Silly Rabbit's mention of quaternions above reminded me that I want to put
Quaternion (disambiguation) up for deletion. See the discussion at
As always, give reasons for your opinions.
Ozob (
talk)
09:32, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
I would like to shorten the vertical arrows of the diagram this (the source code is attached). Any ideas? GeometryGirl ( talk) 14:50, 5 January 2009 (UTC)
\documentclass{amsart} \usepackage[all]{xy} \begin{document} \begin{equation*} \xymatrix@C=1em{ \cdots\ar[r] & H_{n+1}(X_1)\ar[d]_{f_*}\ar[r] & H_n(A_1 \cap B_1)\ar[d]_{f_*}\ar[r] & H_n(A_1) \oplus H_n(B_1)\ar[d]_{f_*}\ar[r] & H_n(X_1)\ar[d]_{f_*}\ar[r] & H_{n-1}(A_1 \cap B_1)\ar[d]_{f_*}\ar[r] & \cdots \\ \cdots\ar[r] & H_{n+1}(X_2)\ar[r] & H_n(A_2 \cap B_2)\ar[r] & H_n(A_2) \oplus H_n(B_2)\ar[r] & H_n(X_2)\ar[r] & H_{n-1}(A_2 \cap B_2)\ar[r] & \cdots \\ } \end{equation*} \end{document}
Is it just me, or is are the mathematics articles on Wikipedia less comprehensive than most other topics of the same importance? There are relatively few mathematics featured articles, and many of the subprojects seem to be, well, dead. Leon math ( talk) 04:04, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
I have contributed a great deal to content review processes, and they are entirely compatible with mathematics articles, partly (in the case of GA) through my efforts. However, in my own edits to mathematics articles, I am much more interested in bringing a range of mathematics articles to B-Class, than taking any of them further. Of Wikipedia's 2.5+ million articles, less than 10000 are GAs or featured (0.4%). Improving the dross to a reasonable standard is far more important a goal than making a handful of articles exceptionally good.
The main historical failing of mathematics articles is the lack of sources. Just check out a few mathematics articles at random. Many have no sources at all. There seems to have been some idiotic belief that mathematics sources itself. I don't say this with my content review "verifiability" hat on, but as a user of Wikipedia. Wikipedia is now a great resource for looking up mathematical information. However, stubby mathematics articles would be so much more useful if they provided references (preferably online) to sources which fill in the gaps. Clicking on an article and finding inadequate content with no references is a depressing experience. Geometry guy 23:39, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
Let's not focus on what part of WikiProject Math is more important. It seems that our overall conclusion is that there aren't enough editors that possess all of the following traits: (1) have the knowledge/ability to help, (2) are willing to put information on Wikipedia, and (3) are concerned with the organization, procedures, and conventions of Wikipedia. (I fail number 1.) Hmm... this problem is not easily solved. I guess it's just like Geometry guy said; we can only do as much as we can, and there's really nothing that can be done to drastically improve the situation. Leon math ( talk) 03:00, 7 January 2009 (UTC)
This complex clothoid/Euler spiral is used everyday, being used in roads and on railways to blend together curves of differing radii (or straight sections). An editor recently has introduced a large amount of new material in the form of including PDF page screen shots into the article (rather than TeX notation). I have copied this material to User:Ling Kah Jai/Track transition curve for their improvement, but it would be useful to have some wider review of what is appropriate (the 8-page proof is perhaps more than necessary for a Wikipedia article).
Track transition curve, User:Ling Kah Jai/Track transition curve, Talk:Track transition curve#Formulation of Euler spiral. — Sladen ( talk) 05:53, 7 January 2009 (UTC)
This category, and its two current inhabitants, Classical Hamiltonian quaternions and The vector of a quaternion, should in my opinion be transwikied to WikiBooks. I feel that these are both needless and unsanctioned content forks of quaternions. They seem to be filled with the personal opinion and original research of the author, and are rather poorly written. siℓℓy rabbit ( talk) 03:46, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
Came across invariants of tensors and noticed that it currently focuses exclusively on rank 2 tensors i.e. matrices. Matrix invariants are already covered at characteristic polynomial and related articles. Is there a more general article that could be written here about how determinant, trace etc. generalise to higher rank tensors, or is this a dead end ? Gandalf61 ( talk) 17:10, 8 January 2009 (UTC)
An editor had earlier comment at the page Iowa class battleship that the two mathematical formulas in the paragraph below were actually the same:
That same year (1935), an empirical formula for predicting a ship's maximum speed was developed, based on scale-model studies in flumes of various hull forms and propellers. The formula used the length-to-speed ratio originally developed for 12-meter (39 ft) yachts:
and with additional research at the David Taylor Model Basin would later be redefined as:
- .
It quickly became apparent that propeller cavitation caused a drop in efficiency at speeds over 30 knots (56 km/h). Propeller design therefore took on new importance. [1] [A 1]
Sine I have failed four separate remedial level math classes at collage, and haven't passed a math class with a grade better than C- since seventh grade, I was wondering if someone from this project could independently verify that the two formulas are in fact the same. TomStar81 ( Talk) 04:08, 10 January 2009 (UTC)
...is working again. Michael Hardy ( talk) 17:48, 10 January 2009 (UTC)
Look at this:
In "displayed" TeX, I'd write the digamma function as
or in some contexts like this:
I don't want to change an "inline" thing to TeX, since that causes comical mismatches of size and alignment, but the "prime" is barely visible. Is there a better, more legible, way to write a "prime" in non-TeX notation, and if not, can one be created? Michael Hardy ( talk) 16:26, 11 January 2009 (UTC)
I am not sure how this article ever got to GA (luckliy it was demoted). I am starting a rewrite now; any help there would be appreciated (in particular, a good lede is necessary). -- Point-set topologist ( talk) 18:17, 11 January 2009 (UTC)
Go to modulo and click on "what links here".
In the modular arithmetic article, 63 and 53 are congruent to each other modulo 10.
In the modulo operation article, "modulo" is a binary operation and (63 modulo 10) = 3.
The modulo article is far more general than just arithmetic.
Michael Hardy ( talk) 21:51, 11 January 2009 (UTC)
I just got the book a a preset a very pleased I am too with it. Of course I immediately dipped into he centre and also started looked up things I know about in the index. Very interesting. I didn't find much or anything about the things I thought of which indicates if it really was comprehensive it would be a bookcase of books - it is pretty huge as it is. I seem also to have been corrupted by Wikipedia, I kept thinking I should edit this to add wikilinks and better citations. Where it differs from WP mainly is it is much more chatty and readable with things like "Why should nonequivalence be harder to prove than equivalence? The answer is that in order to show....", or "For fun, one might ask a fussier question:". On further references it can say things like "For further details n sections 1-4 the reader is referred to standard textbooks such as ...". I can thoroughly recommend the book.
The book has a small section in its introduction on "What Does The Companion Offer That the Internet Does Not Offer?" (I feel like quoting WP:STYLE about the capitalization!) and I have to agree with what it says: that the internet is hit and miss, sometimes there's a good explanation sometimes not. The articles are drier just concerned with giving he facts in an economical way and not reflecting on those facts. And it doesn't have long essays on the fundamentals and origins, the various branches , biographies of mathematicians and the influence of mathematics. Not that I agree with all that, basically I think what it amounts to is one wouldn't make oneself comfortable, get a cup of coffee and curl up to read the articles in wikipedia. The book has a problem with that too as it is so heavy but otherwise it is a far better read overall.
Does a book like this have lessons for us? Should WP style be a bit more chatty? Or should we be dry and economical and just inhabit a different domain from books like this? Dmcq ( talk) 12:18, 9 January 2009 (UTC)
I recently created Category:Additive number theory and I'd like help/feedback.
CRGreathouse ( t | c) 20:28, 12 January 2009 (UTC)
I am seriously concerned about the article on manifolds. First of all, it seems (from an uninvolved user's point of view) that a group of people rejected this article from becoming featured simply because they couldn't understand this. I am glad at least that it was rejected but there should seriously be some restrictions on the people who vote (some people seem to think that if they can't understand it, no-one else can) (if anyone has the time, just have a read through the article). But here is a specific section (the article is never going to be featured at this rate):
Other curves
Manifolds need not be connected (all in "one piece"); an example is a pair of separate circles. They need not be closed; thus a line segment without its end points is a manifold.
And they are never countable; thus a parabola is a manifold.
Putting these freedoms together, two other examples of manifolds are a hyperbola (two open, infinite pieces) and the locus of points on the cubic curve y2 = x3−x (a closed loop piece and an open, infinite piece). However, we exclude examples like two touching circles that share a point to form a figure-8; at the shared point we cannot create a satisfactory chart. Even with the bending allowed by topology, the vicinity of the shared point looks like a "+", not a line (a + is not homeomorphic to a closed interval (line segment) since deleting the center point from the + gives a space with four components (i.e pieces) whereas deleting a point from a closed interval gives a space with at most two pieces; topological operations always preserve the number of pieces).
I can give (if necessary) similar criticizm of almost all other sections. Recently I re-wrote the lede: I would seriously consider re-writing the whole article and deleting some of the sections there. -- Point-set topologist ( talk) 20:59, 12 January 2009 (UTC)
, if not harmful. For example, removing reasonable content as per "delete nonsense section" is pretty bad.
I have reverted your recent edits. Jakob.scholbach ( talk) 21:33, 12 January 2009 (UTC)
I just did a minor edit to Cauchy principal value. After the edit, every line of TeX in the article looked like this:
I've seen this a number of times lately. It will probably go away soon, but just when is completely unpredictable. Why is this happening? Michael Hardy ( talk) 19:41, 13 January 2009 (UTC)
There are a number of (bolded red) parsing errors in this article, related - I think - to mathematical equations. Would someone more familiar with this area take a look? Thanks! -- John Broughton (♫♫) 20:56, 13 January 2009 (UTC)
I think that these articles should be deleted: Topic outline of algebra, Topic outline of arithmetic, Topic outline of calculus, Topic outline of discrete mathematics, Topic outline of geometry, Topic outline of logic, Topic outline of mathematics, Topic outline of statistics, Topic outline of trigonometry. Charvest ( talk) 20:12, 11 January 2009 (UTC)
I would suggest that the portal is the ideal place for these pages. Martin 13:24, 12 January 2009 (UTC)
I've nominated the worst of these articles for deletion at: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Topic outline of algebra Charvest ( talk) 22:09, 14 January 2009 (UTC)
This question sometimes comes up and it bears answering as often as possible, since a lot of people have never heard that we should be using SVG, and of those who have, few seem to have an easy way of actually accomplishing it. This is addressed at Help:Displaying a formula#Convert to SVG, but their proposed solution relies on a somewhat arcane and arbitrary invocation of two different utilities, followed by a roundabout filtration through two major software packages, which is necessitated by one of them (pstoedit) requiring a costly proprietary plugin to work properly. And the end result is still unusable if your diagram has diagonal lines. Here's the right way:
pdflatex file.tex pdfcrop --clip file.pdf tmp.pdf pdf2svg tmp.pdf file.svg (rm tmp.pdf at the end)
Both pdfcrop and pdf2svg are small, free (if new and somewhat alpha) programs that work properly. I advocate pdflatex since with the alternative, you might be tempted to go the route of latex→dvips→pstopdf before vectorizing, and that runs into a problem with fonts that has to be corrected with one of the arcane invocations above. (There is a correct route, which is to replace that chain with dvipdfm, that I have never seen anyone suggest. Somehow, the existence of this useful one-step solution to getting PDFs from plain latex is always ignored.)
I have proposed at the talk page of that Help article that this procedure replace the existing one. It has been road-tested on, most notably (for the complexity of its images) Triangulated category and found to work quite well. Since the interested parties hang out here more than there, I'm soliciting feedback from whatever TeXperts and hackers might be lurking. Ryan Reich ( talk) 04:23, 14 January 2009 (UTC)
Since writing this, I have investigated Inkscape's internals and found that the following pstoedit invocation is also good:
pstoedit -f plot-svg -dt -ssp tmp.pdf tile.svg
It also makes smaller SVG files, sometimes (with the large ones) by quite a bit. This invokes the GNU libplot, and I cannot decide whether this piece of imperfect software is preferable to the one which is pdf2svg; let it be your call if you use it. Ryan Reich ( talk) 20:59, 14 January 2009 (UTC)
...except that it couldn't make a nice SVG out of the pictures now at Cone (category theory), whereas pdf2svg could. I don't think I can really recommend pstoedit for this task. Ryan Reich ( talk) 04:26, 15 January 2009 (UTC)
Please see Negative and non-negative numbers. Katzmik ( talk) 18:10, 14 January 2009 (UTC)
Does anybody have an preferrably an illustration (or an idea for one) to illustrate the concept of vector space? I'd like to nominate that article for FA soon, but I feel without a good lead section image it's only half as beautiful. Thanks! Jakob.scholbach ( talk) 20:56, 14 January 2009 (UTC)
We have Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/List of mathematics categories which is used as worklist by mathbot to fill in the list of mathematics categories.
Question: can this list of categories be also useful to Wikipedia readers, after some formatting changes or prettifying perhaps? Then we could move it to the article namespace, at list of mathematics categories, and treat it in the same way as the other mathematics topics. Oleg Alexandrov ( talk) 07:08, 15 January 2009 (UTC)
I tagged Krull–Schmidt theorem with {{ db-histmerge}}, since there was a WP:CUTPASTE move done to it. The ndash article has no new (relevant) history to it, all of the history is in the hyphen article, which is now a redirect. Can an admin fix this? JackSchmidt ( talk) 00:28, 15 January 2009 (UTC)
Can anyone help with Grey relational analysis? Michael Hardy ( talk) 05:49, 16 January 2009 (UTC)
Gauss–Jacobi mechanical quadrature is vaguely written. In particular, what does the function pn(x) have to do with the statement that follows it? Could someone who knows the answer to these questions clarify by editing the article. Michael Hardy ( talk) 05:26, 16 January 2009 (UTC)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_module_category —Preceding unsigned comment added by 77.4.181.225 ( talk) 12:33, 16 January 2009 (UTC)
As usual vandals are up to no good at geometry. Having scanned through the editing history for 2008, it appears that vandals were at the peak during mid year; their activity lowest around December. But since January they are back for more. I am worried about this article because everyone knows what geometry is and at least one tenth of people who come across this article are out to vandalize. So this article is never going to be safe against vandalizm. Instead of wasting our times reverting edits there every hour of the day (that article will probably fill up 80% of anyone's watchlist), can we take some action? -- PS T 13:59, 17 January 2009 (UTC)
The article on vector spaces is up for featured article nomination. Please opine here. Jakob.scholbach ( talk) 16:00, 17 January 2009 (UTC)
I would be interested in comments as to the appropriateness of the following comment by Gandalf61:
Katzmik, we all know where this is going. You want to bang your non-standard calculus drum and assert calculus could be taught without the concept of limits and so they can't be central to calculus. And you could be right - in theory. However, in practice, limits play a central role in the field of calculus as it is taught and used by most mathematicians, and most mathematicians would be happy with the first sentence of this article as it stands, and your contention that this is a misconception is a tiny minority view. Now you may say that is just my opinon. But if you are really interested in what the wider community thinks, then I suggest you go ahead and flag this discussion at WT:WPM. Gandalf61 ( talk) 10:23, 20 January 2009 (UTC)
(←) Hey cool, we find our way back to policy. "At each stage"? According to whom? And what interpretation of "stage"? "The only way" according to whom? "Intended model" according to whom?
No viewpoint has a right to hegemony or even undue influence on Wikipedia. There are plenty who believe that set-theoretic foundations and questions such as these are entirely the wrong approach, but there are others who dedicate their lives to resolving them. So we must try our best to keep our personal prejudices to one side, and report on what reliable sources say, with due weight. </boring> Geometry guy 23:33, 20 January 2009 (UTC)
These two articles are in an unsatisfactory state. They look as if they could probably be phrased in such a way that any mathematician could understand them. But the author seems to assume knowledge of some related topics that most mathematicians don't have, and seems to lack knowledge of some things that most mathematicians know. I doubt that the person who wrote these two article can do what needs to be done, and I could do it only with more work than I'm going to put into it today or this week. Michael Hardy ( talk) 18:23, 19 January 2009 (UTC)
I are an expert both in data structures and in topological graph theory, and I don't find the article very intelligible either. When I tried to read it I got the strong impression it referred to the same thing as a rotation system, one of the ways of encoding embedding graphs on two-manifolds, and I'm still pretty sure that's what the bulk of the article is about. But the author removed my {{ mergeto}} tag, assuring me it actually referred to higher dimensional things as well, as the "general definition" section claims but never clearly describes. As for "generalized map" it seems to be a copy of only that section, making the signal-to-noise ratio even worse. — David Eppstein ( talk) 02:32, 27 January 2009 (UTC)
I've created a new page titled List of topics named after Bernhard Riemann. It is of course incomplete. Please help expand it by doing two things:
Michael Hardy ( talk) 01:08, 22 January 2009 (UTC)
World Mathematics Challenge is up for deletion as a possible hoax. Ben Mac Dui 19:43, 27 January 2009 (UTC)
See Complex argument (continued fraction) and Talk:Complex argument (continued fraction). A "prod" tag proposes deletion. The article is very clearly and cleanly written and that's quite unusual for dubious material. Michael Hardy ( talk) 03:02, 20 January 2009 (UTC)
Did the continued fraction get merged into some other article? Michael Hardy ( talk) 21:31, 31 January 2009 (UTC)
Carol number has been nominated for deletion. Gandalf61 ( talk) 11:53, 28 January 2009 (UTC)
Cite error: There are <ref group=A>
tags on this page, but the references will not show without a {{reflist|group=A}}
template (see the
help page).
Silly Rabbit's mention of quaternions above reminded me that I want to put
Quaternion (disambiguation) up for deletion. See the discussion at
As always, give reasons for your opinions.
Ozob (
talk)
09:32, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
I would like to shorten the vertical arrows of the diagram this (the source code is attached). Any ideas? GeometryGirl ( talk) 14:50, 5 January 2009 (UTC)
\documentclass{amsart} \usepackage[all]{xy} \begin{document} \begin{equation*} \xymatrix@C=1em{ \cdots\ar[r] & H_{n+1}(X_1)\ar[d]_{f_*}\ar[r] & H_n(A_1 \cap B_1)\ar[d]_{f_*}\ar[r] & H_n(A_1) \oplus H_n(B_1)\ar[d]_{f_*}\ar[r] & H_n(X_1)\ar[d]_{f_*}\ar[r] & H_{n-1}(A_1 \cap B_1)\ar[d]_{f_*}\ar[r] & \cdots \\ \cdots\ar[r] & H_{n+1}(X_2)\ar[r] & H_n(A_2 \cap B_2)\ar[r] & H_n(A_2) \oplus H_n(B_2)\ar[r] & H_n(X_2)\ar[r] & H_{n-1}(A_2 \cap B_2)\ar[r] & \cdots \\ } \end{equation*} \end{document}
Is it just me, or is are the mathematics articles on Wikipedia less comprehensive than most other topics of the same importance? There are relatively few mathematics featured articles, and many of the subprojects seem to be, well, dead. Leon math ( talk) 04:04, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
I have contributed a great deal to content review processes, and they are entirely compatible with mathematics articles, partly (in the case of GA) through my efforts. However, in my own edits to mathematics articles, I am much more interested in bringing a range of mathematics articles to B-Class, than taking any of them further. Of Wikipedia's 2.5+ million articles, less than 10000 are GAs or featured (0.4%). Improving the dross to a reasonable standard is far more important a goal than making a handful of articles exceptionally good.
The main historical failing of mathematics articles is the lack of sources. Just check out a few mathematics articles at random. Many have no sources at all. There seems to have been some idiotic belief that mathematics sources itself. I don't say this with my content review "verifiability" hat on, but as a user of Wikipedia. Wikipedia is now a great resource for looking up mathematical information. However, stubby mathematics articles would be so much more useful if they provided references (preferably online) to sources which fill in the gaps. Clicking on an article and finding inadequate content with no references is a depressing experience. Geometry guy 23:39, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
Let's not focus on what part of WikiProject Math is more important. It seems that our overall conclusion is that there aren't enough editors that possess all of the following traits: (1) have the knowledge/ability to help, (2) are willing to put information on Wikipedia, and (3) are concerned with the organization, procedures, and conventions of Wikipedia. (I fail number 1.) Hmm... this problem is not easily solved. I guess it's just like Geometry guy said; we can only do as much as we can, and there's really nothing that can be done to drastically improve the situation. Leon math ( talk) 03:00, 7 January 2009 (UTC)
This complex clothoid/Euler spiral is used everyday, being used in roads and on railways to blend together curves of differing radii (or straight sections). An editor recently has introduced a large amount of new material in the form of including PDF page screen shots into the article (rather than TeX notation). I have copied this material to User:Ling Kah Jai/Track transition curve for their improvement, but it would be useful to have some wider review of what is appropriate (the 8-page proof is perhaps more than necessary for a Wikipedia article).
Track transition curve, User:Ling Kah Jai/Track transition curve, Talk:Track transition curve#Formulation of Euler spiral. — Sladen ( talk) 05:53, 7 January 2009 (UTC)
This category, and its two current inhabitants, Classical Hamiltonian quaternions and The vector of a quaternion, should in my opinion be transwikied to WikiBooks. I feel that these are both needless and unsanctioned content forks of quaternions. They seem to be filled with the personal opinion and original research of the author, and are rather poorly written. siℓℓy rabbit ( talk) 03:46, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
Came across invariants of tensors and noticed that it currently focuses exclusively on rank 2 tensors i.e. matrices. Matrix invariants are already covered at characteristic polynomial and related articles. Is there a more general article that could be written here about how determinant, trace etc. generalise to higher rank tensors, or is this a dead end ? Gandalf61 ( talk) 17:10, 8 January 2009 (UTC)
An editor had earlier comment at the page Iowa class battleship that the two mathematical formulas in the paragraph below were actually the same:
That same year (1935), an empirical formula for predicting a ship's maximum speed was developed, based on scale-model studies in flumes of various hull forms and propellers. The formula used the length-to-speed ratio originally developed for 12-meter (39 ft) yachts:
and with additional research at the David Taylor Model Basin would later be redefined as:
- .
It quickly became apparent that propeller cavitation caused a drop in efficiency at speeds over 30 knots (56 km/h). Propeller design therefore took on new importance. [1] [A 1]
Sine I have failed four separate remedial level math classes at collage, and haven't passed a math class with a grade better than C- since seventh grade, I was wondering if someone from this project could independently verify that the two formulas are in fact the same. TomStar81 ( Talk) 04:08, 10 January 2009 (UTC)
...is working again. Michael Hardy ( talk) 17:48, 10 January 2009 (UTC)
Look at this:
In "displayed" TeX, I'd write the digamma function as
or in some contexts like this:
I don't want to change an "inline" thing to TeX, since that causes comical mismatches of size and alignment, but the "prime" is barely visible. Is there a better, more legible, way to write a "prime" in non-TeX notation, and if not, can one be created? Michael Hardy ( talk) 16:26, 11 January 2009 (UTC)
I am not sure how this article ever got to GA (luckliy it was demoted). I am starting a rewrite now; any help there would be appreciated (in particular, a good lede is necessary). -- Point-set topologist ( talk) 18:17, 11 January 2009 (UTC)
Go to modulo and click on "what links here".
In the modular arithmetic article, 63 and 53 are congruent to each other modulo 10.
In the modulo operation article, "modulo" is a binary operation and (63 modulo 10) = 3.
The modulo article is far more general than just arithmetic.
Michael Hardy ( talk) 21:51, 11 January 2009 (UTC)
I just got the book a a preset a very pleased I am too with it. Of course I immediately dipped into he centre and also started looked up things I know about in the index. Very interesting. I didn't find much or anything about the things I thought of which indicates if it really was comprehensive it would be a bookcase of books - it is pretty huge as it is. I seem also to have been corrupted by Wikipedia, I kept thinking I should edit this to add wikilinks and better citations. Where it differs from WP mainly is it is much more chatty and readable with things like "Why should nonequivalence be harder to prove than equivalence? The answer is that in order to show....", or "For fun, one might ask a fussier question:". On further references it can say things like "For further details n sections 1-4 the reader is referred to standard textbooks such as ...". I can thoroughly recommend the book.
The book has a small section in its introduction on "What Does The Companion Offer That the Internet Does Not Offer?" (I feel like quoting WP:STYLE about the capitalization!) and I have to agree with what it says: that the internet is hit and miss, sometimes there's a good explanation sometimes not. The articles are drier just concerned with giving he facts in an economical way and not reflecting on those facts. And it doesn't have long essays on the fundamentals and origins, the various branches , biographies of mathematicians and the influence of mathematics. Not that I agree with all that, basically I think what it amounts to is one wouldn't make oneself comfortable, get a cup of coffee and curl up to read the articles in wikipedia. The book has a problem with that too as it is so heavy but otherwise it is a far better read overall.
Does a book like this have lessons for us? Should WP style be a bit more chatty? Or should we be dry and economical and just inhabit a different domain from books like this? Dmcq ( talk) 12:18, 9 January 2009 (UTC)
I recently created Category:Additive number theory and I'd like help/feedback.
CRGreathouse ( t | c) 20:28, 12 January 2009 (UTC)
I am seriously concerned about the article on manifolds. First of all, it seems (from an uninvolved user's point of view) that a group of people rejected this article from becoming featured simply because they couldn't understand this. I am glad at least that it was rejected but there should seriously be some restrictions on the people who vote (some people seem to think that if they can't understand it, no-one else can) (if anyone has the time, just have a read through the article). But here is a specific section (the article is never going to be featured at this rate):
Other curves
Manifolds need not be connected (all in "one piece"); an example is a pair of separate circles. They need not be closed; thus a line segment without its end points is a manifold.
And they are never countable; thus a parabola is a manifold.
Putting these freedoms together, two other examples of manifolds are a hyperbola (two open, infinite pieces) and the locus of points on the cubic curve y2 = x3−x (a closed loop piece and an open, infinite piece). However, we exclude examples like two touching circles that share a point to form a figure-8; at the shared point we cannot create a satisfactory chart. Even with the bending allowed by topology, the vicinity of the shared point looks like a "+", not a line (a + is not homeomorphic to a closed interval (line segment) since deleting the center point from the + gives a space with four components (i.e pieces) whereas deleting a point from a closed interval gives a space with at most two pieces; topological operations always preserve the number of pieces).
I can give (if necessary) similar criticizm of almost all other sections. Recently I re-wrote the lede: I would seriously consider re-writing the whole article and deleting some of the sections there. -- Point-set topologist ( talk) 20:59, 12 January 2009 (UTC)
, if not harmful. For example, removing reasonable content as per "delete nonsense section" is pretty bad.
I have reverted your recent edits. Jakob.scholbach ( talk) 21:33, 12 January 2009 (UTC)
I just did a minor edit to Cauchy principal value. After the edit, every line of TeX in the article looked like this:
I've seen this a number of times lately. It will probably go away soon, but just when is completely unpredictable. Why is this happening? Michael Hardy ( talk) 19:41, 13 January 2009 (UTC)
There are a number of (bolded red) parsing errors in this article, related - I think - to mathematical equations. Would someone more familiar with this area take a look? Thanks! -- John Broughton (♫♫) 20:56, 13 January 2009 (UTC)
I think that these articles should be deleted: Topic outline of algebra, Topic outline of arithmetic, Topic outline of calculus, Topic outline of discrete mathematics, Topic outline of geometry, Topic outline of logic, Topic outline of mathematics, Topic outline of statistics, Topic outline of trigonometry. Charvest ( talk) 20:12, 11 January 2009 (UTC)
I would suggest that the portal is the ideal place for these pages. Martin 13:24, 12 January 2009 (UTC)
I've nominated the worst of these articles for deletion at: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Topic outline of algebra Charvest ( talk) 22:09, 14 January 2009 (UTC)
This question sometimes comes up and it bears answering as often as possible, since a lot of people have never heard that we should be using SVG, and of those who have, few seem to have an easy way of actually accomplishing it. This is addressed at Help:Displaying a formula#Convert to SVG, but their proposed solution relies on a somewhat arcane and arbitrary invocation of two different utilities, followed by a roundabout filtration through two major software packages, which is necessitated by one of them (pstoedit) requiring a costly proprietary plugin to work properly. And the end result is still unusable if your diagram has diagonal lines. Here's the right way:
pdflatex file.tex pdfcrop --clip file.pdf tmp.pdf pdf2svg tmp.pdf file.svg (rm tmp.pdf at the end)
Both pdfcrop and pdf2svg are small, free (if new and somewhat alpha) programs that work properly. I advocate pdflatex since with the alternative, you might be tempted to go the route of latex→dvips→pstopdf before vectorizing, and that runs into a problem with fonts that has to be corrected with one of the arcane invocations above. (There is a correct route, which is to replace that chain with dvipdfm, that I have never seen anyone suggest. Somehow, the existence of this useful one-step solution to getting PDFs from plain latex is always ignored.)
I have proposed at the talk page of that Help article that this procedure replace the existing one. It has been road-tested on, most notably (for the complexity of its images) Triangulated category and found to work quite well. Since the interested parties hang out here more than there, I'm soliciting feedback from whatever TeXperts and hackers might be lurking. Ryan Reich ( talk) 04:23, 14 January 2009 (UTC)
Since writing this, I have investigated Inkscape's internals and found that the following pstoedit invocation is also good:
pstoedit -f plot-svg -dt -ssp tmp.pdf tile.svg
It also makes smaller SVG files, sometimes (with the large ones) by quite a bit. This invokes the GNU libplot, and I cannot decide whether this piece of imperfect software is preferable to the one which is pdf2svg; let it be your call if you use it. Ryan Reich ( talk) 20:59, 14 January 2009 (UTC)
...except that it couldn't make a nice SVG out of the pictures now at Cone (category theory), whereas pdf2svg could. I don't think I can really recommend pstoedit for this task. Ryan Reich ( talk) 04:26, 15 January 2009 (UTC)
Please see Negative and non-negative numbers. Katzmik ( talk) 18:10, 14 January 2009 (UTC)
Does anybody have an preferrably an illustration (or an idea for one) to illustrate the concept of vector space? I'd like to nominate that article for FA soon, but I feel without a good lead section image it's only half as beautiful. Thanks! Jakob.scholbach ( talk) 20:56, 14 January 2009 (UTC)
We have Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/List of mathematics categories which is used as worklist by mathbot to fill in the list of mathematics categories.
Question: can this list of categories be also useful to Wikipedia readers, after some formatting changes or prettifying perhaps? Then we could move it to the article namespace, at list of mathematics categories, and treat it in the same way as the other mathematics topics. Oleg Alexandrov ( talk) 07:08, 15 January 2009 (UTC)
I tagged Krull–Schmidt theorem with {{ db-histmerge}}, since there was a WP:CUTPASTE move done to it. The ndash article has no new (relevant) history to it, all of the history is in the hyphen article, which is now a redirect. Can an admin fix this? JackSchmidt ( talk) 00:28, 15 January 2009 (UTC)
Can anyone help with Grey relational analysis? Michael Hardy ( talk) 05:49, 16 January 2009 (UTC)
Gauss–Jacobi mechanical quadrature is vaguely written. In particular, what does the function pn(x) have to do with the statement that follows it? Could someone who knows the answer to these questions clarify by editing the article. Michael Hardy ( talk) 05:26, 16 January 2009 (UTC)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_module_category —Preceding unsigned comment added by 77.4.181.225 ( talk) 12:33, 16 January 2009 (UTC)
As usual vandals are up to no good at geometry. Having scanned through the editing history for 2008, it appears that vandals were at the peak during mid year; their activity lowest around December. But since January they are back for more. I am worried about this article because everyone knows what geometry is and at least one tenth of people who come across this article are out to vandalize. So this article is never going to be safe against vandalizm. Instead of wasting our times reverting edits there every hour of the day (that article will probably fill up 80% of anyone's watchlist), can we take some action? -- PS T 13:59, 17 January 2009 (UTC)
The article on vector spaces is up for featured article nomination. Please opine here. Jakob.scholbach ( talk) 16:00, 17 January 2009 (UTC)
I would be interested in comments as to the appropriateness of the following comment by Gandalf61:
Katzmik, we all know where this is going. You want to bang your non-standard calculus drum and assert calculus could be taught without the concept of limits and so they can't be central to calculus. And you could be right - in theory. However, in practice, limits play a central role in the field of calculus as it is taught and used by most mathematicians, and most mathematicians would be happy with the first sentence of this article as it stands, and your contention that this is a misconception is a tiny minority view. Now you may say that is just my opinon. But if you are really interested in what the wider community thinks, then I suggest you go ahead and flag this discussion at WT:WPM. Gandalf61 ( talk) 10:23, 20 January 2009 (UTC)
(←) Hey cool, we find our way back to policy. "At each stage"? According to whom? And what interpretation of "stage"? "The only way" according to whom? "Intended model" according to whom?
No viewpoint has a right to hegemony or even undue influence on Wikipedia. There are plenty who believe that set-theoretic foundations and questions such as these are entirely the wrong approach, but there are others who dedicate their lives to resolving them. So we must try our best to keep our personal prejudices to one side, and report on what reliable sources say, with due weight. </boring> Geometry guy 23:33, 20 January 2009 (UTC)
These two articles are in an unsatisfactory state. They look as if they could probably be phrased in such a way that any mathematician could understand them. But the author seems to assume knowledge of some related topics that most mathematicians don't have, and seems to lack knowledge of some things that most mathematicians know. I doubt that the person who wrote these two article can do what needs to be done, and I could do it only with more work than I'm going to put into it today or this week. Michael Hardy ( talk) 18:23, 19 January 2009 (UTC)
I are an expert both in data structures and in topological graph theory, and I don't find the article very intelligible either. When I tried to read it I got the strong impression it referred to the same thing as a rotation system, one of the ways of encoding embedding graphs on two-manifolds, and I'm still pretty sure that's what the bulk of the article is about. But the author removed my {{ mergeto}} tag, assuring me it actually referred to higher dimensional things as well, as the "general definition" section claims but never clearly describes. As for "generalized map" it seems to be a copy of only that section, making the signal-to-noise ratio even worse. — David Eppstein ( talk) 02:32, 27 January 2009 (UTC)
I've created a new page titled List of topics named after Bernhard Riemann. It is of course incomplete. Please help expand it by doing two things:
Michael Hardy ( talk) 01:08, 22 January 2009 (UTC)
World Mathematics Challenge is up for deletion as a possible hoax. Ben Mac Dui 19:43, 27 January 2009 (UTC)
See Complex argument (continued fraction) and Talk:Complex argument (continued fraction). A "prod" tag proposes deletion. The article is very clearly and cleanly written and that's quite unusual for dubious material. Michael Hardy ( talk) 03:02, 20 January 2009 (UTC)
Did the continued fraction get merged into some other article? Michael Hardy ( talk) 21:31, 31 January 2009 (UTC)
Carol number has been nominated for deletion. Gandalf61 ( talk) 11:53, 28 January 2009 (UTC)
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