, especially the meaning of the new result. -- Salix alba ( talk) 20:04, 19 March 2007 (UTC)
I was browsing through the list of vital articles, and found out to my dismay that most (almost all) content has been removed from Probability theory. I have already left some comments at its talk page, but I would like additionally to alert as wide a circle of mathematics editors as possible. Arcfrk 03:25, 21 March 2007 (UTC)
Serious work has started on Probability theory. However, we need experts in probability theory and/or statistics to map out the article (urgent) and contribute high quality content (as the time permits). Arcfrk 04:10, 22 March 2007 (UTC)
I would like to attempt to rewrite Sobolev space. This article, which is quite important, is written in a messy manner (in my opinion). Some points which I would like to stress are described in User:Igny/Sobolev space (they are somewhat mentioned in the article, but like I said it is a mess). In particular I would like to stress the connection to the Fourier transform of distributions, which, by the way, deserves a separate article in my opinion. I will appreciate any input from other editors, in particular a blessing to proceed. ( Igny 19:17, 21 March 2007 (UTC))
Well, I would have to say that the draft article is not written in a very friendly style. We are constantyly asked to have more explanation for the general reader. There is also a constant pressure from experts to remove verbal explanations, replacing them by 'precise' statements and formulae. The difficulty is that articles then lose all chance of access by non-experts. It is fairly typical that an explanatory comment
was removed by someone in January 2006 claiming it was 'original research'.
Charles Matthews 08:02, 22 March 2007 (UTC)
Yes explanatory statements for non-experts are needed but the butterfly was a bad one no matter how catchy it sounds; please see the discussion why it was removed. And indeed it was missing references. The reason why Sobolev spaces exist is simply that solutions of PDEs are in general not in the classical spaces. For example, in 2D and 3D linear elasticity, there are functions with finite deformation energy (=solutions of the elasticity equations; Nature settles to the lowest energy state) that are not bounded and so not even in . One can construct such function as a special kind of spike (this makes a nice picture for the non-specialist), which also shows why point constraints make no sense in >1D, even if engineers merrily keep putting point constraints in their Finite element models all the time. Jmath666 15:21, 22 March 2007 (UTC)
I agree. It is very important to make things comprehensible. I do not think the butterfly statement was helpful heuristics, though. More like an attempt to push the right buttons than to give a clue about the subject. And for me at least it sounds so specialized I would have liked a reference. Jmath666 18:25, 22 March 2007 (UTC)
I don't have time to write anything just now, but I think th first chapter of Susanne C. Brenner and L. Ridgeway Scott, "Mathematical Theory of Finite Element Methods", Springer-Verlag, 1994 ( ISBN 0-387-94193-2) is a particularly nice introduction to Sobolev spaces. It ought to be accessible to anyone having had a first course in analysis at the level of, say, Rudin or Hewett and Stromberg. Greg Woodhouse 18:34, 22 March 2007 (UTC)
Hello again! Wikipedia:WikiProject_Vandalism_studies's first study is finally about finished. We loved you guys' help a few weeks ago in giving some eyeball time to how the study was composed math wise, and now that we're almost done, we're wondering if you wouldn't mind checking over the results. The study's end results themselves are here, and the discussion of what this means for the conclusions is here. We are keeping in mind that measuring is easy, but knowing what you are measuring is the hard part. Any and all comments, critiques and math angles not considered would be much, much appreciated. We want this to be as tip-top as possible before reporting our findings to the community at large. Thanks everyone. JoeSmack Talk 23:59, 24 March 2007 (UTC)
I'm curious what the math community has to say about the proposed merger of several key Wikipedia principles into one: Wikipedia talk:Attribution/Community_discussion. I can't see that it really changes much about the way we do things around here, but I would like to know if there are issues to consider. (Would we have to fight battles over inline citations all over again, for example?) VectorPosse 10:02, 25 March 2007 (UTC)
To KSmrq ( talk · contribs): Since you appear to be unable to refrain from accidentally deleting the comments of other users, which you did again to Lambiam and Oleg Alexandrov recently, I suggest that you make a practice of checking the revision history after you save your edits and immediately repairing any damage you caused. JRSpriggs 12:10, 25 March 2007 (UTC)
I am not the one who is being irrational here. Nor am I asking you to do anything which I do not already do myself — I almost always check the revision history after I do an edit to be sure that I did what I meant to do. I would also point out that your edits (together with the bugs you mentioned) have caused this problem as often as all other editors on this project put together. A possible factor in causing this is that your edits are often very lengthy, providing more opportunity for edit conflicts. If you want this to happen less often, you could write your messages off-line and then cut and paste them in quickly to reduce the window for edit conflicts. JRSpriggs 05:17, 26 March 2007 (UTC)
I see a reference in Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Newsroom/Suggestions#Academic paper on Wikipedia to a research paper "Assessing the value of cooperation in Wikipedia" by Dennis M. Wilkinson and Bernardo A. Huberman. [13]. The paper finds that article quality is correlated with both number of edits and number of distinct editors. Is it just me, or is some of the mathematics and statistical techniques a bit off? -- Lambiam Talk 14:05, 26 March 2007 (UTC)
The recent welcoming of a new mathematics editor led me to wonder, what would be most helpful to tell a newbie to our mathematics community? Information could go in a new mathematics-welcome template, or on the project page, or both. So, aside from the usual Wikipedia welcome, what might we say?
In particular, what did you find most helpful? Most difficult to discover? What do you find yourself wishing most new editors would do or avoid doing with regard to mathematics articles (that we can teach)? Other comments?
To lead off:
Our target audience will include a gamut from professional mathematicians to young students; each needs to be told different things (for the former, Wikipedia is not a technical journal; for the latter, there is more to mathematics than you have seen). A good orientation could bring rich rewards. -- KSmrq T 06:22, 17 March 2007 (UTC)
One was created a couple months ago: User:C S/welcome. I didn't like it much though, which is why I haven't really used it. Perhaps having something concrete to critique will help. -- C S (Talk) 05:40, 19 March 2007 (UTC)
Extracting references from articles is not trivial. It would be relatively easy to get a list of all the instances of {{ cite book}} and friends. It would be much harder to automatically deal with hand-formatted references. I could get the contents of every "References" section (there are about 4500 of them), but it would take a lot of massaging. I'm not sure what plan you have in mind for the information. But anyway, I started the program to update my cache of math articles, which is going to take about 12 hours. I can extract whatever data is requested. CMummert · talk 12:13, 19 March 2007 (UTC)
A while back I started writing Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Editor resources. Is there still interest in this sort of page? It would not be difficult to write Template:maths welcome to point to it. CMummert · talk 11:35, 29 March 2007 (UTC)
Citizendium is now live, and I thought I'd spend a few moments looking at their mathematics.
[14] is an article about Kummer surfaces, and is more detailed than what we say by quite some way. It is marked GFDL, so let's assume there is no problem in principle if we wanted to import it.
The problem in practice is that one wants to import the wikified content, but to 'edit' (get the marked-up version) one needs an account, and there are procedures for that (real name, CV, etc.). My question is: does anyone in this WikiProject already have an account? Would anyone actually want to create an account for the purposes of importing material here? Charles Matthews 20:49, 26 March 2007 (UTC)
Is it OK to link to their articles from ours as we might with MathWorld? JRSpriggs 07:16, 27 March 2007 (UTC)
I have added a Classification section to the probability theory, your comments/updates on it will be useful. To me it also seems that major portion of the article needs extensive copy editing... I am gonna propose this as a candidate for collaboration of the week. Cheers -- Hirak 99 15:59, 28 March 2007 (UTC)
I've created an article on Geometric median, please feel free to improve by adding more information in your free time. Is there a formal way to request for a diagram? Cheers -- Hirak 99 16:03, 28 March 2007 (UTC)
I noticed recently that corollary is a redirect page to theorem. I thought someone here might want to make a proper article out of it.-- Jersey Devil 01:15, 29 March 2007 (UTC)
I cleaned up Theorem a little a long time ago. The main difficulty is finding any sort of canonical reference for the terminology, in order to get the articles to be more than dictdefs.
Personally, I think it would be useful to make a single article " Theorem, Lemma, and Corollary" that discusses these terms. It would also be nice to do something with Mathematical terminology. But then, a lot of things would be nice.
Here is a quick summary of the various articles on mathematical terminology:
CMummert · talk 02:13, 29 March 2007 (UTC)
Mathematics has been made a featured article candidate. -- Lambiam Talk 07:37, 29 March 2007 (UTC)
A couple of Mathieu groups are listed on a few disambiguation pages that I have edited or will edit soon (e.g. M23, M24). The description of these number given at Mathieu group is incomprehensible to the average person. (Note that I have a Ph.D. in astronomy.) Could someone leave a short (one sentence) description of what these numbers are supposed to be on my talk page so that I can write reasonable entries for these numbers on the disambiguation pages? Thank you, Dr. Submillimeter 10:50, 30 March 2007 (UTC)
Well, I see good agreements above that something needs to be said in the math style manual about this issue. I started a section, Wikipedia:Manual of Style (mathematics)#Choice of fonts. It is just an initial write-up, which I hope reflects the sentiment above. Changes to it and comments here on it are very welcome. Oleg Alexandrov ( talk) 15:20, 24 March 2007 (UTC)
The principal discussions of this have been whether to use italics on Greek names; for example in the article Constantinople. There has been agreement not to do that, because
I'm not sure how much this should apply to mathematics; but I see no reason to use α (''α''), when α works fine. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 15:39, 24 March 2007 (UTC)
I'm thinking that we might want to reorganize slightly a set of articles. In particular:
Notice that we have Metric space and Metric (mathematics) both. I think that, if it isn't justified to have both an article for the (quasi)(pseudo)(hemi)(semi)(grape-flavoured)metric as well as the corresponding space, the main article ought to be for the (...)metric rather than the space, as the metric is the more 'basic' object.
It wouldn't really be much work to rewrite the articles to match this, but I'd like opinions on whether it's a good idea before I do such a thing. Also, it seems to me that regardless of whether these are to be moved as I suggested, we need to use consistent terminology throughout this set of articles. I can look into fixing this later today. -- Sopoforic 11:51, 25 February 2007 (UTC)
Since Oleg included Category:Coding theory in the list of math articles a few days ago, I've been trying to review all of those new articles, to be sure they make sense. LT code doesn't make much sense to me, the way it's written. I'd appreciate an independent review by somebody here who understands algebraic coding theory.
From reading a little bit about "Luby Transforms" from other sources, it seems the best way to describe them is to think of the encoding and decoding process in terms of the "Exclusive Or" operation. Since the exclusive or of any bit string with itself is identically zero, it's pretty easy to understand how this randomized encoding strategy works. But I sure can't get that out of the existing article, no matter how hard I try.
I think I understand LT codes well enough to rewrite the article. But I'd appreciate some reassurance from someone who has previous experience with them. Thanks! DavidCBryant 01:02, 26 February 2007 (UTC)
I nominated Category:Important publication and all its subcategories for deletion at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2007 February 28. Comments welcome. Oleg Alexandrov ( talk) 03:21, 28 February 2007 (UTC)
I notice that Independent set is redirected to by Maximum independent set, and has 30-40 references. Since Maximal independent set is somewhat stubby and has only one reference (excluding lists), would it make sense also to merge and redirect this one? If not, I'll add enough of a definition to Independent set to refer back to it. Hv 07:11, 28 February 2007 (UTC)
The following four articles:
overlap and should be merged. Statisticians call it data-snooping bias when it's accidental, data dredging if it's intentional (and data mining, before that term got taken over for something else). Testing hypotheses suggested by the data describes the same thing, and also doesn't seem to be a commonly used phrase. Overfitting is what it's called if an algorithm did it (through overparameterization) rather than a human (through pattern recognition), and indeed what the machine learning community calls it. The machine learning community have studied overfitting ad nauseum since it's the problem with tuning parameters to any supervised learning algorithm. In machine learning you always partition data into a training set and testing set, and even use cross-validation (the data dredging article calls using two sets of data "randomization"; "partitioning" would be a better descriptor).
I can see keeping overfitting separate since it's an extreme version of data-snooping bias, but the other three are definitely mergeable. Thoughts? — Quarl ( talk) 2007-02-28 08:49Z
Hello everyone. I was wondering if I couldn't ask for a little assistance from you fine people over here to look over our data at Wikipedia:WikiProject_Vandalism_studies/Study1. While the math isn't hard obviously, something might catch your skilled eyes that we'd miss. Also, if you have any suggestions of other things we should do with the numbers (been a while since college adv stats) we'd love to hear it on the talk page. Thanks you guys. JoeSmack Talk 17:57, 28 February 2007 (UTC)
The effort to remove Infinite monkey theorem from FA has resumed at Wikipedia:Featured article review/Infinite monkey theorem, despite an admission that the original nomination is not based on an FA criterion and near-cons4ensus that the citation complaints are groundless. I think we have three courses:
This is not, of course, an exclusive or. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 04:30, 1 March 2007 (UTC)
I've just stumbles across Wikipedia:WikiProject League of Copyeditors, it might be possible to enlist their help in getting keeping FA status. -- Salix alba ( talk) 19:43, 5 March 2007 (UTC)
Reviewers should keep the criteria for featured articles in mind when supporting or opposing a nomination. However, please note that (unlike actual featured articles) A-Class articles are not expected to fully meet all of the criteria; an objection should indicate a substantive problem with the article. In particular, objections over relatively minor issues of writing style or formatting should be avoided at this stage; a comprehensive, accurate, well-sourced, and decently-written article should qualify for A-Class status even if it could use some further copyediting.
which seems quite sensible. -- Salix alba ( talk) 09:17, 2 March 2007 (UTC)
Getting back to Infinite monkey theorem, I announce that my work here is done. The benefit solely from deleting the phrases "the chance is not zero, it must be one", "each individual monkey is finite", and "probably an urban myth" already justify the effort. Obviously I also expect the article to now survive FARC. Melchoir 09:01, 3 March 2007 (UTC)
How can I draw geometric diagrams to include in Wikipedia (with free software)? For example, I would like to be able to make diagrams like those in Penrose tiling. Thanks. JRSpriggs 09:03, 2 March 2007 (UTC)
One of Oleg Alexandrov's bots automatically updates the table Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Mathematics articles by quality statistics. Here is a static version from when this message was posted:
Mathematics articles |
Importance | ||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Top | High | Mid | Low | Total | |||
Quality | |||||||
FA | 5 | 3 | 2 | 2 | 12 | ||
A | 9 | 6 | 1 | 16 | |||
GA | 2 | 7 | 7 | 16 | |||
B | 50 | 47 | 31 | 13 | 141 | ||
Start | 22 | 30 | 30 | 29 | 111 | ||
Stub | 5 | 16 | 30 | 51 | |||
Unassessed | |||||||
Total | 88 | 98 | 87 | 74 | 347 |
There is no line for B+ articles here, because WP 1.0 does not include B+ as one of their ratings - it is a project-specific rating. There are currently 38 math articles rated B+, which is about 10% of all rated articles. The math rating template already puts all B+ articles into both the B+ and B-class categories, so B+ articles are included in the B line of the table. But this duplication does not seem to be well known.
The upshot of this is that when an article is rated B+, it is not easy to find that out except by browsing categories. There are several options here:
I am posting this message here to gather opinions about what to do. CMummert · talk 16:22, 1 March 2007 (UTC)
Here is an example of the type of thing that can be done with a project-specific table. Unlike WP 1.0 bot, this program sorts out the B+ articles and uses backlinks to sort the articles by field. Of course there is room for improvement. CMummert · talk 20:21, 1 March 2007 (UTC)
{{Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Table}}
The central question here is: What ratings are useful for the project? Let's assume that that ratings themselves are useful, so the question is just how many different grades we need and what they mean. Right now, there are 5 that we can assign, which I understand as follows:
I find it hard to distinguish between Start class and B class. What criteria could be used to distinguish between Start, B and a new B- class? Wouldn't it be easier to just add some guidance like "When in doubt between B class and Start class, go with Start class"? CMummert · talk 14:30, 2 March 2007 (UTC)
I made the following change to the Integer factorization:
An IP editor reverted this leaving this comment on the edit summary: The empty product is 1 (See explaination in the article on the fundamental theorem of arithmetic) [6]
I don't understand how this makes my contribution incorrect. I understand that 1 is the product of no numbers (like how anything to the zero power is 1). But the question of prime factorization is whether a number can be written as the product of prime numbers, so how does that fact say anything about whether 1 can be represented in such a way?-- Jersey Devil 17:52, 2 March 2007 (UTC)
If you think the prime factorization of 1 is confusing, just try thinking about the prime factorization of 0. It's divisible by every prime power! — David Eppstein 19:06, 2 March 2007 (UTC)
This discussion highlights a phenomenon we've seen many times before. (Until recently, I was involved in a similar discussion about 0^0 at the page Exponentiation.) The point was made there, and I'll make it here, that we here at Wikipedia need not argue about the logic of any given convention. We report what is out there in the literature. On the Exponentiation page, we have a section on 0^0 that describes two different conventions in the literature without judging either as being correct or incorrect. (We mathematicians have a hard time admitting that sometimes two different statements can both be correct, Continuum hypothesis aside, since they are matters of convention.) Why not the same thing here? If there are books that say that 1 can be written as the product of primes, fine. Just report the source of the statement. Alongside it, we absolutely have to report that most books restrict any such statement to integers n > 1, whether they "need to" or not. VectorPosse 23:51, 2 March 2007 (UTC)
For a source, see Hardy and Wright: Number Theory. As far as I know, there is no source which denies that 1 is an empty prime product. Editors can write around this convention if they like, but other editors are likely to follow it; it is simplest. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 03:49, 3 March 2007 (UTC)
Strayer's Elementary Number Theory states the Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic only for integers strictly greater than 1. Then there is an exercise explaining why the statement of the theorem would be (should be?) untrue for 1. So there's the opposing sources I mentioned above. By the way, I'm not sure a book has to deny explicitly that 1 is an empty prime to be a source for the convention that we should restrict attention to integers greater than 1. I think it's also a matter of debate which convention is simpler. (Simpler in terms of the necessary hypotheses, or simpler for the lay reader?) But maybe this discussion has reached the point at which it should be taken to the talk page. VectorPosse 06:10, 3 March 2007 (UTC)
I believe it would be a good idea to add a page with formulas used in mathematics. They could be grouped into categories of different areas of math with explanations and examples of the equation. This would be of great help for many students.-- Trd89 23:16, 2 March 2007 (UTC)
This site would be used for formulas and not identities. for example what (a+b)3 factors down to-- Trd89 03:04, 3 March 2007 (UTC)
Essentially, you are asking us to take virtually all the articles on mathematics (since they all contain formulas) and strip out the words that give context and meaning to the formulas, then combine the resulting mess into one MONSTER article which be would thousands of times longer than the limit for an article. This is the dumbest idea yet. JRSpriggs 12:34, 3 March 2007 (UTC)
I think the idea to add formula only-pages would cause unnecessary redundancy. The formulae are already where they belong to in an encyclopedia — in those articles that handle their topic. Ocolon 18:01, 3 March 2007 (UTC)
See also Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of well known mathematical formulas. — Quarl ( talk) 2007-03-04 09:57Z
I have made the request elsewhere, but am copying a version here:
When a formula is described on Wikipedia, a one or two sentence non-mathematical introduction is included - aimed at persons who are outside their field with the given topic.
"It was developed by [abc] in [date]. This formula is used in the area of [xyz] and its purpose is to do [def]."
(Can someone archive part of this talkpage - getting slightly long).
Jackiespeel 18:54, 5 March 2007 (UTC)
How feasible would it be to create either a graph of theorems and axioms or a crossindexed table of examples, like the one at the back of "Counterexamples in Topology"? I know it would be quite an undertaking, but either would be pretty great. Prc314 23:40, 6 March 2007 (UTC)
I wanted to help, and looked at the Wikipedia:Pages_needing_attention/Mathematics page. Is it possible to sort these items according to topic, i.e. algebra analysis etc. This would help to guide people (like me) with only special knowledge to the articles needing help much quicker. Thanks. Jakob.scholbach 02:06, 7 March 2007 (UTC)
Could someone review Structure theorem for finitely generated modules over a principal ideal domain? It has been recently created and caught by our bot as copyvio, but apparently it is a false positive (and would like a member of this project to review it and decide if it is notable enough for Wikipedia (as the only reference is a PDF). If it is suitable, please tag the article appropriately. If it is not, please prod, afd or inform me so that I can proceed. Thanks in advance! -- ReyBrujo 03:08, 7 March 2007 (UTC)
Recently there has been a small media storm (e.g. [7]) over the revelation that Essjay, a bureaucrat and Wikia community manager, has misrepresented himself, in particular his credentials as a professor of theology at a university. Jimbo Wales initially stated that he regarded this as only utilizing a pseudonym; after learning more details, Jimbo came to the conclusion that Essjay had used his false credentials to bolster his arguments in editorial discussions and so asked him to resign his positions of trust (which he did). Essjay has subsequently left Wikipedia [8].
Jimbo has on his talk page proposed an optional procedure similar to Amazon's "real name" mechanism. Editors wishing to verify their credentials may do so. Jimbo envisions a related policy whereby someone stating unverified credentials would somehow be discouraged for doing so.
Now what does have to do with us? And why am I posting these comments? Well, I've been reading the comments on Jimbo's talk page with regards to this proposal. It struck me that there are several issues that our community is quite unique and perhaps suggestive of a model of how the ideal verification system should work.
Let me basically break up these issues into two groups: 1) trust-based editing, 2) dealing with cranks.
1) There have been arguments against Jimbo's proposal because people understand this (perhaps wrongly) to be about using credentials to bolster one's editing, e.g. "Your edit should be reverted because you don't have a Ph.D. and I do!" I'll try and abstain as much as possible from getting into the issues of whether this is a correct understanding or not of the ramifications of the proposal; my desire is only to explain why our WikiProject experience is relevant to the proposal. In our WikiProject we have a number of credentialed (or near-credentialed :-) ) experts. Somehow we manage to give these people the necessary respect without kow-towing to their authority, and conversely these expert editors manage to not act like such, but utilize policy to justify their edits and decisions.
One explanation for this is that such experts manage to show their expertise in their edits and are generally good at learning the relevant policies in a timely fashion. The expertise is viewed favorably by other editors, who often make the transition to Wikipedia easier for these editors. Speaking for myself, I judge an editor based on his/her edits, but find that credentials often help in understanding someone's background and expertise.
Another explanation is that we are sufficiently insulated from the rest of the community (including a number of trolls and vandals) that we don't have the same issues. This explanation is partly bolstered by the increasingly frequent disconnect between mathematics editors and long-standing non-mathematical editors in discussions on citations, articles reviews, etc. On the other hand, my experience with the second set of issues suggests that the occasional problematic editors we do deal with often require as much effort or even more effort than non-math editors deal with.
2) A number of project members have experience (either directly or indirectly) of cranks, particularly on Wikipedia. A common argument going on right now on Jimbo's talk page is whether policy by itself can handle cranks adequately. Some suggest that the use of credentials can be useful for say, mediators, in determining crankiness. It seems to me that some project members have dealt with such cranks for often very extended amounts of times (with some ongoing). This suggests that it is not as easy for experts to deal with cranks as some have asserted in response to Jimbo's proposal. In my experience, the hardest cranks to handle are the ones that offer myriad citations, sometimes to hard to obtain documents, that can take days or weeks to investigate (by going to the university library, waiting for interlibrary loan, or whatever) and refute.
I think it would be helpful for people to go to Jimbo's talk page and explain their experience, particularly with respect to these two kinds of issues. Somehow we've struck a right balance between relying on credentials but also on a person's body of editing. I think this is something the rest of Wikipedia can learn from, or at least to consider why it may not be viable for all of Wikipedia. -- C S (Talk) 21:04, 6 March 2007 (UTC)
Both of these pages begin by suggesting that the design-of-experiments usage is the principal topic of the article. That is ridiculous. Then they treat the usage that everyone learns in high school, and independent variable gives a stupid definition by non-essentials: the variable plotted on the x-axis.
Also, there should be a conspicuous link to statistical independence, since that is where the topic of independent random variables is treated.
I'm leaning toward (1) redirecting "dependent variable" to "independent variable" and making the latter to into a disambiguation page.
Another problem is how to direct the many links to these pages. I suspect some of them are already pointing to an inappropriate place.
Michael Hardy 22:54, 9 March 2007 (UTC)
It's not compmletely unrelated, but it's certainly quite a different thing. Hence the need for a disambiguation page. Michael Hardy 02:54, 11 March 2007 (UTC)
OK, I've reorganized it, and NOT as a disambiguation page. I moved "independent variable" to dependent and independent variables and redirected "dependent variable" to the latter, after pasting some material from "dependent variable" into "dependent and independent variables". I put in a dablink to statistical independence, where the concept of independent random variables is treated. Michael Hardy 23:49, 11 March 2007 (UTC)
In lots of math articles in the Wikipedia, theorems etc. are stated without proper reference. (E.g. the properties of Étale cohomology). In research articles, ideally all statements (except those the author believes to be known by everybody) are cited very concretely, i.e. [..., Theorem ...] etc. I would propose this for Wikipedia articles, too. What do you think? Jakob.scholbach 05:32, 8 March 2007 (UTC)
I've finally got round to creating a Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Resources page. The aim of this page is to list good sources to help in referencing of mathematics articles. -- Salix alba ( talk) 09:44, 12 March 2007 (UTC)
A raw version of a translator is available, by joint effort of User:Oleg Alexandrov and myself. Jmath666 06:57, 25 February 2007 (UTC)
If you insist on getting inline TeX out of this thing, can you at least use \scriptstyle when it's inline? Michael Hardy 03:15, 28 February 2007 (UTC)
By the way, is there some permanent place to make a link on Wikipedia to such tools? Jmath666 22:18, 8 March 2007 (UTC)
There is now a separate user page for the translation. Jmath666 00:09, 15 March 2007 (UTC)
I've started something called the Mathematics Construction WikiProject (not in development yet), which focuses on making sure that information on an article is verifiable and attributed with reliable sources. If we can do something like this on this WikiProject, it'd be great! Sr13 ( T| C) 03:03, 10 March 2007 (UTC)
Is there any consensus how to format categories? Sometime one sees (mathbf) or A, sometimes (mathcal). Jakob.scholbach 22:49, 13 March 2007 (UTC)
Has anyone ever heard of this? Or should we put it up for deletion as un-notable? JRSpriggs 06:18, 22 February 2007 (UTC)
Oh, a propos of nothing much, I do recall the "J" notation for the integers, from high school. I think the Houghton–Mifflin series of books use it. -- Trovatore 08:42, 27 February 2007 (UTC)
I removed the Werdnabot invocation. I have been following Werdnabot closely; and it just has too many bugs that manifest themselves in unexpected ways. Like on Tuesday, it did not put any edit summaries into its edits for no apparent reason. Thus we go back to manual archiving. JRSpriggs 08:10, 7 March 2007 (UTC)
2 or 3 years ago, before Wikipedia was as popular/well known/... as now, I looked at the Mathematics and Computer Science articles and was extremely impressed. I remember noting a correction of a fault in a Taylor/MacLaurin series. It was no more than minor proof reading but within a day somebody had replied "True, why didn't you correct it yourself?"
A couple of years on it all seems to be going seriously downhill. Hard to believe but it just might be better to divide the subject into "Mathematics" and "Popular Mathematics". In the Mathematics section there are NO links to JAVA/COBOL/IGNORANT animations - that sort of nonsense can be viewed in "Popular Mathematics".
2 more possible rules -
Colin M Davidson 62.251.121.16 20:01, 12 March 2007 (UTC)
Klein's bottle (or surface) is historically important. There should be some reference in any self respecting body of knowledge. - More so if it has lead to an interesting branch of mathematics. I am very disturbed by the "silly picture". The picture is 2nd rate (JAVA/COBOL?) and very misleading. We can only be grateful for the writer's text - something along the lines of "But don't try to do this in 3 dimensions."
Restricting pictures to Euclidean geometry is clearly extreme but it seems a better starting point than accepting anything that Tom, Dick or Harry throws into the mill.
Colin M Davidson 62.251.121.16 20:42, 15 March 2007 (UTC)
When you put quotation marks around the words "silly picture", that means either that someone called it that or that someone would call it that but you wouldn't. Yet your words make it appear that that's not what you meant. Michael Hardy 23:50, 15 March 2007 (UTC)
I can't tell which picture Colin M. Davidson is talking about since they all look good to me. The top one is the standard image of this particular surface, looks like it was done with Mathematica, illustrates exactly the key feature of this immersion. Aside from the two other Mathematica pictures, we have a square-folding diagram, a photograph of a "real" Klein bottle, and the Futurama comic. I find the other two Mathematica pictures quite useful, though the one illustrating dissection of the Klein bottle into two Möbius strips could, I suppose, use a better angle; in particular it's nice to have alternative embeddings shown in the article since, as it is impossible to depict the surface accurately in three, let alone two dimensions, and only one picture. Really, the pictures may be the best part of the article, especially for someone interested just in an overview of the surface. Ryan Reich 00:24, 16 March 2007 (UTC)
From Colin M Davidson's other edits and remarks (e.g., at Talk:Dijkstra's algorithm#EWD would have cried) I deduce that he might be referring to the 'external links' of the Klein bottle article. (Indeed, they lead to one animation and one home page.) Colin, if this is correct, you could have said so from the beginning... The natural thing was to look for pictures in the article itself, since this is what your text seemed to indicate. JoergenB 20:17, 17 March 2007 (UTC)
Is there a page depicting all commonly used symbols like ℤ or ∪ (not in the < math >... < / math> environment) -- and also how to type them? It always takes me an eternity to find them on other pages like union (set theory) etc. Thanks. Jakob.scholbach 16:13, 15 March 2007 (UTC)
No, it wouldn't always be better. If we were using TeX in the normal way, it would be better. But often on Wikipedia when TeX is inline, it gets misaligned or is far too big with comical effect. Michael Hardy 23:48, 15 March 2007 (UTC)
I nominated one of us, CMummert, for admin. If you are familiar with his work, you can comment/vote at Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/CMummert. Oleg Alexandrov ( talk) 03:16, 16 March 2007 (UTC)
New user Greg Kuperberg is giving Grubber a hard time at Talk:Cyclic group, arguing about the best notation to use in the article. It seems Greg Kuperberg wants to push for a certain notation because he uses it and it is used in some current research papers.
My understanding of wikipedia policy is that we always use the most common notation. We copy standards, we do not create them. For articles in mathematics, the most common notation is the notation used in authoritative textbooks on the subject. Perhaps someone can point me to a relevant wikipedia policy or provide some backup for Grubber. MathMartin 16:50, 16 March 2007 (UTC)
See list of cycles and Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of cycles. Michael Hardy 22:24, 18 March 2007 (UTC)
As several editors have expressed an interest in it, I have created a proposal for an A-class review process for this project. If you are interested, please discuss it at the associated talk page. CMummert · talk 00:36, 6 March 2007 (UTC)
I have moved the proposal to Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/A-class rating. Please feel free to nominate articles! CMummert · talk 13:08, 20 March 2007 (UTC)
We've been having a discussion on calibration of the mathematical importance rating system over on Talk:Penrose tiling that might be of more general interest to the participants here. — David Eppstein 18:40, 17 March 2007 (UTC)
David: Your proposed criteria at Talk:Penrose tiling seem excellent at first, but I am worried about them. It seems to me that the principal criterion you have offered for judging the importance of an article is whether you would be embarassed to find that the article was not in the encyclopedia. This seems initially like a reasonable idea, particularly since your examples all elicit about the same level of embarrassment for me as you say they would for you. But I worry that not everyone will be similarly embarrassed by the same things.
If personal embarrassment is used as a criterion, and if there is a consensus about the degree to which individuals would be embarrassed by the hypothetical ommission of articles, then all is well. But I fear that using embarrassment as a criterion will only turn the vague and subjective arguments about "importance" that we have now into equally vague and subjective arguments about personal embarrassment. Nothing will have been gained, and perhaps it will be even worse, since the terms of the discussion will encourage participants to rant and flame about about their personal emotions. Consider how much worse it would be to describe the importance of an article in terms of the rage and fury you would feel if the article were omitted---it should be clear that this way of framing the issue would be unlikely to promote respectful, rational discussions. Using embarrassment as the measure, rather than of rage, would ameliorate the potential problem here, but not eliminate it, I think.
I do not have a useful alternative to offer, but I am concerned that bringing embarrassment into the official guidlines is a step in the wrong direction, and could turn out to be a grave mistake. I hope that the WP:M community can come up with something less likely to promote flame wars. -- Dominus 13:50, 19 March 2007 (UTC)
The E8 (mathematics) lie group hit the news today, which coverage of a full enumeration on the BBC and slashdot, see talk page for links. The article is very technical and could do with some attept to describe it in laymans terms, especially the meaning of the new result. -- Salix alba ( talk) 20:04, 19 March 2007 (UTC)
I was browsing through the list of vital articles, and found out to my dismay that most (almost all) content has been removed from Probability theory. I have already left some comments at its talk page, but I would like additionally to alert as wide a circle of mathematics editors as possible. Arcfrk 03:25, 21 March 2007 (UTC)
Serious work has started on Probability theory. However, we need experts in probability theory and/or statistics to map out the article (urgent) and contribute high quality content (as the time permits). Arcfrk 04:10, 22 March 2007 (UTC)
I would like to attempt to rewrite Sobolev space. This article, which is quite important, is written in a messy manner (in my opinion). Some points which I would like to stress are described in User:Igny/Sobolev space (they are somewhat mentioned in the article, but like I said it is a mess). In particular I would like to stress the connection to the Fourier transform of distributions, which, by the way, deserves a separate article in my opinion. I will appreciate any input from other editors, in particular a blessing to proceed. ( Igny 19:17, 21 March 2007 (UTC))
Well, I would have to say that the draft article is not written in a very friendly style. We are constantyly asked to have more explanation for the general reader. There is also a constant pressure from experts to remove verbal explanations, replacing them by 'precise' statements and formulae. The difficulty is that articles then lose all chance of access by non-experts. It is fairly typical that an explanatory comment
was removed by someone in January 2006 claiming it was 'original research'.
Charles Matthews 08:02, 22 March 2007 (UTC)
Yes explanatory statements for non-experts are needed but the butterfly was a bad one no matter how catchy it sounds; please see the discussion why it was removed. And indeed it was missing references. The reason why Sobolev spaces exist is simply that solutions of PDEs are in general not in the classical spaces. For example, in 2D and 3D linear elasticity, there are functions with finite deformation energy (=solutions of the elasticity equations; Nature settles to the lowest energy state) that are not bounded and so not even in . One can construct such function as a special kind of spike (this makes a nice picture for the non-specialist), which also shows why point constraints make no sense in >1D, even if engineers merrily keep putting point constraints in their Finite element models all the time. Jmath666 15:21, 22 March 2007 (UTC)
I agree. It is very important to make things comprehensible. I do not think the butterfly statement was helpful heuristics, though. More like an attempt to push the right buttons than to give a clue about the subject. And for me at least it sounds so specialized I would have liked a reference. Jmath666 18:25, 22 March 2007 (UTC)
I don't have time to write anything just now, but I think th first chapter of Susanne C. Brenner and L. Ridgeway Scott, "Mathematical Theory of Finite Element Methods", Springer-Verlag, 1994 ( ISBN 0-387-94193-2) is a particularly nice introduction to Sobolev spaces. It ought to be accessible to anyone having had a first course in analysis at the level of, say, Rudin or Hewett and Stromberg. Greg Woodhouse 18:34, 22 March 2007 (UTC)
Hello again! Wikipedia:WikiProject_Vandalism_studies's first study is finally about finished. We loved you guys' help a few weeks ago in giving some eyeball time to how the study was composed math wise, and now that we're almost done, we're wondering if you wouldn't mind checking over the results. The study's end results themselves are here, and the discussion of what this means for the conclusions is here. We are keeping in mind that measuring is easy, but knowing what you are measuring is the hard part. Any and all comments, critiques and math angles not considered would be much, much appreciated. We want this to be as tip-top as possible before reporting our findings to the community at large. Thanks everyone. JoeSmack Talk 23:59, 24 March 2007 (UTC)
I'm curious what the math community has to say about the proposed merger of several key Wikipedia principles into one: Wikipedia talk:Attribution/Community_discussion. I can't see that it really changes much about the way we do things around here, but I would like to know if there are issues to consider. (Would we have to fight battles over inline citations all over again, for example?) VectorPosse 10:02, 25 March 2007 (UTC)
To KSmrq ( talk · contribs): Since you appear to be unable to refrain from accidentally deleting the comments of other users, which you did again to Lambiam and Oleg Alexandrov recently, I suggest that you make a practice of checking the revision history after you save your edits and immediately repairing any damage you caused. JRSpriggs 12:10, 25 March 2007 (UTC)
I am not the one who is being irrational here. Nor am I asking you to do anything which I do not already do myself — I almost always check the revision history after I do an edit to be sure that I did what I meant to do. I would also point out that your edits (together with the bugs you mentioned) have caused this problem as often as all other editors on this project put together. A possible factor in causing this is that your edits are often very lengthy, providing more opportunity for edit conflicts. If you want this to happen less often, you could write your messages off-line and then cut and paste them in quickly to reduce the window for edit conflicts. JRSpriggs 05:17, 26 March 2007 (UTC)
I see a reference in Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Newsroom/Suggestions#Academic paper on Wikipedia to a research paper "Assessing the value of cooperation in Wikipedia" by Dennis M. Wilkinson and Bernardo A. Huberman. [13]. The paper finds that article quality is correlated with both number of edits and number of distinct editors. Is it just me, or is some of the mathematics and statistical techniques a bit off? -- Lambiam Talk 14:05, 26 March 2007 (UTC)
The recent welcoming of a new mathematics editor led me to wonder, what would be most helpful to tell a newbie to our mathematics community? Information could go in a new mathematics-welcome template, or on the project page, or both. So, aside from the usual Wikipedia welcome, what might we say?
In particular, what did you find most helpful? Most difficult to discover? What do you find yourself wishing most new editors would do or avoid doing with regard to mathematics articles (that we can teach)? Other comments?
To lead off:
Our target audience will include a gamut from professional mathematicians to young students; each needs to be told different things (for the former, Wikipedia is not a technical journal; for the latter, there is more to mathematics than you have seen). A good orientation could bring rich rewards. -- KSmrq T 06:22, 17 March 2007 (UTC)
One was created a couple months ago: User:C S/welcome. I didn't like it much though, which is why I haven't really used it. Perhaps having something concrete to critique will help. -- C S (Talk) 05:40, 19 March 2007 (UTC)
Extracting references from articles is not trivial. It would be relatively easy to get a list of all the instances of {{ cite book}} and friends. It would be much harder to automatically deal with hand-formatted references. I could get the contents of every "References" section (there are about 4500 of them), but it would take a lot of massaging. I'm not sure what plan you have in mind for the information. But anyway, I started the program to update my cache of math articles, which is going to take about 12 hours. I can extract whatever data is requested. CMummert · talk 12:13, 19 March 2007 (UTC)
A while back I started writing Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Editor resources. Is there still interest in this sort of page? It would not be difficult to write Template:maths welcome to point to it. CMummert · talk 11:35, 29 March 2007 (UTC)
Citizendium is now live, and I thought I'd spend a few moments looking at their mathematics.
[14] is an article about Kummer surfaces, and is more detailed than what we say by quite some way. It is marked GFDL, so let's assume there is no problem in principle if we wanted to import it.
The problem in practice is that one wants to import the wikified content, but to 'edit' (get the marked-up version) one needs an account, and there are procedures for that (real name, CV, etc.). My question is: does anyone in this WikiProject already have an account? Would anyone actually want to create an account for the purposes of importing material here? Charles Matthews 20:49, 26 March 2007 (UTC)
Is it OK to link to their articles from ours as we might with MathWorld? JRSpriggs 07:16, 27 March 2007 (UTC)
I have added a Classification section to the probability theory, your comments/updates on it will be useful. To me it also seems that major portion of the article needs extensive copy editing... I am gonna propose this as a candidate for collaboration of the week. Cheers -- Hirak 99 15:59, 28 March 2007 (UTC)
I've created an article on Geometric median, please feel free to improve by adding more information in your free time. Is there a formal way to request for a diagram? Cheers -- Hirak 99 16:03, 28 March 2007 (UTC)
I noticed recently that corollary is a redirect page to theorem. I thought someone here might want to make a proper article out of it.-- Jersey Devil 01:15, 29 March 2007 (UTC)
I cleaned up Theorem a little a long time ago. The main difficulty is finding any sort of canonical reference for the terminology, in order to get the articles to be more than dictdefs.
Personally, I think it would be useful to make a single article " Theorem, Lemma, and Corollary" that discusses these terms. It would also be nice to do something with Mathematical terminology. But then, a lot of things would be nice.
Here is a quick summary of the various articles on mathematical terminology:
CMummert · talk 02:13, 29 March 2007 (UTC)
Mathematics has been made a featured article candidate. -- Lambiam Talk 07:37, 29 March 2007 (UTC)
A couple of Mathieu groups are listed on a few disambiguation pages that I have edited or will edit soon (e.g. M23, M24). The description of these number given at Mathieu group is incomprehensible to the average person. (Note that I have a Ph.D. in astronomy.) Could someone leave a short (one sentence) description of what these numbers are supposed to be on my talk page so that I can write reasonable entries for these numbers on the disambiguation pages? Thank you, Dr. Submillimeter 10:50, 30 March 2007 (UTC)
Well, I see good agreements above that something needs to be said in the math style manual about this issue. I started a section, Wikipedia:Manual of Style (mathematics)#Choice of fonts. It is just an initial write-up, which I hope reflects the sentiment above. Changes to it and comments here on it are very welcome. Oleg Alexandrov ( talk) 15:20, 24 March 2007 (UTC)
The principal discussions of this have been whether to use italics on Greek names; for example in the article Constantinople. There has been agreement not to do that, because
I'm not sure how much this should apply to mathematics; but I see no reason to use α (''α''), when α works fine. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 15:39, 24 March 2007 (UTC)