Trend change:
Henry Delforn ( talk) 19:34, 23 August 2009 (UTC)
Why is there a redirect here?-- Sandrobt ( talk) 01:04, 31 August 2009 (UTC)
Category:Euclid clearly needs attention. At present, it seems to be a mish-mash of things having the term "Euclidean" in them, irrespective of whether these were actually due to Euclid or in some historically significant way connected up with Euclid. (I mean, apart from the fact that, for instance, a Euclidean ball is a ball in a Euclidean space.) Sławomir Biały ( talk) 18:22, 31 August 2009 (UTC)
I am teaching an "introduction to proofs" course for undergraduate prospective math majors this semester, and just recently I have presented truth tables. It is always nice to provide a source for more background information for those who are interested (the course text doesn't say much), so I looked at truth tables.
The first sentence in the overview (the first section following the lead) is:
It doesn't even sound as though it was written by a native English speaker. The second sentence:
After three readings, I think this is a quotation from page 39 of Quine's book, with a missing introductory quotation mark. Note that the prominence in the literature is being demonstated by a citation rather than by directly citing the literature in which it appeared. How circuitous.
And so forth. No way would I want my students to read this article. Can anyone help? Plclark ( talk) 19:07, 31 August 2009 (UTC)
What shall we do with the article titled equiareal map? The facts are:
So the incoming links are treating the section of 2 × 2 real matrices as the main thing, even though that article currently refers to equiareal map as the "main article". Michael Hardy ( talk) 21:15, 31 August 2009 (UTC)
In "nowiki" mode, the above looks like this:
Same thing with Bergman kernel. I added the commented-out part. I see this a lot. When I can, I actually fill in this information. Am I the only one who does this? Michael Hardy ( talk) 03:43, 1 September 2009 (UTC)
After making the nomination for Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of mathematics articles (J-L), and being informed that that article was necessary to the proper functioning of the "recent changes" links in {{ MathTopicTOC}}, Cybercobra ( talk · contribs) declared that such links were inappropriate in article space and removed them from the template. I have no strong opinion on whether this was the right thing to do but others may. Discussion taken here rather than in the AfD (where it's inappropriately off-topic) or the template talk page (where nobody will see it). — David Eppstein ( talk) 07:06, 2 September 2009 (UTC)
A recent daily update of WP:WPM/CA (the Current activity subpage) lists hundreds of mathematics articles in the "Removed articles" row. Why did this occur? Is this a result of some kind of change in categorization, the recent issues with Template:MathTopicTOC or what? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Classicalecon ( talk • contribs) 13:15, 3 September 2009 (UTC)
My current hypothesis is that the articles which were removed had been manually added over time, and thus the bot did not automatically include them when it recreated the lists from scratch after they were moved. I have merged all the histories and restored the largest version of each page. I hope this will fix things; the logs may still be strange through the next update. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 15:31, 3 September 2009 (UTC)
I came across this article - it looks rather like an academic paper and the editor notes that: "Plotting the imaginary roots using empty circle in the Cartesian coordinate system is something new I am proposing. Over time, this method may be accepted as an alternate way of plotting imaginary roots.". I know pretty much nothing about the subject so I was wondering if someone could take a look and see if it is original research or a valid article or something else? (As an aside, if it is an article, is there a more specific category than Category:Geometry that I could use?) Thanks --☇ Kateshortforbob talk☄ 14:43, 29 August 2009 (UTC)
imaginary intersections are a very interesting topic, and not just lines and parabolas have them, lines and circles have them as well. To be frank, I am shocked that there is not article on the topic of imaginary intersections, maybe I am missing something? This article on imaginary intersections of lines and parabolas is a good start. There are some good citations on the subject starting at least from Hamilton's elements in 1865. TeamQuaternion ( talk) 04:06, 30 August 2009 (UTC)
Somebody made a proposal to change WP:SYNT. While the practical relevance of the change proposed is rather insignficant on how Math articles are written in practice here, in theory it does impact it. Proposal and discussion. Pcap ping 16:56, 5 September 2009 (UTC)
Let's not miss one point. OR is wrong if it is used to advance a thesis. It is mostly not wrong in mathematics itself, because we deal in truths which are not tendentious. Almost anything else (e.g. history, including history of mathematics) is an area in which any "thesis" is likely to be tendentious. Those discussions on SYNT tend to have the standing assumption that theses are advanced only because they do tend in some direction. Mathematicians have the benefit of true syllogisms. Tweaking the rules on OR doesn't sound good to me, anyway, but it should not be taken as limiting conclusions from axioms. (This may seem to be arguing against the well-established idea that people should prove their theorems elsewhere, not here. That wasn't the type of point I was trying to make, though. I was just trying to explain something usually left tacit.) Charles Matthews ( talk) 20:38, 5 September 2009 (UTC)
Does anyone know what happened with this edit? From the LONG list of allegedly new articles there's no clear way to tell which ones may be actually new articles without clicking on every one of them individually and examining their histories. Nobody can reasonable spare the hours that that would take. Michael Hardy ( talk) 17:27, 5 September 2009 (UTC)
Small query... A number of edits were recently made to the Carleson's theorem article which I started, mainly changing the typesetting of simple expressions in TeX to HTML equivalents. This improved the appearance of the article significantly, removing lots of inconsistent spacing and sizing. However, I'm a little confused/concerned about compatibility issues. Wikipedia:Mathematical_symbols states that the symbols given there should "work in most browsers", but WP:MOSMATH suggests (under "Special symbols") a preference for being conservative with the use of HTML symbols because of compatibility issues (stating one of the symbols from the "Mathematical symbols" article as an example). Does anybody have any concrete information on compatibility and established norms for symbols? Apologies if this is a newbie question... :-) Tcnuk ( talk) 08:40, 2 September 2009 (UTC)
For me it's not a concern about "mindless use of symbols as substitutes for words"; it's about the fact that TeX fails to match the size of the surrounding text, being four times as big, and is too high or too low and does not align with either text or punctuation, and in some cases a period, comma, or parenthesis following it actually appears at the beginning of the next line. Michael Hardy ( talk) 12:54, 2 September 2009 (UTC)
I am a bit confused about one of Carl's comments above, and maybe someone could clarify for me. I recall a months back (January?), User:Bob_K was having trouble viewing several articles because of sepcial mathematical symbols. But all of the symbols in question were HTML entities. (I think convolution, and set theory operations were the case.) He was using a version of Internet explorer, and when I tried this out on my XP machine at home I did indeed have the same problem. After that he added special character templates to a few articles like Hilbert transform and Set (mathematics). Now I admit that named entities have been around a long time, but I think (some versions of) IE doesn't necessarily support them anyways. And your computer doesn't need to be so out of date to have such a version. Does IE really support these symbols? I don't use it often enough to be sure. Thenub314 ( talk) 11:52, 9 September 2009 (UTC)
PS. Part of our conversation is still on his talk page: User_talk:Bob_K#Convolution. Thenub314 ( talk) 11:56, 9 September 2009 (UTC)
I'm late to the party. For reference, I see correctly rendered every single symbol from Unicode Mathematical Operators at least since Fedora 9 (and possibly before that), as well as those from Unicode and HTML#Web browser support. But then, I always install almost all optional fonts. Pcap ping 15:35, 9 September 2009 (UTC)
Is the section Diffusion MRI#Tensors - What Are They and How Does the Math Work? really encyclopedic? Anyway, it seems a lengthy and unnecessary fork of material on tensors. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 02:33, 3 September 2009 (UTC)
(e/c) My issue is mostly with the fact that it seems to duplicate material that should probably properly be elsewhere. The author even went so far as to include links to this article as an alternative treatment of tensors in all of the pages Tensor, Classical treatment of tensors, Intermediate treatment of tensors, and Tensor (intrinsic definition) (see these diffs: [3], [4], [5], [6]). The material was therefore presented as a strange kind of WP:POVFORK from the very beginning. Anyway, I don't think there is an urgent need to remove the material (although the section title will need to be changed, per WP:HOWTO), but readers should not be directed here as though it were an article about tensors. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 12:41, 3 September 2009 (UTC)
Thanks for the suggestions. I first would say that although I have worked with multivariate statistics and tensor principles for more than 30 years, I found each of the Wikipedia mathematical articles completely impenetrable. My concern in this article is to consider the audience. Not only patients for whom a DTI study has been ordered, but also imaging technologists, neuroscientists, insurance companies looking to make decisions about authorizations, and neurologists, radiologists and (yes) neurosurgeons. As a group, doctors are definitely not mathematicians. My objective was to provide an explanation of tensors that linked the accessible level of math, the visual physical concept of the ellipsoid (physicians are generally very good with spatial object visualization as opposed to math) and the steps of the imaging processing. If you remove the discussion, then the reader is left not knowing what in the world a "tensor" actually is. If a mathematician reads my section they may be horrified by the simplicity and lack of formality. However, an encyclopedia cannot consider that it has just one kind of audience. The formal tensor treatments may be fine for mathematics graduate students but I can assure they are totally useless and impenetrable for a neurologists or family practitioner who just wants to have a clear enough idea about it to be able to explain it to patients and insurance company reviewers. I will certainly work on rewording it to get rid of the pronouns. I do feel very strongly that this is an appropriate amount of material and an appropriate level of discussion. Also, patients who want to know about DTI images and go to your mathematical tensor articles will be totally baffled. You don't need to send these people to some other Wiki, they expect to find this material in Wikipedia. All of the mathematical articles totally fail to cover any of the relevant material about tensors as it applies to DTI. You could modify or add to those articles to include a section for the non-mathematician. However, the only really large group of non-specialist, non-mathematical readers who are interested in tensors are those concerned with DTI MRI scans. Therefore, I think the best place for the DTI oriented tensor explanation is in the DTI article.( Afiller ( talk) 05:36, 4 September 2009 (UTC))
It is more clear to me that the material needs a copy edit, than that the copy edit needs to be in the direction of the general tensor articles. After all this is only matrices anyway, when it comes down to it. In other words, it is a writing issue. Charles Matthews ( talk) 20:50, 5 September 2009 (UTC)
Please - no copy editing by mathematicians though. Your principal tensor site gets three or four visits per day - aside from editors. This site draws 300 to 400 visitors per day because it is a good article. It should not read like a mathematics page. It is written for patients and physicians and not for mathematicians. I can write technical material I assure you. The trick is to take mystifyingly complex ideas and re-render them as easily conceptualized elements that are widely accessible. I know you'll just say I'm biased, but the existing tensor articles are each a horrible mess for readability and communication. Why not focus first on copy editing them. They are basically failures as they read right now because they are only understandable by professors of mathematics. Remember, this is an encyclopedia that has very very popular articles about Britney Spears. It is not a professional encyclopedic treatment of complex spartan mathematical listings. If you have a mathematician copy edit the Britney Spears article it will be replaced in a day. If Charles Matthews has some good suggestions about what the copy editing needs are, I will certainly see if I can get there, but this is no problem article. It is very successful and effective. One of the writers above allows that I am an "expert." There may be some debate, but my invention with some use of tensors is already saving thousands of lives and will intimately impact millions into the future. Why not stop all the DTI imaging and just tell the patients to work a bit with matrices until they feel better? Apologies in advance for the argumentative tone, but what is it that you guys are so worked up about here? As an aside, I certainly agree with Charles Matthews that this just barely has to do with tensors - but tensors are involved to some extent. This section points that out - no tensor analysis needed. Historically, we called this "diffusion anisotropy imaging" and it was Peter Basser who helped create and promote the idea that this was some sort of incredibly complex mathematical methodology - not correct in 1992, not correct now. The basic test is that to develop the method, it had to be so simple that even a brain surgeon could do it. I know that most scientists and - certainly most mathematicians - will consider surgeons to be not very bright, (compared to a mathematician at least) but that is just a burden we have to bear. ( Afiller ( talk) 06:05, 6 September 2009 (UTC))
The COI issue has been covered at some length so I won't repeat it here. I do apologize for saying "no mathematicians" and I meant it more in humor. My poke in the ribs on this is not exactly a "ban." My concern is that if the tensor section in the Diffusion MRI article was made to look like the tensor discussions in the mathematical articles, then it wouldn't serve the people I felt were the audience. The edits from Charles Matthews are excellent. In the discussion for this article I point out how complex COI can be. A popular competing claim for early steps in the use of tensors in Diffusion MRI comes from Peter Basser, but he is a senior program director at NIH and so is responsible for doling out the grants to most of the scientists in the field. When Basser's story is championed in a signed article, isn't the scientist looking out for his next grant in order to keep funded, produce papers and get that next academic promotion - maybe there will be an invite to give a plenary lecture, etc. In academia, we understand that all scientists publish about work they themselves have done and upon which their livelihood depends. In most cases, this is obvious to the reader. When interests of the writer exist that may not be obvious to the reader, then they should be declared as I have done. Wikipedia - unlike academia - encourages anonymity and that sets up a terrible potential for untraceable COI. All that being said - relevant to the material here, explaining the mathematical basis is not an area to worry about conflicts as far as I can see. This is particularly the case because I'm not really an advocate of the ellipsoid model. Nowhere do I mention the anti-symmetric dyadic tensor model I've been publishing about - most of the publications in the field (there are about 4,000 peer reviewed articles) orient towards the ellipsoid tensor model. I'm all in favor of the point made about re-explaining the mathematical basis and there are thousands of scientists trying to develop new and better methods of processing diffusion anisotropy MRI data. I'm focused on research on the biophysics and data capture. Diffusion MRI and "DTI" are the work of thousands over the past 15 years, and Arthur Rubin's suggestion to "ban" me isn't very civil. This article is almost entirely about the collective work in this field. I have written some major portions because no one had bothered to in the past and because I like writing to teach - as I have done in other books I have written (such as "Do Your Really Need Back Surgery"). I understand how difficult it is to be successful with the entire project of Wikipedia. I'd like to be helpful, but would not want to be harmful to wikipedia. If you just delete the entire article, you will have to find someone to write again from scratch. If you think there is a punitive value in deleting the tensor explanation then I am truly baffled at what you are trying to accomplish other than wielding authority. I certainly agree (and have said elsewhere) that - if you can't take the heat you should stay out of the blogosphere - and that applies equally well to Wikipedia. ( Afiller ( talk) 04:57, 7 September 2009 (UTC))
So, I came across List of mathematics articles (A-C) and its ilk, and they are evidently used exclusively for recent changes tracking by this wikiproject using Mathbot. I asked Mathbot's author, and he told me to ask here. So: is there any reason (besides the bot's current settings; the author could change them easily) these pages could/should not be moved to a subpage of this wikiproject? They are complete orphans, they duplicate the single-letter articles, and they are solely used internally. I just don't understand why these are in mainspace. -- Cybercobra (talk) 22:39, 5 September 2009 (UTC)
List of mathematics articles (0-9) has been moved a number of times, and in some of its incarnations had an ndash rather than a hyphen. Our usual conventions say an ndash is correct. So why isn't that used? There may be some sort of dispute about whether to say "list" or "index", but I would think it would be obvious that the ndash is correct.
Likewise List of mathematics articles (A-C), etc., should have ndashes rather than hyphens, regardless of whether they're called "lists" or "indexes". Michael Hardy ( talk) 01:31, 6 September 2009 (UTC)
A requested move discussion for the pages has been started @ Talk:List of mathematics articles (A-C). -- Cybercobra (talk) 04:31, 9 September 2009 (UTC)
That discussion is currently full of inclusionist/deletionist rhetoric - does anybody feel up to the task of getting it back on track before Thursday morning? Either presenting a reliable source or a fresh voice explaining why the topic is not notable would be nice. - 2/0 ( cont.) 03:04, 6 September 2009 (UTC)
The current name of the AfD discussion is Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Graphical methods of finding polynomial roots.
The article got drastically rewritten in such a way that its original topic was no longer there. I then restored the original topic without all the kindergarten-level algebra text material and with a correctly drawn graph, within the article's new larger context.
In view of the citing of the book titled Visual Complex Analysis, of which it is said that it goes through similar material with more complicated functions, I think the article can evolve into something worthwhile. Michael Hardy ( talk) 21:39, 6 September 2009 (UTC)
I've looked at the "limited preview", and it does appear that "Colonel Warden" was confused. It seems quite plausible that the topic could be treated in that book. But that's not a reason to cite it.
Now let's imagine an analytic function of a complex variable, that takes real values for real arguments, and suppose in some neighborhood of a real number a it's approximately [(x − a)2 + (a small positive number)], where "small" means by comparison to its deviation from that parabola. The proposed method should give reasonable approximations to the non-real roots, and with some work one should be able to say something precise instead of saying "reasonable".
But of course that won't work for something like x3 + x. Michael Hardy ( talk) 02:23, 7 September 2009 (UTC)
Does everyone here condone the picture we have on Grigori Perelman? It certainly wasn't there a year ago when I last looked at that article. I'm sure the picture has a free license and what not, but do we condone the use of a picture likely taken without the subject's knowledge, and not in the best of circumstances—he looks like bum in that one—as the main picture in biographical articles? Pcap ping 16:16, 7 September 2009 (UTC)
I've nominated Hilbert space for good article status. Follow the links at Talk:Hilbert space. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 20:23, 7 September 2009 (UTC)
Looking for feedback at talk:Beta_function#Disambiguation. Thanks. Headbomb { ταλκ κοντριβς – WP Physics} 02:31, 9 September 2009 (UTC)
In case anyone is interested, a discussion about digit grouping styles is taking place at Village Pump (policy), related to this question:
On Wikipedia, should the selection of digit grouping styles depend upon regional and topical conventions used in the English language?
Please refer to that page for details and discussion. TheFeds 04:01, 9 September 2009 (UTC)
There is a discussion at Talk:List of mathematics articles (A-C) regarding moving these pages to userspace. Oleg Alexandrov ( talk) 17:16, 9 September 2009 (UTC)
Why do we have two different templates Template:MathGenealogy and Template:Mathgenealogy? -- Robin ( talk) 18:32, 4 September 2009 (UTC)
<noinclude>
etc.) is not my strong point so I won't attempt that myself as 70-odd mathematicians might get labelled as deprecated instead.
Qwfp (
talk) 19:35, 4 September 2009 (UTC)
I've had an issue with user PST at Field extension and I've reverted his edit twice so I'm raising my issue here (it has also been discussed by me and him at User talk:RobHar#Shur's_lemma). He wants to say that the fact that ring homomorphisms between fields are necessarily injective is a consequence of Schur's lemma, which in some sense it is, but that's complete overkill. It's just because fields have no non-trivial ideals. In the same edit he replaces "ring homomorphism" with "non-zero ring homomorphism" though on wikipedia ring homomorphisms are assumed to be unital, and hence automatically non-zero.
An additional problem is his edit at Talk:Banach manifold where he raised the math rating importance of that article from "low" to "top". His reason is that manifolds are top importance and manifolds are special cases of Banach manifolds, hence Banach manifolds are top importance. This is of course an inappropriate use of transitivity, but I fear I will not be able to convince him of that myself. RobHar ( talk) 11:26, 7 September 2009 (UTC)
I did not know that my edit at field extension or my edit at Talk:Banach manifold would create a conflict and I am sorry if it did. However, I do not understand why it is absolutely necessary that a mention of Shur's lemma should be removed because of an opinion that it is overkill - a name was merely given to a particular (rather simple) result. Altough I can understand how people might feel that this is unnecessary, I do not think that it is worth to discuss this issue to any great depth so in effect I will not revert that statement again.
With regards to Talk:Banach manifold, I feel that priority ratings unnecessarily seem to classify research as being "low importance", "mid importance" or "high importance". After reading the appropriate policy page ( WP:WikiProject Mathematics/Wikipedia 1.0/Importance), I observed the statement: "However, it does not assess the importance of the article as it is currently written, but the potential value of having a high quality article on the topic. This is usually closely tied to how important the subject is, and consequently, importance levels are often described in terms of the importance of the subject rather than the article." In some sense, this compares to asserting that "Mathematical research on a field should be determined by priority; the potential value of someone researching the theory of manifolds is greater than that of researching Banach manifolds." Of course, this is my interpretation if Wikipedia believes that some articles should be given more attention that others according to priority. Do we really want to convey that Banach manifolds are apparently "low priority" because they do not have applications in string theory (for instance) unlike Euclidean manifolds (actually they do - or a subclass at least)? In effect, I do not understand why the logical deduction that Euclidean manifolds constitute a subclass of Banach manifolds implies that they have the same importance, is flawed. This is just my opinion so in effect there may well be a good reason but at present, I am unable to see it (as another instance of "priority ratings" - [10]). As someone mentioned above, I consulted Geometry Guy regarding this issue, and I feel that it should be considered.
If I understand correctly, Plclark asserts that Shur's lemma does not apply to ring homomorphisms between distinct fields whereas it does apply to ring endomorphisms. As such, this criticizm is perfecly appropriate - I did not state that this was so. I did state, however, that in the literature this is sometimes stated as a "generalized Shur's lemma" in a vague sense. At the time, I did not feel that this point needed evidence as it was not at the heart of the debate. The source I had in mind, upon closer check, does not in fact have the precise statement I asserted and so I apologize for stating that this is used in the literature (I could not find other instances of this, either).
I think that this discussion has reminded me that one should edit articles which are apparently unheard of by mathematicians (because of their specialization). Articles on well-known topics appear to be defended from constructive edits. Possibly, it is better if someone does not know which articles you edit (or at least has no clue about the topic) so that no conflict arises. -- PS T 01:00, 8 September 2009 (UTC)
I resent the implication that PST is making that my actions prevented "constructive edits" from being made. PST has also accused me on my talk page of not handling this matter in an "ideal" fashion because I immediately reverted his original edit. He seems to suggest I should have waited or something. I simply followed wiki's consensus-building process by removing an edit that I didn't agreed with. PST proceeded to reinsert his edit two more times without seeking consensus first. I feel I've done exactly what wikipedia suggests, and I feel that PST has made two baseless accusations. RobHar ( talk) 15:18, 8 September 2009 (UTC)
I find the current version of WP:NOT PAPERS both reductive, containing some redundancy, and rather poorly explained (in particular the ban on "academic language" at dictum 7). It also fails to defer to the guideline where the finer points of those issues are discussed. I've made a proposal to address these shortcomings. Actually, I had already implemented it, but I've been reverted by someone insisting that I "get consensus", although that editor had to comments on the substance of my edits. So, this notice is an attempt to get the interested parties to form a consensus. Pcap ping 16:13, 8 September 2009 (UTC)
I have some doubts about example 2 which was added to the article yesterday. Don't get me wrong: it is a very nice piece of mathematics. But I think it might be a bit out of place in the article as it stands. The idea of an envelope is a simple one from differential geometry. When people talk about envelopes they are, by and large, talking about the envelopes of families of smooth submanifolds. This new addition seems very algebraic (e.g. it uses a special case of the Hölder inequality) and topological, and a little out of place. Could some people please take a look and see what they think. I think it should be removed. Maybe a new article or a new section could be added to deal with envelopes from a non-differential geometry point of view. As it stands, everything in the article, except the new example, is about simple differential geometry. ~~ Dr Dec ( Talk) ~~ 15:25, 10 September 2009 (UTC)
We might need some collaboration at Russell's paradox. Some of you may know that Will Bailey, User:Wvbailey, is a thoughtful, careful, and hard-working contributor. However he has a tendency towards what to my taste is an overly "historical" focus, and a tendency to overvalue primary sources, as opposed to the secondary ones from which we are supposed primarily (oh the irony!) work.
He has recently made some well-researched changes, but ones that in my estimation impair the readability of the article and muddle its focus, which (just to reveal my biases) in my opinion should be primarily on the way that the paradox refutes Frege's attempt to reduce sets to logic. There is no question of any edit war here, at least not from Will; his good faith is unquestioned, and I'm certain we can work through this, but some further eyes might spot something helpful. -- Trovatore ( talk) 20:47, 13 September 2009 (UTC)
In general, for history articles here it is not acceptable to directly use primary texts to write an article. Several heated conflicts have occurred on this wiki when some editors tried to promote their own historical interpretations of ancient texts. More recently, I've seen a number of Mathematics articles that have fairly detailed history sections essentially written directly from reprints of the original papers, typically 19th century and early 20th century papers. Examples include, but are not limited to Function_(mathematics)#History, and Algorithm#History. I am a bit surprised, because at least for some of these topics, detailed historical accounts have been published. For instance I've added one to Algorithm#Further reading. Clearly, writing about the history of mathematics is a little different than other types of history. So, I have to ask here: to what extent do we wish to condone such practices? Should we add something to the Math MOS about it? Pcap ping 13:19, 5 September 2009 (UTC)
The history in function is derived primarily from van Heijenoort 1967. And van Heijenoort always prefaces his articles with excellent commentary, either written by him or by another scholar e.g. Quine. And he, like Martin Davis's The Undecidable, often had access to the authors themselves (e.g. Goedel, Russell). In the assembly of these "sourcebooks", these minds went through a huge amount of literature, condensed it, and then presented their "best pieces" (together with their commentary and analysis); you can see this in their extensive bibliographies. A lot of this sort of research is similar to what a wiki contributor has to do in the case of a biography -- read a lot of sources and connect the dots. True, sometimes we get lucky and find a huge trove of primary stuff e.g. Goedel's nachlass as compiled and sorted by (and commented on) by Dawson. But it's almost always a case of reading something in a secondary source and then going hunting into the original to verify the secondary source. My experience has been that the original author always says it best; précis and other condensing usually butchers the original. Bill Wvbailey ( talk) 04:08, 14 September 2009 (UTC)
I'd also like to add that quite often "primary" sources themselves serve as "secondary" sources of background info with respect to issues being treated by the author. In other words, the "primary" source is actually behaving, in part, as a review of a (more-)primary source. In exactly the same way, any good review article or book is always "primary" (in its extension) but can be "secondary" (in its intension); this has always been a problem with criticism in fiction and art -- do you just review the art on the page (the extension) without regard to the author's intension (e.g. his infered state-of-mind based on his biography, his prior works, his own comments re his work etc)? For a good example of what I'm talking about see Zermelo's (1908) A new proof of the possibility of a well-ordering section b. Objection concerning nonpredicative defintion (van Heijenoort 1967:190-191) wherein Zermelo lambastes Poincaré with regards to Poincare's (1905, 1906, 1906a) dismissal of Cantor's set theory and with regards to Poincare's opinions re impredicativity (1906, p. 307). Here the page numbers in parentheses are in the original Zermelo, and they refer to the "primary" sources i.e. Poincare; van Heijenoort in his bibliography also cites them fully for the curious. I hope what I'm saying here makes sense. Bill Wvbailey ( talk) 16:16, 16 September 2009 (UTC)
(This is a cross-post from WP:COMPSCI believed to be of interest here as well, please reply there).
We have a box in that article that proclaims, rather idiosyncratically, that it is an unsolved problem. Of course, the actual (claimed) problem is to "formalize" it so it can be "proved". Even this appears to me to be an idiosyncratic view of a few authors, as most state that the thesis is not something that can be proved because in general one needs to "quantify" over all computational models (I can give citations if anybody doubts me). So, it's somewhat questionable to have it included in Unsolved problems in computer science as well, given that most authors do not believe it to be something of a provable nature. So, the box appearing in the CTT article reflects a minority POV in my view. Any other opinions? Pcap ping 23:04, 13 September 2009 (UTC)
There are actually 4 different viewpoints on the Church-Turing thesis (CTT) in the literature:
So you can see that just calling CTT an "open problem" is not very helpful when there are several mutually-contradictory positions all of which state that it is not an open problem. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 01:26, 14 September 2009 (UTC)
The Church–Turing thesis is not a mathematical proposition, and so is not susceptible of mathematical proof. I'm not sure I'd call it a philosophical premise either. Certainly one can imagine universal assent to a surprising counterexample. It seems to live in some very lonely place in any of our ways of organizing what we think about. Michael Hardy ( talk) 04:01, 14 September 2009 (UTC)
Re Pohta: I was simply listing the viewpoints that can actually be found in the literature, without offering my own opinion about which of them is correct. I could certainly argue in favor and against all four positions, but that doesn't help anything. As I said, position 1 is the most popular in undergraduate textbooks and position 2 has significant popularity among researchers in recursion theory. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 10:20, 14 September 2009 (UTC)
My wording of the now-deleted "unsolved problem", with its verifiable sources, is not an instance of me violating NPOV. But I can understand people's confusion in thinking that I, evil ole Bill, am claiming that Dershowitz and Gurevich have indeed succesfully axiomitized the problem. Not a chance! I suspect D and G are all wet. But D and G's claim is in the literature and has to be dealt with; my invoking them was just adding another verifiable source re evidence that efforts of axiomatize (or "formalize" if you will) is still in play as an academic "issue". A quick survey of the history of this article shows that this "unsolved problem" was in the list long before I ever came to wikipedia. It wasn't me pushing a POV -- it was there in the article , then it was gone, then (as I recall) I reinserted it (together with very good sourcing) based on my reading of Goedel's comment to Church. For disbelievers that this issue is not current see CBM's find here: http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/teaching_staff/Smith/godelbook/other/CTT.pdf. Here Smith reviews articles that discuss as "formalizing" the CTT. Bill Wvbailey ( talk) 15:33, 16 September 2009 (UTC)
I just found out we have no article titled oriented matroid.
I'd have immediately created it if I weren't too confused about the definition to do so. Michael Hardy ( talk) 04:03, 14 September 2009 (UTC)
If anyone knows how add that to the talk archives here, please do so. I spent a little trying to find how that's done but I couldn't find any clear instructions. Pcap ping 03:28, 15 September 2009 (UTC)
Should this really be a dab? I suspect the average person looking for this would be rather confused. We have:
The "(introduction)" article clearly belongs to Category:Introductions, and is well justified, but I don't even know which article serves as main article for {{ introduction}} purposes... Also, it's unclear to me how Boolean algebra (logic) differs from Boolean logic.
I could echo what Sławomir wrote above (vis-a-vis tensor articles) along the lines "no more boolean algebra articles, please!". Well, don't get me wrong, I think we don't need more repetitive articles, rather than no more articles on topics in this area. Opinions on reorganizing this in any way? Pcap ping 22:57, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
Hi, I've just come across A New Interpretation of Odd Magic Squares in the Lo Shu format and can't make head or tail of it. Is it WP:OR? If so, can someone WP:AFD it? cheers, Rd232 talk 01:19, 19 September 2009 (UTC)
Third set of eyes are needed at envelope (mathematics). Sławomir Biały ( talk) 15:11, 21 September 2009 (UTC)
New article Wiart's triangle seems to be a straight cut-and-paste copy of Pascal's triangle with "Pascal" replaced by "Wiart" in a few places. It would appear to be a likely candidate for speedy deletion, but this type of page-copy vandalism doesn't quite seem to fit any of the WP:CSD criteria. On the other hand, prodding and waiting 7 days for deletion seems an unnecessary delay. What is the appropriate course of action ? Gandalf61 ( talk) 11:37, 23 September 2009 (UTC)
I deleted the article. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 12:22, 23 September 2009 (UTC)
There are no links to Schwarz integral formula from the article space, except from a list. Please help. Michael Hardy ( talk) 18:25, 24 September 2009 (UTC)
Template:Linear algebra references has been nominated for deletion. The discussion page is Wikipedia:Templates for deletion#Template:Linear algebra references. Jim ( talk) 03:57, 25 September 2009 (UTC)
I have nominated Formal language (logic) for deletion. The discussion page is Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Formal language (logic). — Carl ( CBM · talk) 00:39, 18 September 2009 (UTC)
I managed to find a source that explicitly says this, see Talk:Metalogic#Metalogic_.3D_metamathematics. So, I'm proposing a merge of those articles. Pcap ping 09:36, 18 September 2009 (UTC)
Rayleigh's method of dimensional analysis could use a couple minutes of work to clean it up. I know 0 about the subject and have not been able to get a good enough grasp of it through google. Thanks for any assistance. Cptnono ( talk) 02:53, 25 September 2009 (UTC)
I've cleaned it up. I put some proper initial context words in the first sentence, added some links from the article to some others, brought the style (mostly) into line with Wikipedia conventions, and added some links to the article from other articles. Michael Hardy ( talk) 19:56, 25 September 2009 (UTC)
The article in its present form is not all that clear. I don't know whether it's really dealing with something that doesn't belong in the main dimensional analysis article. Michael Hardy ( talk) 16:58, 26 September 2009 (UTC)
See Hannan Binth Hashim. Hoax? Non-notable instance of some journalist being stupid? Michael Hardy ( talk) 19:08, 25 September 2009 (UTC)
I was thinking of ways to get myself more involved in Wikipedia again - specifically the maths topics. I was surpised to find that the Collaboration of the Month page was marked as inactive. Would there be interest in reviving it? -- Paul Carpenter ( talk) 16:26, 25 September 2009 (UTC)
I believe there is a non-sense in the derivation of the formulae: umu.eta = u(x + ct)*(x - ct) = u(x2 - (ct)2) which is NOT the same as utt - c2uxx —Preceding unsigned comment added by 93.3.252.129 ( talk • contribs) 27 September 2009
Trend change:
Henry Delforn ( talk) 19:34, 23 August 2009 (UTC)
Why is there a redirect here?-- Sandrobt ( talk) 01:04, 31 August 2009 (UTC)
Category:Euclid clearly needs attention. At present, it seems to be a mish-mash of things having the term "Euclidean" in them, irrespective of whether these were actually due to Euclid or in some historically significant way connected up with Euclid. (I mean, apart from the fact that, for instance, a Euclidean ball is a ball in a Euclidean space.) Sławomir Biały ( talk) 18:22, 31 August 2009 (UTC)
I am teaching an "introduction to proofs" course for undergraduate prospective math majors this semester, and just recently I have presented truth tables. It is always nice to provide a source for more background information for those who are interested (the course text doesn't say much), so I looked at truth tables.
The first sentence in the overview (the first section following the lead) is:
It doesn't even sound as though it was written by a native English speaker. The second sentence:
After three readings, I think this is a quotation from page 39 of Quine's book, with a missing introductory quotation mark. Note that the prominence in the literature is being demonstated by a citation rather than by directly citing the literature in which it appeared. How circuitous.
And so forth. No way would I want my students to read this article. Can anyone help? Plclark ( talk) 19:07, 31 August 2009 (UTC)
What shall we do with the article titled equiareal map? The facts are:
So the incoming links are treating the section of 2 × 2 real matrices as the main thing, even though that article currently refers to equiareal map as the "main article". Michael Hardy ( talk) 21:15, 31 August 2009 (UTC)
In "nowiki" mode, the above looks like this:
Same thing with Bergman kernel. I added the commented-out part. I see this a lot. When I can, I actually fill in this information. Am I the only one who does this? Michael Hardy ( talk) 03:43, 1 September 2009 (UTC)
After making the nomination for Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of mathematics articles (J-L), and being informed that that article was necessary to the proper functioning of the "recent changes" links in {{ MathTopicTOC}}, Cybercobra ( talk · contribs) declared that such links were inappropriate in article space and removed them from the template. I have no strong opinion on whether this was the right thing to do but others may. Discussion taken here rather than in the AfD (where it's inappropriately off-topic) or the template talk page (where nobody will see it). — David Eppstein ( talk) 07:06, 2 September 2009 (UTC)
A recent daily update of WP:WPM/CA (the Current activity subpage) lists hundreds of mathematics articles in the "Removed articles" row. Why did this occur? Is this a result of some kind of change in categorization, the recent issues with Template:MathTopicTOC or what? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Classicalecon ( talk • contribs) 13:15, 3 September 2009 (UTC)
My current hypothesis is that the articles which were removed had been manually added over time, and thus the bot did not automatically include them when it recreated the lists from scratch after they were moved. I have merged all the histories and restored the largest version of each page. I hope this will fix things; the logs may still be strange through the next update. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 15:31, 3 September 2009 (UTC)
I came across this article - it looks rather like an academic paper and the editor notes that: "Plotting the imaginary roots using empty circle in the Cartesian coordinate system is something new I am proposing. Over time, this method may be accepted as an alternate way of plotting imaginary roots.". I know pretty much nothing about the subject so I was wondering if someone could take a look and see if it is original research or a valid article or something else? (As an aside, if it is an article, is there a more specific category than Category:Geometry that I could use?) Thanks --☇ Kateshortforbob talk☄ 14:43, 29 August 2009 (UTC)
imaginary intersections are a very interesting topic, and not just lines and parabolas have them, lines and circles have them as well. To be frank, I am shocked that there is not article on the topic of imaginary intersections, maybe I am missing something? This article on imaginary intersections of lines and parabolas is a good start. There are some good citations on the subject starting at least from Hamilton's elements in 1865. TeamQuaternion ( talk) 04:06, 30 August 2009 (UTC)
Somebody made a proposal to change WP:SYNT. While the practical relevance of the change proposed is rather insignficant on how Math articles are written in practice here, in theory it does impact it. Proposal and discussion. Pcap ping 16:56, 5 September 2009 (UTC)
Let's not miss one point. OR is wrong if it is used to advance a thesis. It is mostly not wrong in mathematics itself, because we deal in truths which are not tendentious. Almost anything else (e.g. history, including history of mathematics) is an area in which any "thesis" is likely to be tendentious. Those discussions on SYNT tend to have the standing assumption that theses are advanced only because they do tend in some direction. Mathematicians have the benefit of true syllogisms. Tweaking the rules on OR doesn't sound good to me, anyway, but it should not be taken as limiting conclusions from axioms. (This may seem to be arguing against the well-established idea that people should prove their theorems elsewhere, not here. That wasn't the type of point I was trying to make, though. I was just trying to explain something usually left tacit.) Charles Matthews ( talk) 20:38, 5 September 2009 (UTC)
Does anyone know what happened with this edit? From the LONG list of allegedly new articles there's no clear way to tell which ones may be actually new articles without clicking on every one of them individually and examining their histories. Nobody can reasonable spare the hours that that would take. Michael Hardy ( talk) 17:27, 5 September 2009 (UTC)
Small query... A number of edits were recently made to the Carleson's theorem article which I started, mainly changing the typesetting of simple expressions in TeX to HTML equivalents. This improved the appearance of the article significantly, removing lots of inconsistent spacing and sizing. However, I'm a little confused/concerned about compatibility issues. Wikipedia:Mathematical_symbols states that the symbols given there should "work in most browsers", but WP:MOSMATH suggests (under "Special symbols") a preference for being conservative with the use of HTML symbols because of compatibility issues (stating one of the symbols from the "Mathematical symbols" article as an example). Does anybody have any concrete information on compatibility and established norms for symbols? Apologies if this is a newbie question... :-) Tcnuk ( talk) 08:40, 2 September 2009 (UTC)
For me it's not a concern about "mindless use of symbols as substitutes for words"; it's about the fact that TeX fails to match the size of the surrounding text, being four times as big, and is too high or too low and does not align with either text or punctuation, and in some cases a period, comma, or parenthesis following it actually appears at the beginning of the next line. Michael Hardy ( talk) 12:54, 2 September 2009 (UTC)
I am a bit confused about one of Carl's comments above, and maybe someone could clarify for me. I recall a months back (January?), User:Bob_K was having trouble viewing several articles because of sepcial mathematical symbols. But all of the symbols in question were HTML entities. (I think convolution, and set theory operations were the case.) He was using a version of Internet explorer, and when I tried this out on my XP machine at home I did indeed have the same problem. After that he added special character templates to a few articles like Hilbert transform and Set (mathematics). Now I admit that named entities have been around a long time, but I think (some versions of) IE doesn't necessarily support them anyways. And your computer doesn't need to be so out of date to have such a version. Does IE really support these symbols? I don't use it often enough to be sure. Thenub314 ( talk) 11:52, 9 September 2009 (UTC)
PS. Part of our conversation is still on his talk page: User_talk:Bob_K#Convolution. Thenub314 ( talk) 11:56, 9 September 2009 (UTC)
I'm late to the party. For reference, I see correctly rendered every single symbol from Unicode Mathematical Operators at least since Fedora 9 (and possibly before that), as well as those from Unicode and HTML#Web browser support. But then, I always install almost all optional fonts. Pcap ping 15:35, 9 September 2009 (UTC)
Is the section Diffusion MRI#Tensors - What Are They and How Does the Math Work? really encyclopedic? Anyway, it seems a lengthy and unnecessary fork of material on tensors. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 02:33, 3 September 2009 (UTC)
(e/c) My issue is mostly with the fact that it seems to duplicate material that should probably properly be elsewhere. The author even went so far as to include links to this article as an alternative treatment of tensors in all of the pages Tensor, Classical treatment of tensors, Intermediate treatment of tensors, and Tensor (intrinsic definition) (see these diffs: [3], [4], [5], [6]). The material was therefore presented as a strange kind of WP:POVFORK from the very beginning. Anyway, I don't think there is an urgent need to remove the material (although the section title will need to be changed, per WP:HOWTO), but readers should not be directed here as though it were an article about tensors. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 12:41, 3 September 2009 (UTC)
Thanks for the suggestions. I first would say that although I have worked with multivariate statistics and tensor principles for more than 30 years, I found each of the Wikipedia mathematical articles completely impenetrable. My concern in this article is to consider the audience. Not only patients for whom a DTI study has been ordered, but also imaging technologists, neuroscientists, insurance companies looking to make decisions about authorizations, and neurologists, radiologists and (yes) neurosurgeons. As a group, doctors are definitely not mathematicians. My objective was to provide an explanation of tensors that linked the accessible level of math, the visual physical concept of the ellipsoid (physicians are generally very good with spatial object visualization as opposed to math) and the steps of the imaging processing. If you remove the discussion, then the reader is left not knowing what in the world a "tensor" actually is. If a mathematician reads my section they may be horrified by the simplicity and lack of formality. However, an encyclopedia cannot consider that it has just one kind of audience. The formal tensor treatments may be fine for mathematics graduate students but I can assure they are totally useless and impenetrable for a neurologists or family practitioner who just wants to have a clear enough idea about it to be able to explain it to patients and insurance company reviewers. I will certainly work on rewording it to get rid of the pronouns. I do feel very strongly that this is an appropriate amount of material and an appropriate level of discussion. Also, patients who want to know about DTI images and go to your mathematical tensor articles will be totally baffled. You don't need to send these people to some other Wiki, they expect to find this material in Wikipedia. All of the mathematical articles totally fail to cover any of the relevant material about tensors as it applies to DTI. You could modify or add to those articles to include a section for the non-mathematician. However, the only really large group of non-specialist, non-mathematical readers who are interested in tensors are those concerned with DTI MRI scans. Therefore, I think the best place for the DTI oriented tensor explanation is in the DTI article.( Afiller ( talk) 05:36, 4 September 2009 (UTC))
It is more clear to me that the material needs a copy edit, than that the copy edit needs to be in the direction of the general tensor articles. After all this is only matrices anyway, when it comes down to it. In other words, it is a writing issue. Charles Matthews ( talk) 20:50, 5 September 2009 (UTC)
Please - no copy editing by mathematicians though. Your principal tensor site gets three or four visits per day - aside from editors. This site draws 300 to 400 visitors per day because it is a good article. It should not read like a mathematics page. It is written for patients and physicians and not for mathematicians. I can write technical material I assure you. The trick is to take mystifyingly complex ideas and re-render them as easily conceptualized elements that are widely accessible. I know you'll just say I'm biased, but the existing tensor articles are each a horrible mess for readability and communication. Why not focus first on copy editing them. They are basically failures as they read right now because they are only understandable by professors of mathematics. Remember, this is an encyclopedia that has very very popular articles about Britney Spears. It is not a professional encyclopedic treatment of complex spartan mathematical listings. If you have a mathematician copy edit the Britney Spears article it will be replaced in a day. If Charles Matthews has some good suggestions about what the copy editing needs are, I will certainly see if I can get there, but this is no problem article. It is very successful and effective. One of the writers above allows that I am an "expert." There may be some debate, but my invention with some use of tensors is already saving thousands of lives and will intimately impact millions into the future. Why not stop all the DTI imaging and just tell the patients to work a bit with matrices until they feel better? Apologies in advance for the argumentative tone, but what is it that you guys are so worked up about here? As an aside, I certainly agree with Charles Matthews that this just barely has to do with tensors - but tensors are involved to some extent. This section points that out - no tensor analysis needed. Historically, we called this "diffusion anisotropy imaging" and it was Peter Basser who helped create and promote the idea that this was some sort of incredibly complex mathematical methodology - not correct in 1992, not correct now. The basic test is that to develop the method, it had to be so simple that even a brain surgeon could do it. I know that most scientists and - certainly most mathematicians - will consider surgeons to be not very bright, (compared to a mathematician at least) but that is just a burden we have to bear. ( Afiller ( talk) 06:05, 6 September 2009 (UTC))
The COI issue has been covered at some length so I won't repeat it here. I do apologize for saying "no mathematicians" and I meant it more in humor. My poke in the ribs on this is not exactly a "ban." My concern is that if the tensor section in the Diffusion MRI article was made to look like the tensor discussions in the mathematical articles, then it wouldn't serve the people I felt were the audience. The edits from Charles Matthews are excellent. In the discussion for this article I point out how complex COI can be. A popular competing claim for early steps in the use of tensors in Diffusion MRI comes from Peter Basser, but he is a senior program director at NIH and so is responsible for doling out the grants to most of the scientists in the field. When Basser's story is championed in a signed article, isn't the scientist looking out for his next grant in order to keep funded, produce papers and get that next academic promotion - maybe there will be an invite to give a plenary lecture, etc. In academia, we understand that all scientists publish about work they themselves have done and upon which their livelihood depends. In most cases, this is obvious to the reader. When interests of the writer exist that may not be obvious to the reader, then they should be declared as I have done. Wikipedia - unlike academia - encourages anonymity and that sets up a terrible potential for untraceable COI. All that being said - relevant to the material here, explaining the mathematical basis is not an area to worry about conflicts as far as I can see. This is particularly the case because I'm not really an advocate of the ellipsoid model. Nowhere do I mention the anti-symmetric dyadic tensor model I've been publishing about - most of the publications in the field (there are about 4,000 peer reviewed articles) orient towards the ellipsoid tensor model. I'm all in favor of the point made about re-explaining the mathematical basis and there are thousands of scientists trying to develop new and better methods of processing diffusion anisotropy MRI data. I'm focused on research on the biophysics and data capture. Diffusion MRI and "DTI" are the work of thousands over the past 15 years, and Arthur Rubin's suggestion to "ban" me isn't very civil. This article is almost entirely about the collective work in this field. I have written some major portions because no one had bothered to in the past and because I like writing to teach - as I have done in other books I have written (such as "Do Your Really Need Back Surgery"). I understand how difficult it is to be successful with the entire project of Wikipedia. I'd like to be helpful, but would not want to be harmful to wikipedia. If you just delete the entire article, you will have to find someone to write again from scratch. If you think there is a punitive value in deleting the tensor explanation then I am truly baffled at what you are trying to accomplish other than wielding authority. I certainly agree (and have said elsewhere) that - if you can't take the heat you should stay out of the blogosphere - and that applies equally well to Wikipedia. ( Afiller ( talk) 04:57, 7 September 2009 (UTC))
So, I came across List of mathematics articles (A-C) and its ilk, and they are evidently used exclusively for recent changes tracking by this wikiproject using Mathbot. I asked Mathbot's author, and he told me to ask here. So: is there any reason (besides the bot's current settings; the author could change them easily) these pages could/should not be moved to a subpage of this wikiproject? They are complete orphans, they duplicate the single-letter articles, and they are solely used internally. I just don't understand why these are in mainspace. -- Cybercobra (talk) 22:39, 5 September 2009 (UTC)
List of mathematics articles (0-9) has been moved a number of times, and in some of its incarnations had an ndash rather than a hyphen. Our usual conventions say an ndash is correct. So why isn't that used? There may be some sort of dispute about whether to say "list" or "index", but I would think it would be obvious that the ndash is correct.
Likewise List of mathematics articles (A-C), etc., should have ndashes rather than hyphens, regardless of whether they're called "lists" or "indexes". Michael Hardy ( talk) 01:31, 6 September 2009 (UTC)
A requested move discussion for the pages has been started @ Talk:List of mathematics articles (A-C). -- Cybercobra (talk) 04:31, 9 September 2009 (UTC)
That discussion is currently full of inclusionist/deletionist rhetoric - does anybody feel up to the task of getting it back on track before Thursday morning? Either presenting a reliable source or a fresh voice explaining why the topic is not notable would be nice. - 2/0 ( cont.) 03:04, 6 September 2009 (UTC)
The current name of the AfD discussion is Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Graphical methods of finding polynomial roots.
The article got drastically rewritten in such a way that its original topic was no longer there. I then restored the original topic without all the kindergarten-level algebra text material and with a correctly drawn graph, within the article's new larger context.
In view of the citing of the book titled Visual Complex Analysis, of which it is said that it goes through similar material with more complicated functions, I think the article can evolve into something worthwhile. Michael Hardy ( talk) 21:39, 6 September 2009 (UTC)
I've looked at the "limited preview", and it does appear that "Colonel Warden" was confused. It seems quite plausible that the topic could be treated in that book. But that's not a reason to cite it.
Now let's imagine an analytic function of a complex variable, that takes real values for real arguments, and suppose in some neighborhood of a real number a it's approximately [(x − a)2 + (a small positive number)], where "small" means by comparison to its deviation from that parabola. The proposed method should give reasonable approximations to the non-real roots, and with some work one should be able to say something precise instead of saying "reasonable".
But of course that won't work for something like x3 + x. Michael Hardy ( talk) 02:23, 7 September 2009 (UTC)
Does everyone here condone the picture we have on Grigori Perelman? It certainly wasn't there a year ago when I last looked at that article. I'm sure the picture has a free license and what not, but do we condone the use of a picture likely taken without the subject's knowledge, and not in the best of circumstances—he looks like bum in that one—as the main picture in biographical articles? Pcap ping 16:16, 7 September 2009 (UTC)
I've nominated Hilbert space for good article status. Follow the links at Talk:Hilbert space. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 20:23, 7 September 2009 (UTC)
Looking for feedback at talk:Beta_function#Disambiguation. Thanks. Headbomb { ταλκ κοντριβς – WP Physics} 02:31, 9 September 2009 (UTC)
In case anyone is interested, a discussion about digit grouping styles is taking place at Village Pump (policy), related to this question:
On Wikipedia, should the selection of digit grouping styles depend upon regional and topical conventions used in the English language?
Please refer to that page for details and discussion. TheFeds 04:01, 9 September 2009 (UTC)
There is a discussion at Talk:List of mathematics articles (A-C) regarding moving these pages to userspace. Oleg Alexandrov ( talk) 17:16, 9 September 2009 (UTC)
Why do we have two different templates Template:MathGenealogy and Template:Mathgenealogy? -- Robin ( talk) 18:32, 4 September 2009 (UTC)
<noinclude>
etc.) is not my strong point so I won't attempt that myself as 70-odd mathematicians might get labelled as deprecated instead.
Qwfp (
talk) 19:35, 4 September 2009 (UTC)
I've had an issue with user PST at Field extension and I've reverted his edit twice so I'm raising my issue here (it has also been discussed by me and him at User talk:RobHar#Shur's_lemma). He wants to say that the fact that ring homomorphisms between fields are necessarily injective is a consequence of Schur's lemma, which in some sense it is, but that's complete overkill. It's just because fields have no non-trivial ideals. In the same edit he replaces "ring homomorphism" with "non-zero ring homomorphism" though on wikipedia ring homomorphisms are assumed to be unital, and hence automatically non-zero.
An additional problem is his edit at Talk:Banach manifold where he raised the math rating importance of that article from "low" to "top". His reason is that manifolds are top importance and manifolds are special cases of Banach manifolds, hence Banach manifolds are top importance. This is of course an inappropriate use of transitivity, but I fear I will not be able to convince him of that myself. RobHar ( talk) 11:26, 7 September 2009 (UTC)
I did not know that my edit at field extension or my edit at Talk:Banach manifold would create a conflict and I am sorry if it did. However, I do not understand why it is absolutely necessary that a mention of Shur's lemma should be removed because of an opinion that it is overkill - a name was merely given to a particular (rather simple) result. Altough I can understand how people might feel that this is unnecessary, I do not think that it is worth to discuss this issue to any great depth so in effect I will not revert that statement again.
With regards to Talk:Banach manifold, I feel that priority ratings unnecessarily seem to classify research as being "low importance", "mid importance" or "high importance". After reading the appropriate policy page ( WP:WikiProject Mathematics/Wikipedia 1.0/Importance), I observed the statement: "However, it does not assess the importance of the article as it is currently written, but the potential value of having a high quality article on the topic. This is usually closely tied to how important the subject is, and consequently, importance levels are often described in terms of the importance of the subject rather than the article." In some sense, this compares to asserting that "Mathematical research on a field should be determined by priority; the potential value of someone researching the theory of manifolds is greater than that of researching Banach manifolds." Of course, this is my interpretation if Wikipedia believes that some articles should be given more attention that others according to priority. Do we really want to convey that Banach manifolds are apparently "low priority" because they do not have applications in string theory (for instance) unlike Euclidean manifolds (actually they do - or a subclass at least)? In effect, I do not understand why the logical deduction that Euclidean manifolds constitute a subclass of Banach manifolds implies that they have the same importance, is flawed. This is just my opinion so in effect there may well be a good reason but at present, I am unable to see it (as another instance of "priority ratings" - [10]). As someone mentioned above, I consulted Geometry Guy regarding this issue, and I feel that it should be considered.
If I understand correctly, Plclark asserts that Shur's lemma does not apply to ring homomorphisms between distinct fields whereas it does apply to ring endomorphisms. As such, this criticizm is perfecly appropriate - I did not state that this was so. I did state, however, that in the literature this is sometimes stated as a "generalized Shur's lemma" in a vague sense. At the time, I did not feel that this point needed evidence as it was not at the heart of the debate. The source I had in mind, upon closer check, does not in fact have the precise statement I asserted and so I apologize for stating that this is used in the literature (I could not find other instances of this, either).
I think that this discussion has reminded me that one should edit articles which are apparently unheard of by mathematicians (because of their specialization). Articles on well-known topics appear to be defended from constructive edits. Possibly, it is better if someone does not know which articles you edit (or at least has no clue about the topic) so that no conflict arises. -- PS T 01:00, 8 September 2009 (UTC)
I resent the implication that PST is making that my actions prevented "constructive edits" from being made. PST has also accused me on my talk page of not handling this matter in an "ideal" fashion because I immediately reverted his original edit. He seems to suggest I should have waited or something. I simply followed wiki's consensus-building process by removing an edit that I didn't agreed with. PST proceeded to reinsert his edit two more times without seeking consensus first. I feel I've done exactly what wikipedia suggests, and I feel that PST has made two baseless accusations. RobHar ( talk) 15:18, 8 September 2009 (UTC)
I find the current version of WP:NOT PAPERS both reductive, containing some redundancy, and rather poorly explained (in particular the ban on "academic language" at dictum 7). It also fails to defer to the guideline where the finer points of those issues are discussed. I've made a proposal to address these shortcomings. Actually, I had already implemented it, but I've been reverted by someone insisting that I "get consensus", although that editor had to comments on the substance of my edits. So, this notice is an attempt to get the interested parties to form a consensus. Pcap ping 16:13, 8 September 2009 (UTC)
I have some doubts about example 2 which was added to the article yesterday. Don't get me wrong: it is a very nice piece of mathematics. But I think it might be a bit out of place in the article as it stands. The idea of an envelope is a simple one from differential geometry. When people talk about envelopes they are, by and large, talking about the envelopes of families of smooth submanifolds. This new addition seems very algebraic (e.g. it uses a special case of the Hölder inequality) and topological, and a little out of place. Could some people please take a look and see what they think. I think it should be removed. Maybe a new article or a new section could be added to deal with envelopes from a non-differential geometry point of view. As it stands, everything in the article, except the new example, is about simple differential geometry. ~~ Dr Dec ( Talk) ~~ 15:25, 10 September 2009 (UTC)
We might need some collaboration at Russell's paradox. Some of you may know that Will Bailey, User:Wvbailey, is a thoughtful, careful, and hard-working contributor. However he has a tendency towards what to my taste is an overly "historical" focus, and a tendency to overvalue primary sources, as opposed to the secondary ones from which we are supposed primarily (oh the irony!) work.
He has recently made some well-researched changes, but ones that in my estimation impair the readability of the article and muddle its focus, which (just to reveal my biases) in my opinion should be primarily on the way that the paradox refutes Frege's attempt to reduce sets to logic. There is no question of any edit war here, at least not from Will; his good faith is unquestioned, and I'm certain we can work through this, but some further eyes might spot something helpful. -- Trovatore ( talk) 20:47, 13 September 2009 (UTC)
In general, for history articles here it is not acceptable to directly use primary texts to write an article. Several heated conflicts have occurred on this wiki when some editors tried to promote their own historical interpretations of ancient texts. More recently, I've seen a number of Mathematics articles that have fairly detailed history sections essentially written directly from reprints of the original papers, typically 19th century and early 20th century papers. Examples include, but are not limited to Function_(mathematics)#History, and Algorithm#History. I am a bit surprised, because at least for some of these topics, detailed historical accounts have been published. For instance I've added one to Algorithm#Further reading. Clearly, writing about the history of mathematics is a little different than other types of history. So, I have to ask here: to what extent do we wish to condone such practices? Should we add something to the Math MOS about it? Pcap ping 13:19, 5 September 2009 (UTC)
The history in function is derived primarily from van Heijenoort 1967. And van Heijenoort always prefaces his articles with excellent commentary, either written by him or by another scholar e.g. Quine. And he, like Martin Davis's The Undecidable, often had access to the authors themselves (e.g. Goedel, Russell). In the assembly of these "sourcebooks", these minds went through a huge amount of literature, condensed it, and then presented their "best pieces" (together with their commentary and analysis); you can see this in their extensive bibliographies. A lot of this sort of research is similar to what a wiki contributor has to do in the case of a biography -- read a lot of sources and connect the dots. True, sometimes we get lucky and find a huge trove of primary stuff e.g. Goedel's nachlass as compiled and sorted by (and commented on) by Dawson. But it's almost always a case of reading something in a secondary source and then going hunting into the original to verify the secondary source. My experience has been that the original author always says it best; précis and other condensing usually butchers the original. Bill Wvbailey ( talk) 04:08, 14 September 2009 (UTC)
I'd also like to add that quite often "primary" sources themselves serve as "secondary" sources of background info with respect to issues being treated by the author. In other words, the "primary" source is actually behaving, in part, as a review of a (more-)primary source. In exactly the same way, any good review article or book is always "primary" (in its extension) but can be "secondary" (in its intension); this has always been a problem with criticism in fiction and art -- do you just review the art on the page (the extension) without regard to the author's intension (e.g. his infered state-of-mind based on his biography, his prior works, his own comments re his work etc)? For a good example of what I'm talking about see Zermelo's (1908) A new proof of the possibility of a well-ordering section b. Objection concerning nonpredicative defintion (van Heijenoort 1967:190-191) wherein Zermelo lambastes Poincaré with regards to Poincare's (1905, 1906, 1906a) dismissal of Cantor's set theory and with regards to Poincare's opinions re impredicativity (1906, p. 307). Here the page numbers in parentheses are in the original Zermelo, and they refer to the "primary" sources i.e. Poincare; van Heijenoort in his bibliography also cites them fully for the curious. I hope what I'm saying here makes sense. Bill Wvbailey ( talk) 16:16, 16 September 2009 (UTC)
(This is a cross-post from WP:COMPSCI believed to be of interest here as well, please reply there).
We have a box in that article that proclaims, rather idiosyncratically, that it is an unsolved problem. Of course, the actual (claimed) problem is to "formalize" it so it can be "proved". Even this appears to me to be an idiosyncratic view of a few authors, as most state that the thesis is not something that can be proved because in general one needs to "quantify" over all computational models (I can give citations if anybody doubts me). So, it's somewhat questionable to have it included in Unsolved problems in computer science as well, given that most authors do not believe it to be something of a provable nature. So, the box appearing in the CTT article reflects a minority POV in my view. Any other opinions? Pcap ping 23:04, 13 September 2009 (UTC)
There are actually 4 different viewpoints on the Church-Turing thesis (CTT) in the literature:
So you can see that just calling CTT an "open problem" is not very helpful when there are several mutually-contradictory positions all of which state that it is not an open problem. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 01:26, 14 September 2009 (UTC)
The Church–Turing thesis is not a mathematical proposition, and so is not susceptible of mathematical proof. I'm not sure I'd call it a philosophical premise either. Certainly one can imagine universal assent to a surprising counterexample. It seems to live in some very lonely place in any of our ways of organizing what we think about. Michael Hardy ( talk) 04:01, 14 September 2009 (UTC)
Re Pohta: I was simply listing the viewpoints that can actually be found in the literature, without offering my own opinion about which of them is correct. I could certainly argue in favor and against all four positions, but that doesn't help anything. As I said, position 1 is the most popular in undergraduate textbooks and position 2 has significant popularity among researchers in recursion theory. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 10:20, 14 September 2009 (UTC)
My wording of the now-deleted "unsolved problem", with its verifiable sources, is not an instance of me violating NPOV. But I can understand people's confusion in thinking that I, evil ole Bill, am claiming that Dershowitz and Gurevich have indeed succesfully axiomitized the problem. Not a chance! I suspect D and G are all wet. But D and G's claim is in the literature and has to be dealt with; my invoking them was just adding another verifiable source re evidence that efforts of axiomatize (or "formalize" if you will) is still in play as an academic "issue". A quick survey of the history of this article shows that this "unsolved problem" was in the list long before I ever came to wikipedia. It wasn't me pushing a POV -- it was there in the article , then it was gone, then (as I recall) I reinserted it (together with very good sourcing) based on my reading of Goedel's comment to Church. For disbelievers that this issue is not current see CBM's find here: http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/teaching_staff/Smith/godelbook/other/CTT.pdf. Here Smith reviews articles that discuss as "formalizing" the CTT. Bill Wvbailey ( talk) 15:33, 16 September 2009 (UTC)
I just found out we have no article titled oriented matroid.
I'd have immediately created it if I weren't too confused about the definition to do so. Michael Hardy ( talk) 04:03, 14 September 2009 (UTC)
If anyone knows how add that to the talk archives here, please do so. I spent a little trying to find how that's done but I couldn't find any clear instructions. Pcap ping 03:28, 15 September 2009 (UTC)
Should this really be a dab? I suspect the average person looking for this would be rather confused. We have:
The "(introduction)" article clearly belongs to Category:Introductions, and is well justified, but I don't even know which article serves as main article for {{ introduction}} purposes... Also, it's unclear to me how Boolean algebra (logic) differs from Boolean logic.
I could echo what Sławomir wrote above (vis-a-vis tensor articles) along the lines "no more boolean algebra articles, please!". Well, don't get me wrong, I think we don't need more repetitive articles, rather than no more articles on topics in this area. Opinions on reorganizing this in any way? Pcap ping 22:57, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
Hi, I've just come across A New Interpretation of Odd Magic Squares in the Lo Shu format and can't make head or tail of it. Is it WP:OR? If so, can someone WP:AFD it? cheers, Rd232 talk 01:19, 19 September 2009 (UTC)
Third set of eyes are needed at envelope (mathematics). Sławomir Biały ( talk) 15:11, 21 September 2009 (UTC)
New article Wiart's triangle seems to be a straight cut-and-paste copy of Pascal's triangle with "Pascal" replaced by "Wiart" in a few places. It would appear to be a likely candidate for speedy deletion, but this type of page-copy vandalism doesn't quite seem to fit any of the WP:CSD criteria. On the other hand, prodding and waiting 7 days for deletion seems an unnecessary delay. What is the appropriate course of action ? Gandalf61 ( talk) 11:37, 23 September 2009 (UTC)
I deleted the article. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 12:22, 23 September 2009 (UTC)
There are no links to Schwarz integral formula from the article space, except from a list. Please help. Michael Hardy ( talk) 18:25, 24 September 2009 (UTC)
Template:Linear algebra references has been nominated for deletion. The discussion page is Wikipedia:Templates for deletion#Template:Linear algebra references. Jim ( talk) 03:57, 25 September 2009 (UTC)
I have nominated Formal language (logic) for deletion. The discussion page is Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Formal language (logic). — Carl ( CBM · talk) 00:39, 18 September 2009 (UTC)
I managed to find a source that explicitly says this, see Talk:Metalogic#Metalogic_.3D_metamathematics. So, I'm proposing a merge of those articles. Pcap ping 09:36, 18 September 2009 (UTC)
Rayleigh's method of dimensional analysis could use a couple minutes of work to clean it up. I know 0 about the subject and have not been able to get a good enough grasp of it through google. Thanks for any assistance. Cptnono ( talk) 02:53, 25 September 2009 (UTC)
I've cleaned it up. I put some proper initial context words in the first sentence, added some links from the article to some others, brought the style (mostly) into line with Wikipedia conventions, and added some links to the article from other articles. Michael Hardy ( talk) 19:56, 25 September 2009 (UTC)
The article in its present form is not all that clear. I don't know whether it's really dealing with something that doesn't belong in the main dimensional analysis article. Michael Hardy ( talk) 16:58, 26 September 2009 (UTC)
See Hannan Binth Hashim. Hoax? Non-notable instance of some journalist being stupid? Michael Hardy ( talk) 19:08, 25 September 2009 (UTC)
I was thinking of ways to get myself more involved in Wikipedia again - specifically the maths topics. I was surpised to find that the Collaboration of the Month page was marked as inactive. Would there be interest in reviving it? -- Paul Carpenter ( talk) 16:26, 25 September 2009 (UTC)
I believe there is a non-sense in the derivation of the formulae: umu.eta = u(x + ct)*(x - ct) = u(x2 - (ct)2) which is NOT the same as utt - c2uxx —Preceding unsigned comment added by 93.3.252.129 ( talk • contribs) 27 September 2009