References to Non-Newtonian calculus are being added to to the 'See also' section of various articles related to the exponential function. They don't seem relevant enough to warrant inclusion, but what should I put into a comment when removing them - is there a guideline please? Or do you think they are reasonable? Dmcq ( talk) 16:01, 30 May 2009 (UTC)
There is current and threatened editorial action on the article mentioned. The article is primarily a list, and I would like to improve its nature. I would also categorize it as a part of mathematics education, if such is possible. I have one citation to "attempted" work by a CalTech Ph.D. at zhurnaly.com/cgi-bin/wiki/CoincidentalTaxonomy that I would like to use or suggest as being used in the article. I also think the article might be re-directed to a larger article on mathematical curiosities. I have my own original results that I deem not to be research that I also would like to place in the introduction or body of the article as well. This is the subject matter you can find at User:Julzes/365.25. The results were found by happenstance, this being my explanation for not regarding them as research, and I have no interest in staking a claim to them. Julzes ( talk) 04:40, 31 May 2009 (UTC)
How about transferring this to our sister project Wiki Books? They are using the same software and probably have a lot more tolerance for this type of thing. Of course sometimes the worst things are turned into a fine article by some genius, but I have no idea how this should work in this case. -- Hans Adler ( talk) 15:21, 31 May 2009 (UTC)
user:MrOllie recently deleted these two links from Circumscribed circle, calling them "linkspam" in the edit summary:
(In the course of doing this, he left fully intact the previous edit, which was vandalism.) The pages appear to be well written and relevant, unlike cases of linkspam I've seen where the page merely links injudiciously to other places on the web that superficially seem relevant to the topic, for the purpose of advertising. It looks as if they supported by advertising but not created for the purpose of that advertising, again unlike sites of the other sort I've seen. Some of MrOllie's recent edits leave the impression that he spends a lot of time removing linkspam, but may not be capable of judging the quality of the pages that he deletes the links to.
In some cases of this kind, the person deleting the links on these grounds asserts that the person who put the links there has a conflict of interests. In such cases, reinstatement of the links by someone with no such conflict is then found inoffensive, so that it is held there is no grounds for considering them "linkspam". MrOllie has recently deleted lots of links to various pages on geometry on that particular site. It appears that MrOllie may lack either the ability or the willingness to judge the difference between two sorts of sites:
If those whose primary concern is getting rid of linkspam, and any WikiProjects or the like concerned with that, lack the ability or willingness to make this sort of distinction, then people like the denizens of this present WikiProject need to intervene to help them. Michael Hardy ( talk) 16:43, 31 May 2009 (UTC)
I would be interested in hearing people thoughts about this. Articles such as 6 (number) generally attract lots of trivia.
etc. etc. etc. What are the relevant guidelines on what should be included in such an article? Are there any good or featured articles of this kind that can be used as a model? The most recent inclusion
which at least is mathematical if a bit obscure. — Martin ( MSGJ · talk) 09:20, 1 June 2009 (UTC)
Hello, WikiProject Mathematics!
An editor has asked for help concerning a technical mathematical article here, and I wonder if someone who understands these things better than I could advise.— S Marshall Talk/ Cont 21:41, 3 June 2009 (UTC)
Guys, i've been Reading this Project for many months, there are many Highly talented Folks here, i really want an answer for this, i Do believe Wikipedia is not a Forum but i really really want an answer for this, please guys don't Delete this here is the Problem:
solve for t-
60√t (sin(t/3))^2 = 150
only t is under root after 60
Please Help! 122.174.74.142 ( talk) 17:01, 4 June 2009 (UTC)
User:Lipedia (formerly User:Boolean hexadecimal) added some odd diagrams to two articles; I've removed them. Diffs: Logical NOR and Sheffer stroke. This is not the first set of odd images added by this user; File:Hasse_diagram_of_all_logical_connectives.jpg was a previous one that, in the end, was not used in any articles. Thoughts? — Carl ( CBM · talk) 21:13, 1 June 2009 (UTC)
Quote: I thought we'd been through all this in
Talk:Logical connective not so long ago. What has changed between then and now? I notice the German version of the article also removed his diagram recently.
Dmcq
Please make sure, you've got the topic, before you add your opinion. Here we speak about the following two diagrams, and about nothing else. (They have never been used in any german articles.)
The same about Hans Adler: The symbols used are original research, and even apart from this his graphics only make sense with long explanations. Which symbols?! (Probably you remember these, but they do not appear in the diagrams we speak about. I've once used them as a means of explanation in the Wikipedia, to visualise the relations between logical connectives, and this was a mistake, indeed.)
Concerning Bkell: Ah ... ordering logical connectives in a Hasse diagram by implication is original research - very interesting. (Maybe you take a look at this homepage.)
Concerning CBM: Nice to meet the user, who removed the set theoretic definition of logical connectives (Added by Gregbard) with the most funny statement: It's quite unclear to me what these sets are supposed to represent. It was tagged as possible OR for some time. I mention this sentence, because here it seems to be the same.
The diagrams:
Prefix notations like
are usual, but nearly unreadable for human beings. At the moment in the NAND article there is a section called Simplification, where the operation is not written, because it's always the same operation, NOR in this case:
That's easier, but still hard to read, because it's very difficult to see, which left and right brackets belong together. Combining them to circles is the easiest solution. And that's what you want to call original research? (To express operations by circles surrounding the arguments is nothing special, by the way: It's also done in existential graphs.)
At the moment these two diagrams are the easiest way to show, how every logical connective can be expressed by only one Sheffer operator. Greetings, Lipedia ( talk) 16:34, 3 June 2009 (UTC)
Just a short note: It's no problem including the connectives names in the diagrams. It's what I first did, but it became too crowded for my taste. The hint, that printable information is desirable is true indeed. Concerning the color scheme: I may choose darker colors, to make the appearance less gaudy. It's just important, that A and B have different colors. I will upload modified versions at the weekend. Greetings, Lipedia ( talk) 07:33, 4 June 2009 (UTC)
No, I didn't ignore it, but I doubt that it is justified.
Content must be verifiable, otherwise it's original research - and the content is undoubted in this case, and verifiable by any source you want. But like every encyclopedia, we should display this verified information in the way, that serves our readers best. An article is good, when the content is verifiable, and as many readers as possible (also non experts) can understand it as easy as possible. So your request aims in the wrong direction: The question is not "Does it appear somewhere in exactly this way?" but "Does it help anyone to understand Sheffer operators?".
This is disputable of couse. I think it does:
The article tells, that all sixteen logical connectives can be expressed in terms of NOR and NAND respectively, so I think we should show that - and not only mention some examples, presuming that the reader can easily deduct all others. This could be done in a sixteen row table of couse, but the most helpful way to display logical connectives is not the table (because the neighbour rows have nothing to do with each other) but the
Hasse diagram showing all implications.
The formulas should be shown in a clear and easy way, so somewhat easier to read than
(((A,A),(B,B)),((A,A),(B,B))), the notation used in the
Simplification section in the
present NAND article. Combining the parentheses to circles for better readability is really not a "idiosyncratic notation" (the Simplification section presumed) but a very simple step. The hint, that "the most important information" should be shown in the diagram itself was justified, so I changed it (and the color scheme as well).
This is how it could show at the end of the articles (= at the end of the Simplification section, which could be included also in the NOR article):
Greetings,
Lipedia (
talk)
12:26, 11 June 2009 (UTC)
"it would need to accompanied by an explanation of the notation or a link to an explanation"
Please note, that I proposed to include them in the
Simplification section in the
present NAND article (and its equivalent in the NOR article not yet created). Did you read it? In this section simplified notations like
(((A,A),B),(A,(B,B))) meaning
NAND(NAND(NAND(A,A),B),NAND(A,NAND(B,B))) are used. In the context of this section the short explanation below the diagram will do. (I wouldn't be so crazy, to include these files in the
logical connectives article, and think it could help some reader there. Hope you didn't think that.)
"Truth tables, however cumbersome you think they are"
"Your comments that such truth tables are not the notation we should be using"
These lines tells me, that you missunderstood something I wrote, or something the others wrote about me. I did not even mention truth tables
nor would I say anything against them (I actually
love truth tables!). Here we speak about the linking of many equal operations in
NOR logic and
NAND logic, and what I don't like are unreadable formulas like
NOR(NOR(NOR(A,A),B),NOR(A,NOR(B,B))) or even the simplification
(((A,A),B),(A,(B,B))). I think these simplified formulas are better readable, when the outer parentheses are bigger and the inner parentheses are smaller.
(In this case the left and right parentheses touch in the middle, and become a circle. If anyone conciders my diagrams to be original research because of this, I can easily make a short break in the middle, so that every circle becomes a pair of semicircles, easily recognizable as a pair of parentheses - than it would be exactly the same like (((A,A),(B,B)),((A,A),(B,B))) and so on.) Greetings, Lipedia ( talk) 15:41, 11 June 2009 (UTC)
If something is correct, it doesn't need to be "maintained". Possibly your focus is more on the editor than the reader - in my eyes a fundamental mistake, but it appears to me, that this is quite usual in the Wikipedia.
The blame against the first version was to be "a riddle like the
Pioneer plaque" because I "hide the most important information in a link map". So I've got this information included, and now the blame is, that the diagrams are "cluttered". Isn't that a bit strange? Looks as if the rejection is more imporant than the reason.
I think it's sad, that all this debate is primarily harping on about principles, may they be real or imagined, and the question "Does it help someone?" does not play any role. Is "they keep being put in as an alternative to the straightforward text" really a senseful blame? For me it's too far away from "Does it help someone?" and thus secondary, borderline unimportant. For me an article is good
if and only if it helps as many and as different people as possible. Greetings,
Lipedia (
talk)
15:56, 14 June 2009 (UTC)
Of course I didn't mean someone when I said "someone", but rater a quantity of people worth mentioning. But sadly we have no means to check, what exactly is helpful to how many people. Concerning idiosyncracy I can only repeat what I said before: I can easily make a short break in the middle, so that every circle becomes a pair of semicircles, easily recognizable as a pair of parentheses - than it would be exactly the same like (((A,A),(B,B)),((A,A),(B,B))) and so on. But I'm not going to do that. We can agree that the diagrams don't match in Logical NOR, Sheffer stroke and Henry M. Sheffer and end the discussion. Lipedia ( talk) 09:39, 16 June 2009 (UTC)
Another funny diagram has been added to Hereditary set. At least it's smaller but I think it detracts from what little content there is in the article. A straightforward listing of a few sets would be better and could include some infinite ones. I think the article needs a bit of expansion. For instance a set containing itself and all subsets wouldn't have an ordinal number as far as I can work out. Dmcq ( talk) 11:17, 14 June 2009 (UTC)
Basically, a significant number of math terms are virtually impossible to define for the layman, usually because the relevant Wikipedia articles are simply unhelpful, even useless (cf. hypoelliptic- wikt:) to people without knowledge of fairly advanced maths (and yes I fully acknowledge the difficulty of avoiding jargon in many math articles). Another problem often comes in that some terms may be ridiculously hard to give good quotations (i.e. from books or scientific publication), such as sphenic number- wikt:, even though they are clearly in use (in this case, the problem comes with the small amount of truly useful material in google books and google scholar).
Would WPMATH members be interested in answering the occasional requests for help in such cases?
Circeus (
talk)
02:44, 3 June 2009 (UTC)
Okay, so your first mission, if you accept it (sorry, couldn't help it :p), is to help define wikt:hypoelliptic in comprehensible term, and verify whether or not that definition directly relates to the current mathematics definition we have for wikt:elliptic. Personally, I'd appreciate some backgroung for dating the term. I find a fair amount of material that discusses or mentions Lars Hörmander's solution (?) ot the things (apparently at some point in the 50s or 60s), but none about when the term started being used (of course it might not have been formally used before Hörmander). A typical example is here. Circeus ( talk) 17:32, 3 June 2009 (UTC)
So, to get back to the question of a dictionary definition of hypoelliptic:
Right? — David Eppstein ( talk) 06:17, 4 June 2009 (UTC)
Judging by this discussion, some preliminaries on dismbiguation by email might help. You can run things past me offline to get a general sense. Charles Matthews ( talk) 10:55, 14 June 2009 (UTC)
...that a mitimorphism is a morphism from the power set of a fibre bundle into another fibre bundle?
I was hoping someone here could clarify whether this newly created article is a hoax, a neologism, or just very obscure. Thanks, decltype ( talk) 08:08, 4 June 2009 (UTC)
Could someone look at the geometric argument for the integration by parts? I am thinking to add a section to the article about that and have a couple questions. I used xfig to create the picture, is there a better tool to create pictures like that? I could not find this particular trick in the literature, does it constitute OR if I add this argument to the article? ( Igny ( talk) 02:20, 5 June 2009 (UTC))
Category:Linear operators seems a rather strange category. It says that it is for linear operators defined on functions, but this seems rather overly restrictive. What should be done with it? Sławomir Biały ( talk) 15:18, 7 June 2009 (UTC)
Portal:Statistics is being considered for featured quality status, at the Featured portal candidates process. Comments would be appreciated at Wikipedia:Featured portal candidates/Portal:Statistics. — G716 < T· C> 01:26, 9 June 2009 (UTC)
See Template_talk:Technical_(expert)#This_template_is_for_article_namespace. User: Debresser has repeatedly tried to remove the talk page requirement, contrary to the explicit instructions in the technical guideline. I pointed out to him that since this tag is scarcely used, Coren's mistaken reformatting of the tag (which changed the template to an ambox, which is for articles) was not reverted, unlike the situation for the regular technical tag, which was reverted. Debresser insists that since Coren's reformatting of the tag as an ambox was unreverted, I must be completely mistaken about the consensus regarding the placement of the technical tag on talk pages. He has not explained why there is this distinction (one technical tag on the article, the other on talk pages) and has refused to read the guideline or its talk page to understand the consensus. Indeed, according to him, since this mistake was unreverted for 2 years or so, his position is the consensus! -- C S ( talk) 14:32, 11 June 2009 (UTC)
Lo and behold: List of arithmetic topics is a red link. Should we do something about that? Michael Hardy ( talk) 03:50, 13 June 2009 (UTC)
Under the terms of the licensing update being adopted across all Wikimedia sites, WMF projects will no longer be able to add GFDL-only text published elsewhere. Any GFDL text added to Wikipedia after Nov. 1, 2008 will have to be removed as a copyvio. PlanetMath uses the GFDL and hence this could shut down a potentially valuable source of content interaction. In order to avoid that, PlanetMath would need to also relicense to CC-BY-SA as explicitly allowed under GFDL 1.3.
If you have contacts at PlanetMath, or participate there yourself, I would encourage you to discuss this issue with them. See also: m:Licensing update/Outreach. Dragons flight ( talk) 01:14, 14 June 2009 (UTC)
I have a somewhat minor complaint with regards to some of the algebra-related articles. In particular, I find that too many technical terms are abbreviated. For example, although it is reasonable to abbreviate terms like "unique factorization domain" to UFD, or "principal ideal domain" to PID, abbreviations such as BFD, BD, HFD, AD etc... are ambiguous to some extent (try to guess what some of them refer to; I find that this is not at all trivial, even for algebraists). As an encyclopedia, we should aim to be as clear as possible, and abbreviations should only be done if absolutely necessary. Even in this case, the word which is abbreviated should be made clear, along with its abbreviation. I tend to find abbreviations such as ACCP to mean "ascending chain condition on principal ideals" somewhat pointless because along with abbreviations like UFD or PID, it is somewhat difficult to interpret (one may guess ACCP to be some sort of "domain" if he was not familiar with it). Furthermore, such abbreviations can lead to errors. For instance, one may write "UFD domain" instead of "UFD" thus being redundant to some extent. Therefore, although abbreviations of basic terms are OK, we should start defining/linking abbreviations when using them; especially if the term to which they correspond is somewhat unknown. -- PS T 04:44, 14 June 2009 (UTC)
In WP:REFNAME, starting from 14 April 2008, I read: "In subsequent uses of the named tag the use of <ref name="name" /> is encouraged rather than copying the whole footnote again, as whole footnotes tend to reduce the readability of the article's text in edit mode, which makes finding specific parts of the text when editing tedious."
On the other hand, the short version is more prone to accidents under further edits; if the editor is not careful enough, his/her local edit may have unwanted global effect. See also Wikipedia_talk:Footnotes#Mark-up_would_be_better_than_encouraging_people_to_remove_reference_information.
For this reason I have used the long version in unbounded operator. (Initially I did not know about that style recommendation.) I wonder, do we mathematicians agree that the short version is preferable also in our texts? Boris Tsirelson ( talk) 12:03, 15 June 2009 (UTC)
Named footnotes have one disadvantage: they discourage grouping together several references cited in the same sentence. Thus, the degree to whch they shorten footnotes is debateable. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 18:42, 16 June 2009 (UTC)
I have been working, with help from other editors, to improve the article on first-order logic. If anyone has the time to review the relatively long article and give an outside perspective, it would be greatly appreciated. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 18:01, 15 June 2009 (UTC)
Can someone take a look at the Dirac delta function page? The editor User:Sławomir Biały may know what he is talking about, but it is beyond my area of expertise. Assuming that he is competent, I wonder if the article is being made unaccessible to anyone below his level of knowledge? PAR ( talk) 03:50, 16 June 2009 (UTC)
Some of you may or may know, but Wikipedia has switched its license to cc-by-sa. One consequence is that we are now permitted to import text from citizendium (an encyclopedia project started by a cofounder of Wikipedia). I have just imported a large chunk of text from CZ to Gamma function, which greatly improved the article (in a matter of minutes :) Anyway, I thought you might consider doing something like that. -- Taku ( talk) 11:05, 16 June 2009 (UTC)
My recent edit to this section seems to have perversely disappeared.
Taku seems to assume we know what "cc-by-sa" is, and doesn't link to it. Here's the link: cc-by-sa. Michael Hardy ( talk) 20:32, 16 June 2009 (UTC)
Just a side note — Taku said that WP has switched to cc-by-sa. According to the notice I'm looking at below this text box, that does not appear to be exactly true. Apparently new content is multi-licensed under cc-by-sa and GFDL. I'm not a lawyer but it seems to me that this could get complicated for reusers. Ordinarily, when you make a derivative work from multi-free-licensed content, you can choose the license under which to release the derivative work, at least as I understand it.
But in the case of WP, the content from before the change is not available to be re-licensed under cc-by-sa, unless the authors all consent to this, which as a practical matter seems impossible. For content that WP has copied from Citizendium, this content cannot be relicensed under GFDL without the copyright holders' consent. So apparently the author of a derivative work, to be safe, must also release the work under both licenses, and so on for all derivatives of that work, and this seems contrary to the natural reading of each license separately. Have the lawyers really thought this through? -- Trovatore ( talk) 09:12, 17 June 2009 (UTC)
Since the principal motivation behind the license switch is to allow the importation of contents licensed under cc-by-sa, if you couldn't data-dump contents from citizendium, say, I don't see the point of the switch. This page [4] hopefully answers some questions raised above. But to summarize key points:
Because of (ii), we can now data-dump contents licensed under cc-by-sa. But the other unintended? consequence is that we are no longer able to data-dump contents from PlanetMath. Since we've been relying less and less on PlanetMath lately, hopefully this doesn't cause much pain. -- Taku ( talk) 10:52, 17 June 2009 (UTC)
A user inserted this into the article on the square root of 2:
I did some simple number-crunching that seems to bear out the assertion. The user has not responded to my inquiry about where to find a proof; I think this user hasn't been around lately. Can anyone tell us anything?
Probably this result should be mention in one or more of the articles related to π. Michael Hardy ( talk) 19:57, 16 June 2009 (UTC)
This is one of the methods of numerically approximating π attributed to Archimedes — it follows easily from considering inscribed 2m-gons and applying half-angle formulas. Arcfrk ( talk) 21:00, 16 June 2009 (UTC)
OK, here's a sketch. First, note that π = 2m(π/2m) and that π/2m equals sin(π/2m) with a third degree error term. Then we hit the sine with the half-angle formula:
The half-angle formula for cosine tells us:
which we now apply to the previous equation:
where there are m square root signs. Of course, cos π is −1, so the last term is zero. This leaves us with:
where there are m − 1 square root signs. Shifting the index by one gives the desired formula.
I should be cleaning out the fridge. She's going to kill me. Ozob ( talk) 23:57, 16 June 2009 (UTC)
...is at peer review. Help get it back to FA. Casliber ( talk · contribs) 11:33, 17 June 2009 (UTC)
Hi, just an friendly heads-up that a mathematical article, Euclidean algorithm, will be featured on the Main Page in a few hours. Since Main-Page articles are usually a magnet for vandalism, it would be great if you could add it to your watchlists for the day and fix things as you happen to notice them. Others will undoubtedly be watching as well. My own schedule is very busy, however, so I'll have only a limited time to help out. Thanks! Proteins ( talk) 20:29, 17 June 2009 (UTC)
I've just posted a comment on the French WikiProject here and the German one. Are there currently any "institutionalized" means of collaborating with the guys there? For example, the French site is also using a grading scheme similar to the one used here, but nonetheless the actual article quality is not automatically comparable. I'd like to spot articles in French or German whose English equivalent is worse (or the other way round, but that's more relevant to fr.wp and de.wp). Any ideas about that? (Obviously, the same holds true for other languages, but I think it is a start to deal with these two.) Jakob.scholbach ( talk) 19:51, 13 June 2009 (UTC)
I have done a GA Reassessment of the Special relativity article as part of the GA Sweeps project. I have found the article to need quite a bit of referencing. I have placed the article on hold for a week pending work. I am notifying all interested projects of this review which can be found here. If there are any questions please contact me on my talk page. H1nkles ( talk) 17:59, 19 June 2009 (UTC)
I gave it a preliminary cleanup, but the article seems unfocused and unsure of what to cover. Lots of redlinks (which could be redirects or piped, but I lack knowledge here). Also seems to draws heavily from one author (R. Brown). Headbomb { ταλκ κοντριβς – WP Physics} 14:24, 20 June 2009 (UTC)
Hello, a lot of good faith information has been added to the page by someone who is French I believe, and it is therefore in dire need of cleanup. More importantly for this WP, it lacks inline citations, although it does have references. I wouldn't know if did find references for some statements, so if someone with more knowledge could look into it... it also makes some fairly heavy claims, that a) aren't sourced and b) sound fairly disputable. I know little of the history of algebra, but 'He was the first mathematician to have represented the parameters of an equation by letters' sounds like a big claim. Since the contributor has added a lot of information, it could be a really good page, so I suggest anyone who can should get involved. On another point, New algebra didn't exist until the contributor created it, which seems quite odd. Considering the title may be a direct translation, or not use English terminology, could someone who fully understands the subject, and knows what pages exist check that the page doesn't already exist. Factual correctness would be great, but as I said, the edits are in good faith. - Jarry1250 ( t, c, rfa) 15:55, 21 June 2009 (UTC)
Hi, that link redirects to Curvature. Which in turn directs you to Curvature of Riemannian manifolds. This article appears to be missing its first sentence dealing with expression but without, or skipping, definition? It has been unchanged for years (I know nothing about it myself) ~ R. T. G 16:24, 21 June 2009 (UTC)
I noticed that Proposition and Proposition (mathematics) both say "... proposition is used for a proven statement ...". As a universal proposition, this is false according to my understanding and as "proposition" is used in propositional calculus, propositional formula, proposition (philosophy), and implicational propositional calculus. JRSpriggs ( talk) 18:11, 21 June 2009 (UTC)
JamesBWatson ( talk · contribs) has unilaterally moved Newton's method to Newton–Raphson method. This is contrary to our policy of using the most common name in English. JRSpriggs ( talk) 10:45, 23 June 2009 (UTC)
<<above copied from Oleg's talk page>>
I have tended to take the term Newton's method to refer to the one-dimensional case and Newton–Raphson method to mean the case of a function of several variables (but still a one-dimensional range space. But I don't know how prevalent that usage is. Michael Hardy ( talk) 19:22, 23 June 2009 (UTC) ...and now I see that there's nothing at all about higher-dimensional domains in the article. Michael Hardy ( talk) 19:47, 23 June 2009 (UTC)
I have now moved the article back, since I seem inadvertently to have annoyed various editors by the move, for which I apologise. However, in my defence I should say (1) I did not "unilaterally" move the article: as can be seen from the talk page, two others had suggested the move, and it seemed that nobody had objected to the suggestion, so I thought the move was unopposed. I have now realised that there was, in fact, further discussion of the matter, but for some reason somebody started a new section on the talk page, instead of continuing the discussion where it had been started, so I did not realise it was there, and (2) As for the move being "contrary to our policy of using the most common name in English", I am not sure which name is more common: I first learnt the method as "Newton's method" back in the 1960s, but in recent years the majority of references I have seen to it refer to it as "Newton-Raphson". Anyway, it seems that the majority opinion expressed on the matter favours "Newton's method", so I am happy to accept it: I certainly had no intention of going against consensus. JamesBWatson ( talk) 21:08, 24 June 2009 (UTC)
MSGJ requests (at my talk page) a comment about
I personally have never heard of k-array. Is this a neologism? Also, what about the second? Jakob.scholbach ( talk) 17:45, 23 June 2009 (UTC)
Excessive cross-posting. Spammed to 11 WikiProjects. [6] Hans Adler 14:30, 24 June 2009 (UTC) |
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The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it. |
In the article Physics of the Impossible a single editor removed material that I believe, very much enhanced this article. The other editor’s view is that the removed material was off topic. My view is that it is very much on topic. The current article is here: (current) The version which I restored is at my sub page here: (restored) Everything that was removed is related to the book. This is because, as the author writes: “The material in this book ranges over many fields and disciplines, as well as the work of many outstanding scientists.” There is a two and one half page list of the individuals, “who have graciously given their time for lengthy interviews, consultations, and interesting, stimulating conversations.” Most on this list happen to be scientists. I listed only the first 22 individuals and these are scientists. In addition, I linked their names to their biography on Wikipedia. I also listed each scientist’s fields of specialties. Many on the list in the article have more than one field of specialty (view here), and hence this reflects the breadth of knowledge contained in this book. If you look at this section in the restored article you will see what I mean. In addition, before this material was removed by the one editor, the article was much more interactive. It was also more in line with the intent of Wikipedia that that the readers (as well as the editors) have a satisfying experience with Wikipedia. One aspect of this more satisfying experience is being able to access the knowledge that is available at Wikipedia on the sciences, and, perhaps, the mathematics. So, I linked not only the names on the list, but also many of their scientific disciplines to the respective Wikipedia article. Accessing this knowledge supports the following WikiProjects and their respective portals: (there are more I am sure)
Also, there were graphics that were removed which support the article and the concepts in the book. I believe these should be restored as well. These are on the restored article page, at my sub page. The captions of the graphics show that the book is grounded in real science. If you scroll through the restored article you will see the variety of graphics. I believe these enhance the article aesthetically, as well as help to give a clearer picture of the concepts contained in the book and the article. Lastly, there were external links that were removed which reflect the concepts in the book. These external links were removed as though they were not relevant. For example, I will list some of the external links, and then the page number in the book, to which each link is related:
Unfortunately the external links that were removed are going to have to be restored one at a time, because they cannot be cut and pasted back from the revision history without some distortion. I think these external links should also, be restored to the article. I think the bottom line is, let common sense decide. Even Wikipedia guidelines say that they are just guidelines, not letter of the law. I would appreciate a consensus on whether or not to keep the removed material. Please place your comments here: Consensus please. This is on the talk page of Physics of the Impossible. Thanks for your time Ti-30X ( talk) 13:29, 24 June 2009 (UTC) |
I am glad to see that we actually have as a template; it's currently up for deletion, but I hope that will blow over. If others find this as intuitive (for non-mathematicians) as I do, let's use it more widely. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 00:58, 25 June 2009 (UTC)
It seems that inevitably some people like to add an "In popular culture" section to an article whenever the webcomic
xkcd happens to make even a passing reference to it. Thus
Paul Erdős (
Talk),
Erdős number (
Talk), even
Proof that the sum of the reciprocals of the primes diverges, etc. Since this is likely to keep coming up at mathematics articles, I was wondering if we could have a policy page or some centralised discussion to point people at?
For what it's worth, my opinion is that mere incidental mentions are not worth recording, but nontrivial uses in popular culture (even on xkcd) might be. (
XKCD comic.) No doubt there are others who think that all "in popular culture" mentions are cruft.
Shreevatsa (
talk)
17:46, 26 June 2009 (UTC)
It's a big stretch to call an xkcd mention as being a somehow significant "popular culture" mention. Obviously a number of people that like to edit Wikipedia have a somewhat distorted view of what constitutes "popular culture" (I've noted for a while that the article on Crucifixion seems to devote more space and importance to mentions of crucifixions in anime as compared to those in classic artwork and literature). xkcd, as great as it is, is basically a niche webcomic that is only now starting to emerge more into the mainstream. The most defensible insertion would be into Erdos or Bacon number articles...topics which are inherently about popular culture (although the former is more limited to the geek crowd). -- C S ( talk) 21:20, 26 June 2009 (UTC)
References to Non-Newtonian calculus are being added to to the 'See also' section of various articles related to the exponential function. They don't seem relevant enough to warrant inclusion, but what should I put into a comment when removing them - is there a guideline please? Or do you think they are reasonable? Dmcq ( talk) 16:01, 30 May 2009 (UTC)
There is current and threatened editorial action on the article mentioned. The article is primarily a list, and I would like to improve its nature. I would also categorize it as a part of mathematics education, if such is possible. I have one citation to "attempted" work by a CalTech Ph.D. at zhurnaly.com/cgi-bin/wiki/CoincidentalTaxonomy that I would like to use or suggest as being used in the article. I also think the article might be re-directed to a larger article on mathematical curiosities. I have my own original results that I deem not to be research that I also would like to place in the introduction or body of the article as well. This is the subject matter you can find at User:Julzes/365.25. The results were found by happenstance, this being my explanation for not regarding them as research, and I have no interest in staking a claim to them. Julzes ( talk) 04:40, 31 May 2009 (UTC)
How about transferring this to our sister project Wiki Books? They are using the same software and probably have a lot more tolerance for this type of thing. Of course sometimes the worst things are turned into a fine article by some genius, but I have no idea how this should work in this case. -- Hans Adler ( talk) 15:21, 31 May 2009 (UTC)
user:MrOllie recently deleted these two links from Circumscribed circle, calling them "linkspam" in the edit summary:
(In the course of doing this, he left fully intact the previous edit, which was vandalism.) The pages appear to be well written and relevant, unlike cases of linkspam I've seen where the page merely links injudiciously to other places on the web that superficially seem relevant to the topic, for the purpose of advertising. It looks as if they supported by advertising but not created for the purpose of that advertising, again unlike sites of the other sort I've seen. Some of MrOllie's recent edits leave the impression that he spends a lot of time removing linkspam, but may not be capable of judging the quality of the pages that he deletes the links to.
In some cases of this kind, the person deleting the links on these grounds asserts that the person who put the links there has a conflict of interests. In such cases, reinstatement of the links by someone with no such conflict is then found inoffensive, so that it is held there is no grounds for considering them "linkspam". MrOllie has recently deleted lots of links to various pages on geometry on that particular site. It appears that MrOllie may lack either the ability or the willingness to judge the difference between two sorts of sites:
If those whose primary concern is getting rid of linkspam, and any WikiProjects or the like concerned with that, lack the ability or willingness to make this sort of distinction, then people like the denizens of this present WikiProject need to intervene to help them. Michael Hardy ( talk) 16:43, 31 May 2009 (UTC)
I would be interested in hearing people thoughts about this. Articles such as 6 (number) generally attract lots of trivia.
etc. etc. etc. What are the relevant guidelines on what should be included in such an article? Are there any good or featured articles of this kind that can be used as a model? The most recent inclusion
which at least is mathematical if a bit obscure. — Martin ( MSGJ · talk) 09:20, 1 June 2009 (UTC)
Hello, WikiProject Mathematics!
An editor has asked for help concerning a technical mathematical article here, and I wonder if someone who understands these things better than I could advise.— S Marshall Talk/ Cont 21:41, 3 June 2009 (UTC)
Guys, i've been Reading this Project for many months, there are many Highly talented Folks here, i really want an answer for this, i Do believe Wikipedia is not a Forum but i really really want an answer for this, please guys don't Delete this here is the Problem:
solve for t-
60√t (sin(t/3))^2 = 150
only t is under root after 60
Please Help! 122.174.74.142 ( talk) 17:01, 4 June 2009 (UTC)
User:Lipedia (formerly User:Boolean hexadecimal) added some odd diagrams to two articles; I've removed them. Diffs: Logical NOR and Sheffer stroke. This is not the first set of odd images added by this user; File:Hasse_diagram_of_all_logical_connectives.jpg was a previous one that, in the end, was not used in any articles. Thoughts? — Carl ( CBM · talk) 21:13, 1 June 2009 (UTC)
Quote: I thought we'd been through all this in
Talk:Logical connective not so long ago. What has changed between then and now? I notice the German version of the article also removed his diagram recently.
Dmcq
Please make sure, you've got the topic, before you add your opinion. Here we speak about the following two diagrams, and about nothing else. (They have never been used in any german articles.)
The same about Hans Adler: The symbols used are original research, and even apart from this his graphics only make sense with long explanations. Which symbols?! (Probably you remember these, but they do not appear in the diagrams we speak about. I've once used them as a means of explanation in the Wikipedia, to visualise the relations between logical connectives, and this was a mistake, indeed.)
Concerning Bkell: Ah ... ordering logical connectives in a Hasse diagram by implication is original research - very interesting. (Maybe you take a look at this homepage.)
Concerning CBM: Nice to meet the user, who removed the set theoretic definition of logical connectives (Added by Gregbard) with the most funny statement: It's quite unclear to me what these sets are supposed to represent. It was tagged as possible OR for some time. I mention this sentence, because here it seems to be the same.
The diagrams:
Prefix notations like
are usual, but nearly unreadable for human beings. At the moment in the NAND article there is a section called Simplification, where the operation is not written, because it's always the same operation, NOR in this case:
That's easier, but still hard to read, because it's very difficult to see, which left and right brackets belong together. Combining them to circles is the easiest solution. And that's what you want to call original research? (To express operations by circles surrounding the arguments is nothing special, by the way: It's also done in existential graphs.)
At the moment these two diagrams are the easiest way to show, how every logical connective can be expressed by only one Sheffer operator. Greetings, Lipedia ( talk) 16:34, 3 June 2009 (UTC)
Just a short note: It's no problem including the connectives names in the diagrams. It's what I first did, but it became too crowded for my taste. The hint, that printable information is desirable is true indeed. Concerning the color scheme: I may choose darker colors, to make the appearance less gaudy. It's just important, that A and B have different colors. I will upload modified versions at the weekend. Greetings, Lipedia ( talk) 07:33, 4 June 2009 (UTC)
No, I didn't ignore it, but I doubt that it is justified.
Content must be verifiable, otherwise it's original research - and the content is undoubted in this case, and verifiable by any source you want. But like every encyclopedia, we should display this verified information in the way, that serves our readers best. An article is good, when the content is verifiable, and as many readers as possible (also non experts) can understand it as easy as possible. So your request aims in the wrong direction: The question is not "Does it appear somewhere in exactly this way?" but "Does it help anyone to understand Sheffer operators?".
This is disputable of couse. I think it does:
The article tells, that all sixteen logical connectives can be expressed in terms of NOR and NAND respectively, so I think we should show that - and not only mention some examples, presuming that the reader can easily deduct all others. This could be done in a sixteen row table of couse, but the most helpful way to display logical connectives is not the table (because the neighbour rows have nothing to do with each other) but the
Hasse diagram showing all implications.
The formulas should be shown in a clear and easy way, so somewhat easier to read than
(((A,A),(B,B)),((A,A),(B,B))), the notation used in the
Simplification section in the
present NAND article. Combining the parentheses to circles for better readability is really not a "idiosyncratic notation" (the Simplification section presumed) but a very simple step. The hint, that "the most important information" should be shown in the diagram itself was justified, so I changed it (and the color scheme as well).
This is how it could show at the end of the articles (= at the end of the Simplification section, which could be included also in the NOR article):
Greetings,
Lipedia (
talk)
12:26, 11 June 2009 (UTC)
"it would need to accompanied by an explanation of the notation or a link to an explanation"
Please note, that I proposed to include them in the
Simplification section in the
present NAND article (and its equivalent in the NOR article not yet created). Did you read it? In this section simplified notations like
(((A,A),B),(A,(B,B))) meaning
NAND(NAND(NAND(A,A),B),NAND(A,NAND(B,B))) are used. In the context of this section the short explanation below the diagram will do. (I wouldn't be so crazy, to include these files in the
logical connectives article, and think it could help some reader there. Hope you didn't think that.)
"Truth tables, however cumbersome you think they are"
"Your comments that such truth tables are not the notation we should be using"
These lines tells me, that you missunderstood something I wrote, or something the others wrote about me. I did not even mention truth tables
nor would I say anything against them (I actually
love truth tables!). Here we speak about the linking of many equal operations in
NOR logic and
NAND logic, and what I don't like are unreadable formulas like
NOR(NOR(NOR(A,A),B),NOR(A,NOR(B,B))) or even the simplification
(((A,A),B),(A,(B,B))). I think these simplified formulas are better readable, when the outer parentheses are bigger and the inner parentheses are smaller.
(In this case the left and right parentheses touch in the middle, and become a circle. If anyone conciders my diagrams to be original research because of this, I can easily make a short break in the middle, so that every circle becomes a pair of semicircles, easily recognizable as a pair of parentheses - than it would be exactly the same like (((A,A),(B,B)),((A,A),(B,B))) and so on.) Greetings, Lipedia ( talk) 15:41, 11 June 2009 (UTC)
If something is correct, it doesn't need to be "maintained". Possibly your focus is more on the editor than the reader - in my eyes a fundamental mistake, but it appears to me, that this is quite usual in the Wikipedia.
The blame against the first version was to be "a riddle like the
Pioneer plaque" because I "hide the most important information in a link map". So I've got this information included, and now the blame is, that the diagrams are "cluttered". Isn't that a bit strange? Looks as if the rejection is more imporant than the reason.
I think it's sad, that all this debate is primarily harping on about principles, may they be real or imagined, and the question "Does it help someone?" does not play any role. Is "they keep being put in as an alternative to the straightforward text" really a senseful blame? For me it's too far away from "Does it help someone?" and thus secondary, borderline unimportant. For me an article is good
if and only if it helps as many and as different people as possible. Greetings,
Lipedia (
talk)
15:56, 14 June 2009 (UTC)
Of course I didn't mean someone when I said "someone", but rater a quantity of people worth mentioning. But sadly we have no means to check, what exactly is helpful to how many people. Concerning idiosyncracy I can only repeat what I said before: I can easily make a short break in the middle, so that every circle becomes a pair of semicircles, easily recognizable as a pair of parentheses - than it would be exactly the same like (((A,A),(B,B)),((A,A),(B,B))) and so on. But I'm not going to do that. We can agree that the diagrams don't match in Logical NOR, Sheffer stroke and Henry M. Sheffer and end the discussion. Lipedia ( talk) 09:39, 16 June 2009 (UTC)
Another funny diagram has been added to Hereditary set. At least it's smaller but I think it detracts from what little content there is in the article. A straightforward listing of a few sets would be better and could include some infinite ones. I think the article needs a bit of expansion. For instance a set containing itself and all subsets wouldn't have an ordinal number as far as I can work out. Dmcq ( talk) 11:17, 14 June 2009 (UTC)
Basically, a significant number of math terms are virtually impossible to define for the layman, usually because the relevant Wikipedia articles are simply unhelpful, even useless (cf. hypoelliptic- wikt:) to people without knowledge of fairly advanced maths (and yes I fully acknowledge the difficulty of avoiding jargon in many math articles). Another problem often comes in that some terms may be ridiculously hard to give good quotations (i.e. from books or scientific publication), such as sphenic number- wikt:, even though they are clearly in use (in this case, the problem comes with the small amount of truly useful material in google books and google scholar).
Would WPMATH members be interested in answering the occasional requests for help in such cases?
Circeus (
talk)
02:44, 3 June 2009 (UTC)
Okay, so your first mission, if you accept it (sorry, couldn't help it :p), is to help define wikt:hypoelliptic in comprehensible term, and verify whether or not that definition directly relates to the current mathematics definition we have for wikt:elliptic. Personally, I'd appreciate some backgroung for dating the term. I find a fair amount of material that discusses or mentions Lars Hörmander's solution (?) ot the things (apparently at some point in the 50s or 60s), but none about when the term started being used (of course it might not have been formally used before Hörmander). A typical example is here. Circeus ( talk) 17:32, 3 June 2009 (UTC)
So, to get back to the question of a dictionary definition of hypoelliptic:
Right? — David Eppstein ( talk) 06:17, 4 June 2009 (UTC)
Judging by this discussion, some preliminaries on dismbiguation by email might help. You can run things past me offline to get a general sense. Charles Matthews ( talk) 10:55, 14 June 2009 (UTC)
...that a mitimorphism is a morphism from the power set of a fibre bundle into another fibre bundle?
I was hoping someone here could clarify whether this newly created article is a hoax, a neologism, or just very obscure. Thanks, decltype ( talk) 08:08, 4 June 2009 (UTC)
Could someone look at the geometric argument for the integration by parts? I am thinking to add a section to the article about that and have a couple questions. I used xfig to create the picture, is there a better tool to create pictures like that? I could not find this particular trick in the literature, does it constitute OR if I add this argument to the article? ( Igny ( talk) 02:20, 5 June 2009 (UTC))
Category:Linear operators seems a rather strange category. It says that it is for linear operators defined on functions, but this seems rather overly restrictive. What should be done with it? Sławomir Biały ( talk) 15:18, 7 June 2009 (UTC)
Portal:Statistics is being considered for featured quality status, at the Featured portal candidates process. Comments would be appreciated at Wikipedia:Featured portal candidates/Portal:Statistics. — G716 < T· C> 01:26, 9 June 2009 (UTC)
See Template_talk:Technical_(expert)#This_template_is_for_article_namespace. User: Debresser has repeatedly tried to remove the talk page requirement, contrary to the explicit instructions in the technical guideline. I pointed out to him that since this tag is scarcely used, Coren's mistaken reformatting of the tag (which changed the template to an ambox, which is for articles) was not reverted, unlike the situation for the regular technical tag, which was reverted. Debresser insists that since Coren's reformatting of the tag as an ambox was unreverted, I must be completely mistaken about the consensus regarding the placement of the technical tag on talk pages. He has not explained why there is this distinction (one technical tag on the article, the other on talk pages) and has refused to read the guideline or its talk page to understand the consensus. Indeed, according to him, since this mistake was unreverted for 2 years or so, his position is the consensus! -- C S ( talk) 14:32, 11 June 2009 (UTC)
Lo and behold: List of arithmetic topics is a red link. Should we do something about that? Michael Hardy ( talk) 03:50, 13 June 2009 (UTC)
Under the terms of the licensing update being adopted across all Wikimedia sites, WMF projects will no longer be able to add GFDL-only text published elsewhere. Any GFDL text added to Wikipedia after Nov. 1, 2008 will have to be removed as a copyvio. PlanetMath uses the GFDL and hence this could shut down a potentially valuable source of content interaction. In order to avoid that, PlanetMath would need to also relicense to CC-BY-SA as explicitly allowed under GFDL 1.3.
If you have contacts at PlanetMath, or participate there yourself, I would encourage you to discuss this issue with them. See also: m:Licensing update/Outreach. Dragons flight ( talk) 01:14, 14 June 2009 (UTC)
I have a somewhat minor complaint with regards to some of the algebra-related articles. In particular, I find that too many technical terms are abbreviated. For example, although it is reasonable to abbreviate terms like "unique factorization domain" to UFD, or "principal ideal domain" to PID, abbreviations such as BFD, BD, HFD, AD etc... are ambiguous to some extent (try to guess what some of them refer to; I find that this is not at all trivial, even for algebraists). As an encyclopedia, we should aim to be as clear as possible, and abbreviations should only be done if absolutely necessary. Even in this case, the word which is abbreviated should be made clear, along with its abbreviation. I tend to find abbreviations such as ACCP to mean "ascending chain condition on principal ideals" somewhat pointless because along with abbreviations like UFD or PID, it is somewhat difficult to interpret (one may guess ACCP to be some sort of "domain" if he was not familiar with it). Furthermore, such abbreviations can lead to errors. For instance, one may write "UFD domain" instead of "UFD" thus being redundant to some extent. Therefore, although abbreviations of basic terms are OK, we should start defining/linking abbreviations when using them; especially if the term to which they correspond is somewhat unknown. -- PS T 04:44, 14 June 2009 (UTC)
In WP:REFNAME, starting from 14 April 2008, I read: "In subsequent uses of the named tag the use of <ref name="name" /> is encouraged rather than copying the whole footnote again, as whole footnotes tend to reduce the readability of the article's text in edit mode, which makes finding specific parts of the text when editing tedious."
On the other hand, the short version is more prone to accidents under further edits; if the editor is not careful enough, his/her local edit may have unwanted global effect. See also Wikipedia_talk:Footnotes#Mark-up_would_be_better_than_encouraging_people_to_remove_reference_information.
For this reason I have used the long version in unbounded operator. (Initially I did not know about that style recommendation.) I wonder, do we mathematicians agree that the short version is preferable also in our texts? Boris Tsirelson ( talk) 12:03, 15 June 2009 (UTC)
Named footnotes have one disadvantage: they discourage grouping together several references cited in the same sentence. Thus, the degree to whch they shorten footnotes is debateable. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 18:42, 16 June 2009 (UTC)
I have been working, with help from other editors, to improve the article on first-order logic. If anyone has the time to review the relatively long article and give an outside perspective, it would be greatly appreciated. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 18:01, 15 June 2009 (UTC)
Can someone take a look at the Dirac delta function page? The editor User:Sławomir Biały may know what he is talking about, but it is beyond my area of expertise. Assuming that he is competent, I wonder if the article is being made unaccessible to anyone below his level of knowledge? PAR ( talk) 03:50, 16 June 2009 (UTC)
Some of you may or may know, but Wikipedia has switched its license to cc-by-sa. One consequence is that we are now permitted to import text from citizendium (an encyclopedia project started by a cofounder of Wikipedia). I have just imported a large chunk of text from CZ to Gamma function, which greatly improved the article (in a matter of minutes :) Anyway, I thought you might consider doing something like that. -- Taku ( talk) 11:05, 16 June 2009 (UTC)
My recent edit to this section seems to have perversely disappeared.
Taku seems to assume we know what "cc-by-sa" is, and doesn't link to it. Here's the link: cc-by-sa. Michael Hardy ( talk) 20:32, 16 June 2009 (UTC)
Just a side note — Taku said that WP has switched to cc-by-sa. According to the notice I'm looking at below this text box, that does not appear to be exactly true. Apparently new content is multi-licensed under cc-by-sa and GFDL. I'm not a lawyer but it seems to me that this could get complicated for reusers. Ordinarily, when you make a derivative work from multi-free-licensed content, you can choose the license under which to release the derivative work, at least as I understand it.
But in the case of WP, the content from before the change is not available to be re-licensed under cc-by-sa, unless the authors all consent to this, which as a practical matter seems impossible. For content that WP has copied from Citizendium, this content cannot be relicensed under GFDL without the copyright holders' consent. So apparently the author of a derivative work, to be safe, must also release the work under both licenses, and so on for all derivatives of that work, and this seems contrary to the natural reading of each license separately. Have the lawyers really thought this through? -- Trovatore ( talk) 09:12, 17 June 2009 (UTC)
Since the principal motivation behind the license switch is to allow the importation of contents licensed under cc-by-sa, if you couldn't data-dump contents from citizendium, say, I don't see the point of the switch. This page [4] hopefully answers some questions raised above. But to summarize key points:
Because of (ii), we can now data-dump contents licensed under cc-by-sa. But the other unintended? consequence is that we are no longer able to data-dump contents from PlanetMath. Since we've been relying less and less on PlanetMath lately, hopefully this doesn't cause much pain. -- Taku ( talk) 10:52, 17 June 2009 (UTC)
A user inserted this into the article on the square root of 2:
I did some simple number-crunching that seems to bear out the assertion. The user has not responded to my inquiry about where to find a proof; I think this user hasn't been around lately. Can anyone tell us anything?
Probably this result should be mention in one or more of the articles related to π. Michael Hardy ( talk) 19:57, 16 June 2009 (UTC)
This is one of the methods of numerically approximating π attributed to Archimedes — it follows easily from considering inscribed 2m-gons and applying half-angle formulas. Arcfrk ( talk) 21:00, 16 June 2009 (UTC)
OK, here's a sketch. First, note that π = 2m(π/2m) and that π/2m equals sin(π/2m) with a third degree error term. Then we hit the sine with the half-angle formula:
The half-angle formula for cosine tells us:
which we now apply to the previous equation:
where there are m square root signs. Of course, cos π is −1, so the last term is zero. This leaves us with:
where there are m − 1 square root signs. Shifting the index by one gives the desired formula.
I should be cleaning out the fridge. She's going to kill me. Ozob ( talk) 23:57, 16 June 2009 (UTC)
...is at peer review. Help get it back to FA. Casliber ( talk · contribs) 11:33, 17 June 2009 (UTC)
Hi, just an friendly heads-up that a mathematical article, Euclidean algorithm, will be featured on the Main Page in a few hours. Since Main-Page articles are usually a magnet for vandalism, it would be great if you could add it to your watchlists for the day and fix things as you happen to notice them. Others will undoubtedly be watching as well. My own schedule is very busy, however, so I'll have only a limited time to help out. Thanks! Proteins ( talk) 20:29, 17 June 2009 (UTC)
I've just posted a comment on the French WikiProject here and the German one. Are there currently any "institutionalized" means of collaborating with the guys there? For example, the French site is also using a grading scheme similar to the one used here, but nonetheless the actual article quality is not automatically comparable. I'd like to spot articles in French or German whose English equivalent is worse (or the other way round, but that's more relevant to fr.wp and de.wp). Any ideas about that? (Obviously, the same holds true for other languages, but I think it is a start to deal with these two.) Jakob.scholbach ( talk) 19:51, 13 June 2009 (UTC)
I have done a GA Reassessment of the Special relativity article as part of the GA Sweeps project. I have found the article to need quite a bit of referencing. I have placed the article on hold for a week pending work. I am notifying all interested projects of this review which can be found here. If there are any questions please contact me on my talk page. H1nkles ( talk) 17:59, 19 June 2009 (UTC)
I gave it a preliminary cleanup, but the article seems unfocused and unsure of what to cover. Lots of redlinks (which could be redirects or piped, but I lack knowledge here). Also seems to draws heavily from one author (R. Brown). Headbomb { ταλκ κοντριβς – WP Physics} 14:24, 20 June 2009 (UTC)
Hello, a lot of good faith information has been added to the page by someone who is French I believe, and it is therefore in dire need of cleanup. More importantly for this WP, it lacks inline citations, although it does have references. I wouldn't know if did find references for some statements, so if someone with more knowledge could look into it... it also makes some fairly heavy claims, that a) aren't sourced and b) sound fairly disputable. I know little of the history of algebra, but 'He was the first mathematician to have represented the parameters of an equation by letters' sounds like a big claim. Since the contributor has added a lot of information, it could be a really good page, so I suggest anyone who can should get involved. On another point, New algebra didn't exist until the contributor created it, which seems quite odd. Considering the title may be a direct translation, or not use English terminology, could someone who fully understands the subject, and knows what pages exist check that the page doesn't already exist. Factual correctness would be great, but as I said, the edits are in good faith. - Jarry1250 ( t, c, rfa) 15:55, 21 June 2009 (UTC)
Hi, that link redirects to Curvature. Which in turn directs you to Curvature of Riemannian manifolds. This article appears to be missing its first sentence dealing with expression but without, or skipping, definition? It has been unchanged for years (I know nothing about it myself) ~ R. T. G 16:24, 21 June 2009 (UTC)
I noticed that Proposition and Proposition (mathematics) both say "... proposition is used for a proven statement ...". As a universal proposition, this is false according to my understanding and as "proposition" is used in propositional calculus, propositional formula, proposition (philosophy), and implicational propositional calculus. JRSpriggs ( talk) 18:11, 21 June 2009 (UTC)
JamesBWatson ( talk · contribs) has unilaterally moved Newton's method to Newton–Raphson method. This is contrary to our policy of using the most common name in English. JRSpriggs ( talk) 10:45, 23 June 2009 (UTC)
<<above copied from Oleg's talk page>>
I have tended to take the term Newton's method to refer to the one-dimensional case and Newton–Raphson method to mean the case of a function of several variables (but still a one-dimensional range space. But I don't know how prevalent that usage is. Michael Hardy ( talk) 19:22, 23 June 2009 (UTC) ...and now I see that there's nothing at all about higher-dimensional domains in the article. Michael Hardy ( talk) 19:47, 23 June 2009 (UTC)
I have now moved the article back, since I seem inadvertently to have annoyed various editors by the move, for which I apologise. However, in my defence I should say (1) I did not "unilaterally" move the article: as can be seen from the talk page, two others had suggested the move, and it seemed that nobody had objected to the suggestion, so I thought the move was unopposed. I have now realised that there was, in fact, further discussion of the matter, but for some reason somebody started a new section on the talk page, instead of continuing the discussion where it had been started, so I did not realise it was there, and (2) As for the move being "contrary to our policy of using the most common name in English", I am not sure which name is more common: I first learnt the method as "Newton's method" back in the 1960s, but in recent years the majority of references I have seen to it refer to it as "Newton-Raphson". Anyway, it seems that the majority opinion expressed on the matter favours "Newton's method", so I am happy to accept it: I certainly had no intention of going against consensus. JamesBWatson ( talk) 21:08, 24 June 2009 (UTC)
MSGJ requests (at my talk page) a comment about
I personally have never heard of k-array. Is this a neologism? Also, what about the second? Jakob.scholbach ( talk) 17:45, 23 June 2009 (UTC)
Excessive cross-posting. Spammed to 11 WikiProjects. [6] Hans Adler 14:30, 24 June 2009 (UTC) |
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The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it. |
In the article Physics of the Impossible a single editor removed material that I believe, very much enhanced this article. The other editor’s view is that the removed material was off topic. My view is that it is very much on topic. The current article is here: (current) The version which I restored is at my sub page here: (restored) Everything that was removed is related to the book. This is because, as the author writes: “The material in this book ranges over many fields and disciplines, as well as the work of many outstanding scientists.” There is a two and one half page list of the individuals, “who have graciously given their time for lengthy interviews, consultations, and interesting, stimulating conversations.” Most on this list happen to be scientists. I listed only the first 22 individuals and these are scientists. In addition, I linked their names to their biography on Wikipedia. I also listed each scientist’s fields of specialties. Many on the list in the article have more than one field of specialty (view here), and hence this reflects the breadth of knowledge contained in this book. If you look at this section in the restored article you will see what I mean. In addition, before this material was removed by the one editor, the article was much more interactive. It was also more in line with the intent of Wikipedia that that the readers (as well as the editors) have a satisfying experience with Wikipedia. One aspect of this more satisfying experience is being able to access the knowledge that is available at Wikipedia on the sciences, and, perhaps, the mathematics. So, I linked not only the names on the list, but also many of their scientific disciplines to the respective Wikipedia article. Accessing this knowledge supports the following WikiProjects and their respective portals: (there are more I am sure)
Also, there were graphics that were removed which support the article and the concepts in the book. I believe these should be restored as well. These are on the restored article page, at my sub page. The captions of the graphics show that the book is grounded in real science. If you scroll through the restored article you will see the variety of graphics. I believe these enhance the article aesthetically, as well as help to give a clearer picture of the concepts contained in the book and the article. Lastly, there were external links that were removed which reflect the concepts in the book. These external links were removed as though they were not relevant. For example, I will list some of the external links, and then the page number in the book, to which each link is related:
Unfortunately the external links that were removed are going to have to be restored one at a time, because they cannot be cut and pasted back from the revision history without some distortion. I think these external links should also, be restored to the article. I think the bottom line is, let common sense decide. Even Wikipedia guidelines say that they are just guidelines, not letter of the law. I would appreciate a consensus on whether or not to keep the removed material. Please place your comments here: Consensus please. This is on the talk page of Physics of the Impossible. Thanks for your time Ti-30X ( talk) 13:29, 24 June 2009 (UTC) |
I am glad to see that we actually have as a template; it's currently up for deletion, but I hope that will blow over. If others find this as intuitive (for non-mathematicians) as I do, let's use it more widely. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 00:58, 25 June 2009 (UTC)
It seems that inevitably some people like to add an "In popular culture" section to an article whenever the webcomic
xkcd happens to make even a passing reference to it. Thus
Paul Erdős (
Talk),
Erdős number (
Talk), even
Proof that the sum of the reciprocals of the primes diverges, etc. Since this is likely to keep coming up at mathematics articles, I was wondering if we could have a policy page or some centralised discussion to point people at?
For what it's worth, my opinion is that mere incidental mentions are not worth recording, but nontrivial uses in popular culture (even on xkcd) might be. (
XKCD comic.) No doubt there are others who think that all "in popular culture" mentions are cruft.
Shreevatsa (
talk)
17:46, 26 June 2009 (UTC)
It's a big stretch to call an xkcd mention as being a somehow significant "popular culture" mention. Obviously a number of people that like to edit Wikipedia have a somewhat distorted view of what constitutes "popular culture" (I've noted for a while that the article on Crucifixion seems to devote more space and importance to mentions of crucifixions in anime as compared to those in classic artwork and literature). xkcd, as great as it is, is basically a niche webcomic that is only now starting to emerge more into the mainstream. The most defensible insertion would be into Erdos or Bacon number articles...topics which are inherently about popular culture (although the former is more limited to the geek crowd). -- C S ( talk) 21:20, 26 June 2009 (UTC)