It would be helpful to have some independent views at Talk:Semigroup#Section_on_group_of_fractions on the validity and relevance of some material on the group of fractions of a semigroup. Thanks. Quotient group ( talk) 20:40, 29 March 2010 (UTC)
File:Helicatenoid.gif, with some small modifications, was promoted to Featured Picture. There aren't any current nominations for math, though there is a statistics one that is active.-- RDBury ( talk) 22:29, 29 March 2010 (UTC)
The new article titled Beppo-Levi space could use some work. In particular, it's a near-orphan; probably some other articles should link to it. Michael Hardy ( talk) 03:15, 30 March 2010 (UTC)
Does our project have any preference on whether the Laplacian should be written as Δ or ∇2? I have noticed a trend in the past few months to replacing Δ with ∇2 in many articles, and I can't say that I approve. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 17:22, 28 March 2010 (UTC)
It would be helpful to have some independent views at Talk:Semigroup#Section_on_group_of_fractions on the validity and relevance of some material on the group of fractions of a semigroup. Thanks. Quotient group ( talk) 20:40, 29 March 2010 (UTC)
File:Helicatenoid.gif, with some small modifications, was promoted to Featured Picture. There aren't any current nominations for math, though there is a statistics one that is active.-- RDBury ( talk) 22:29, 29 March 2010 (UTC)
The new article titled Beppo-Levi space could use some work. In particular, it's a near-orphan; probably some other articles should link to it. Michael Hardy ( talk) 03:15, 30 March 2010 (UTC)
User:Notorious4life has recently bulk-tagged almost every number article from 2 (number) to 200 (number) with {{template:examplefarm}}, which says "This article may contain excessive, poor or irrelevant examples. " and adds the articles to Category:Articles with too many examples. I have invited the editor to come here to discuss their concerns about these articles. Gandalf61 ( talk) 11:19, 30 March 2010 (UTC)
What is this world coming to? I reverted this edit. Has anyone seen this happen before? Should we put in commented-out warnings in the hundreds of articles that use this locution? Michael Hardy ( talk) 00:49, 31 March 2010 (UTC)
I updated the rating criteria so that the C rating is official. I also updated the maths rating tag so Category:C-Class mathematics articles will populate itself. VeblenBot still needs to be updated but Carl said that won't be hard.
I think issues to consider for the future are the eventual fate of the B-Plus rating, and more generally whether we should maintain separate criteria for WPM ratings. As far as I know this is the only project (other than Statistics which uses ours) that uses it's own rating criteria; the others just link to Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Assessment. My thinking is that if we are to have are own rating criteria then it should be because there is a consensus here that ours are better, as least for math articles. The current WP 1.0 criteria are (imo) confusing and inconsistent, so coming up with better criteria should be possible, but achieving consensus may prove problematic.-- RDBury ( talk) 10:26, 31 March 2010 (UTC)
Part of Wikipedia:Manual of Style (mathematics) tells us to only write fractions in styles like 1/2 and in mathematics articles. But there was an attempt to change it today to explicitly condone 1⁄2 style as well, a style that EmilJ and I have been fighting in some recent changes on Riemann hypothesis. See ongoing discussion at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (mathematics)#Fractions. — David Eppstein ( talk) 22:29, 31 March 2010 (UTC)
Why do we have a Category:Discrete mathematics ? Surely this is just as absurd as having a Category:Continuous mathematics containing things like euclidean geometry, sine function, real numbers, Set theory, manifold, Continuous symmetry. And information theory which is currently in the discrete mathematics category could just as easily be in a continuous category. I propose deleting this category. Bethnim ( talk) 12:11, 23 March 2010 (UTC)
Our articles on the physicist John Baez and the singer Joan Baez link to each other, each mentioning that they are cousins.
Bernard Osgood Koopman's mother was a cousin of William Fogg Osgood; both were mathematicians. Should they similarly mention and link to each other? Michael Hardy ( talk) 21:47, 1 April 2010 (UTC)
I thought I'd seen it in one of the articles linked to externally. But now I can't find it. But I will eventually, unless someone beats me to it. Michael Hardy ( talk) 03:06, 3 April 2010 (UTC)
Guys, what's your favourite application/occurrence of logarithms? I'm just working on that article, which does have a few ones, but the more I read on the more crazy things I find, so I thought I should ask for broader input. Jakob.scholbach ( talk) 18:20, 25 March 2010 (UTC)
A few of my favorites:
— David Eppstein ( talk) 00:36, 26 March 2010 (UTC)
Just to add my exp(log 2)¢, to me the slide rule (already mentioned and depicted) and continuous compounding came to mind, although in both cases one could argue they are as much about the exponential function as about the logarithm. Marc van Leeuwen ( talk) 09:03, 4 April 2010 (UTC)
This is the current Navbox:
Updated 16:44, 2 April 2010 (UTC)
Today I propose the following navbox to replace the present one (whose organizational principle escapes me). It has only two lines --- the first for the general public and the second for those with special interests in mathematics. Your comments are welcome. Thanks! Kiefer.Wolfowitz ( talk) 18:56, 1 April 2010 (UTC)
I think both "Navboxes" are fairly useless. I'd prefer that neither one be in the article. Paul August ☎ 19:30, 1 April 2010 (UTC)
I prefer not to split them into advanced/elementary. Doing so requires a certain degree of judgment, so if we do it here people will just keep popping up to complain that we made the wrong choice. Moreover, splitting the topics into elementary and advanced overemphasizes the difference between them. It can be read either as "that basic stuff isn't really math" or "that advanced stuff is too hard, stick with the easier stuff", both of which are unfortunately too common as attitudes. Keeping all the areas together emphasizes the unity more, which I like. So those are two reasons to keep everything in a single list. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 20:03, 1 April 2010 (UTC)
I have finally thought of a use for these navboxes, so I feel I'm now in a position to comment on them. It seems to me that these navboxes would go fairly well on articles about major fields of mathematics: Algebra, analysis, geometry, etc. Those articles might also contain navboxes about their specific areas (e.g., algebra might have elementary algebra, linear algebra, abstract algebra, etc.) but the point of this navbox is that it's for someone who wants a taste of all the mathematics that's out there—for instance, the bright 14-year old who knows he or she likes math but has no experience and no assistance. In the past, such kids might have been lucky enough to stumble upon World of Mathematics or perhaps Mathematics: Its content, meaning and methods; ideally the navbox would guide such kids just as the tables of contents of those books guided their readers.
With that in mind, I think that neither the MSC nor the IMU listing is well-suited to the task. They are both classifications of research mathematics. They don't include trigonometry or elementary algebra or axiomatic Euclidean geometry; nobody does research in these anymore. The Princeton Companion to Mathematics's list of branches of mathematics (in Part IV) is, I think, somewhat bizarre and even less suited to our task. I think a good solution might be to take all the fields in the IMU listing and put them together with a list of historical research fields of mathematics (surely trigonometry and elementary algebra were at one time active fields of research). Perhaps there's a good historical work that does that for us. At Talk:List of important publications in mathematics, User:Lesnail mentioned Grattan-Guiness's Landmark Writings in Western Mathematics 1640-1940. Maybe that would be a good start. Ozob ( talk) 04:12, 5 April 2010 (UTC)
Hello. Lately I've creating a few new articles by translating articles from other language editions of Wikipedia (mostly German.) Does anyone know of a list of math articles that English Wikipedia don't have but other editions do? -- Taku ( talk) 22:31, 4 April 2010 (UTC)
I don't speak German (or French or any other) so I can't enrich other editions with English content. Anyway, apparently no one answered my question (we are typical mathematicians...), so I take it no. I will probably run a bot or something. (That's actually quite easy.) I'm concentrating on biographies since most of stuff in such articles are quite mandane (going to school X; got Ph.D in Y etc.) and thus machine translation works quite well. -- Taku ( talk) 11:48, 5 April 2010 (UTC)
Hi. Today I have created a new article in English; I'm italian and so my English isn't very good... if someone wants to improve my article, it is Finite difference coefficients. -- Superale85 ( talk 18:01, 5 April 2010 (UTC)
Thanks a lot, now it should be right... you can check if it's all right at this site: http://amath.colorado.edu/faculty/fornberg/Docs/MathComp_88_FD_formulas.pdf. -- Superale85 ( talk 10:01, 6 April 2010 (UTC)
Hi. I've turned the images in tables, and now it should be all right... I hope so! -- Superale85 ( talk 07:00, 7 April 2010 (UTC)
In Talk:Square root of 2#Hippasus of Metapontum and the square root of 2 somebody is arguing that Hipassus might have discovered the irrationality of the square root of 2 but didn't prove it. It seems to me they must be trying to apply some funny idea of proof. They have lots of books to quote which I don't have access to but some might be accessible from google, I haven't looked. I guess if they have cites they can stick something in but I wonder what weight there is for such stuff which I consider revisionism. Dmcq ( talk) 14:50, 6 April 2010 (UTC)
See Bearing-from-coordinates formula. Is this whole article just a triviality? Michael Hardy ( talk) 06:57, 7 April 2010 (UTC)
| ||||||||
An example of a book cover, taken from Book:Hadronic Matter |
As detailed in last week's Signpost, WildBot has been patrolling Wikipedia-Books and searched for various problems in them, such as books having duplicate articles or containing redirects. WikiProject Wikipedia-Books is in the process of cleaning them up, but help would be appreciated. For this project, the following books have problems:
The problem reports explain in details what exactly are the problems, why they are problems, and how to fix them. This way anyone can fix them even if they aren't familiar with books. If you don't see something that looks like this, then all problems have been fixed. (Please strike articles from this list as the problems get fixed.)
Also, the {{ saved book}} template has been updated to allow editors to specify the default covers of books (title, subtitle, cover-image, cover-color), and gives are preview of the default cover on the book's page. An example of such a cover is found on the right. Ideally, all books in Category:Book-Class mathematics pages should have covers.
If you need help with cleaning up a book, help with the {{ saved book}} template, or have any questions about books in general, see Help:Books, Wikipedia:Books, and Wikipedia:WikiProject Wikipedia-Books, or ask me on my talk page. Also feel free to join WikiProject Wikipedia-Books, as we need all the help we can get.
This message was delivered by User:EarwigBot, at 00:42, 8 April 2010 (UTC), on behalf of Headbomb. Headbomb probably isn't watching this page, so if you want him to reply here, just leave him a message on his talk page. EarwigBot ( owner • talk) 00:42, 8 April 2010 (UTC)
I've updated my list of missing mathematics topics - Skysmith ( talk) 13:29, 8 April 2010 (UTC)
Have we really had two days of no new mathematics articles or is a bot malfunctioning somewhere? — David Eppstein ( talk) 03:18, 9 April 2010 (UTC)
The difficulty is that there are two bots. The current activity page depends on the list of mathematics articles, and that list seems to have not been updated by MathBot since the 6th. Michael Hardy already asked Oleg about it, so hopefully it will be fixed soon. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 11:27, 9 April 2010 (UTC)
Comments would be welcome on the phrasing of the lede of Well-formed formula, at Talk:Well-formed_formula#Problems_with_the_lede. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 00:10, 10 April 2010 (UTC)
as in i^2 = -1 is it roman i or italic i —Preceding unsigned comment added by 170.170.59.138 ( talk) 17:37, 9 April 2010 (UTC)
According to WP:MOSMATH both italic i or (bold) roman i are acceptable. Also since the WP:MOSMATH recommends to use italic for variables, it might makes sense to use roman for (well known) constants to contrast them.-- Kmhkmh ( talk) 05:52, 11 April 2010 (UTC)
There's a caveat about using latex inline. It says,
Justin W Smith
talk/
stalk
05:55, 11 April 2010 (UTC)
WP:MOSMATH does "recommend" italic for i. It says,
Justin W Smith talk/ stalk 06:02, 11 April 2010 (UTC)
One of the most rapidly developing areas in Decimal. Tkuvho ( talk) 17:08, 11 April 2010 (UTC)
Why not just split it off to Traditional Chinese decimals, then ask WP:CHINA to handle it? 70.29.208.247 ( talk) 05:29, 14 April 2010 (UTC)
Codomain of a random variable: observation space (recently archived)
There are several unresolved issues, primarily pedagogical or presentational in my opinion. One is whether a random variable is real-valued, whether the codomain of a random variable is a subset of the real numbers. There is some value in consistency across articles, but that is not the only value. If the answer will be consistently yes (all random variables are real-valued) than we need a general term for those random whatchamacallem that aren't r.variables. -- P64 ( talk) 19:57, 11 April 2010 (UTC)
Here's the link above, formatted as an internal link:
Codomain of a random variable: observation space (recently archived)
Michael Hardy (
talk)
19:51, 12 April 2010 (UTC)
I just found this thread after spending hours clicking through Wikipedia's probability articles trying to find out exactly what an observation space is (after seeing the term in random variable), and (completely missing as far as I can tell) what an observation is (after seeing it elsewhere, that I can't seem to find again, but I mean the thing that is informally described as drawing a sample from a random variable). So I do think the topic is in a pretty murky state right now. Is it even a reasonable question, to ask for a formal and rigorous mathematical definition of "observation"? Maybe I will try to get a textbook. I notice my local bookstore has Renyi's "Foundations of Probability" which looks good--do ppl here recommend it? Thanks. 66.127.52.47 ( talk) 01:03, 14 April 2010 (UTC)
The article titled Urquhart graph begins like this:
But it should say this:
for some suitable value of ??????. Michael Hardy ( talk) 20:31, 14 April 2010 (UTC)
I'm skeptical that the subject of this article is sufficiently notable to include. I tried to search for the term, and aside from other work by the same authors found only a survey on proximity graphs by Godfried Toussaint that mentions these graphs briefly. My standards for whether a mathematical object is notable enough to have an article are pretty low, but they involve the object being studied by multiple independent groups of researchers. — David Eppstein ( talk) 23:04, 14 April 2010 (UTC)
It is my pleasure to announce a new subproject, WikiProject Mathematics/Typography (or WP:WPMATHTYPE for short)!
Lovers of math typography, or anyone who cares about how formulae are written or rendered, please:
To kick off, is HTML-rendered TeX (texhtml) too big for you?
Do the following all render about the same size for you? They don’t for me, and all four are commonly used.
If you, too, suffer from a too-big texhtml in your life, or just want to join the discussion, put in your 2¢/2c/2p/2¥ at texhtml is too big, and welcome!
Hello the Wiki-smarts ;-).
I know this is really not the place, but primary editor is insistent on removing {{Expert-subject|Mathematics}} from an article that only the WP:Mathematics members (Topology, perhaps?) have even half a chance of comprehending. I really don't want to escalate, so would appreciate if one of you could pop along and take a "third-party", educated beyond my abilities look :-)
The article is Augmental homology, and to make things really interesting editor has admitted wp:ORN on the Talk Page, but that doesn't mean that it isn't notable...(?)
Much appreciated, and apologies for placing request here. (It took a lot, trust me... I feel like I've stumbled into the 6th form room all over again, and expect to be hung upside down on the coat hooks again... just like all these years ago... <sigh>) -- Haruth ( talk) 11:30, 15 April 2010 (UTC)
I would like to see separate articles on the McLaughlin and Suzuki sporadic simple groups. Presently they are just treated under Conway groups. Also I would like to see an article on the Suzuki groups, which are not the same as the aforesaid group. Now there is just a disambiguation page entitled 'Suzuki group.' Scott Tillinghast, Houston TX ( talk) 19:45, 13 April 2010 (UTC)
You can comment at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Augmental_homology Tkuvho ( talk) 12:12, 16 April 2010 (UTC)
A little time ago I had a (non-mathematical) article assessed by WikiProject Germany.
As well as giving a current rating, their assessment template includes a 5-point check for how the article currently stands against the next rating up, and what would need to be fixed for promotion.
Is this something that might be worth adding into {{ maths rating}} ?
Reporting where the article stands against the systematic next-step assessment criteria is probably helpful for assuring ratings consistency.
Perhaps more significantly, in my case, being told how close my article was to getting a "B" actually got me to fix it, unlike any of the times when I have just got a "C" without further explanation.
Is this an idea that might be worth considering? Jheald ( talk) 18:55, 16 April 2010 (UTC)
I completely agree with Jheald: it would be very, very helpful from the points of view of consistency and calibration to have specific criteria in a form of a checklist next to the quality rating. Rating math articles is a very ad hoc and subjective process. I have rated many articles myself (field, importance, class) and looked at other people's ratings and, even if there had been an implicit agreement on what the criteria should have been, it was not systematically applied, at least for articles below B plus level. I think that part of the reason is that careful evaluation is time consuming, while we had several "drives" to rate the articles, where the average time spent on a single article was under a minute! Also, people who are willing to invest time in this fairly thankless task are not necessarily experts in the subjects of the articles they rate and they frequently don't leave comments for improvement on the "Comments" subpage (or even sign their rating). That is actually a strong argument in favor of clearly displaying the criteria according to which the rating was assigned. On the other hand, let us not overestimate the role of the ratings: they provide an internal mechanism for improving the mathematics coverage, but do they have the desired effect? Also, what happened to the much discussed idea of updating the fields? Arcfrk ( talk) 01:15, 18 April 2010 (UTC)
Can I encourage people to look at an example of WikiProject Germany's template in action? See eg Talk:David Hilbert, click 'show' to expand the WP:Germany project template, and then click 'show' again (next to 'B') to show the criteria breakdown.
We're not talking about a time-consuming extensive comment system, just a simple and quick pass/fail/not checked rating -- but one which makes so much clearer just why the article is not currently getting a B from WP:Germany. Jheald ( talk) 19:33, 18 April 2010 (UTC)
Nemmers Prize in Mathematics says that Terence Tao has the 2010 award. The official page at Northwestern is not updated, may not be this weekend. One blog says this is true; do we have any more? Shouldn't go into the Tao article as a rumour. Charles Matthews ( talk) 10:40, 17 April 2010 (UTC)
Hello! I just wanted to comment that another "thing to do" that could be added to the table is "Add references for mathematical facts". This is particularly easy to do for those who study mathematics: since the classes usually have some text book which the students should read, the students can add from time to time a reference in the articles about the subjects they are reading. This is somewhat easier than to choose a Wikipedia article first and then search for references for the facts in it... (you don't need to change of book =), just of article...).
I've been doing this for a while... ;)
It is just an idea... Helder ( talk) 19:20, 17 April 2010 (UTC)
For Shilov, Russian Mathematical Surveys (in English translation) probably has a long obituary - and it is online (subscription site). Someone whose library subscribes might find this easier than I do (there is basic biographical data in the Russian Wikipedia, but no new web references). Charles Matthews ( talk) 14:52, 19 April 2010 (UTC)
Please come participate in the move discussion at Talk:Seki Kōwa#Move discussion. Thanks! ··· 日本穣 ? · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe 18:03, 19 April 2010 (UTC)
Per the consensus mentioned above, I added a draft of criteria for C rating to the Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Wikipedia 1.0. In the process I tweaked the B rating criteria to make some room by raising the bar a bit. I think this is reasonable because if you look at the Wikipedia 1.0 B criteria, which is used by nearly every other project, their B rating is very close to our B+ rating. I'll allow some time for comments/revisions and then remove the "(draft)" from the criteria. It seems to be that the next step is to update the {{ maths rating}} template so it sorts the C rated articles into Category:C-Class mathematics articles. — Preceding unsigned comment added by RDBury ( talk • contribs) 08:37, 23 March 2010
I recently came across the list of zero terms (it figures prominently in Category Zero), which to me does not seem to have any use. Without stating its topic, it is a random list of mathematical terms containing "zero". For instance zero divisor is in but nilpotent is out; there is also zerosumfree monoid. I think an article about mathematical "nothingness" in general could be in place (which might even discuss why it should not be left to individual taste whether 0∈N, or whether 00 is defined ;-), but this is not it. I've proposed it for deletion for this reason, but the {{prod}} was anonymously removed, saying that is was a good topic for a list. Being united by choice of terminology only, I find it rather silly, even in comparison to most other articles in the Category Mathematics-related lists. Any ideas? Marc van Leeuwen ( talk) 14:13, 19 April 2010 (UTC)
Should the nearly orphaned discrete Fourier series get merged into discrete Fourier transform? Michael Hardy ( talk) 13:42, 20 April 2010 (UTC)
We have been accustomed to seeing a list of new math-categorized Wikipedia articles every day on this WikiProject's current activities page. That stopped functioning six days ago. Oleg can't fix it because he uses an "external module" to log in to Wikipedia, and it's broken. Whoever maintains it probably doesn't suspect it affects this WikiProject. This situation will persist until it's fixed, and "until it's fixed" is apparently all the information we will ever get about when that will be, until it's fixed.
Should we seek to establish a system that doesn't depend for its existence on someone whose identity we don't know and who doesn't know that we exist? Michael Hardy ( talk) 19:49, 12 April 2010 (UTC)
I'm told it's been fixed. We'll see what happens when it's time for the next daily update. Michael Hardy ( talk) 17:34, 13 April 2010 (UTC)
We're getting new articles, but I'm not entirely convinced that we're seeing all of them. Where are all the mathematical biographies we used to get? For instance, I created a new article Paul Finsler a couple of days ago — why is the bot not picking it up? — David Eppstein ( talk) 02:07, 21 April 2010 (UTC)
Today's "new articles" section on the current activities page, which is now less than one hour old, is much longer than usual, and nearly all of the new items are about individual mathematicians. Michael Hardy ( talk) 02:20, 23 April 2010 (UTC)
Can someone please have a look at recent changes this article, in particular this change. It seems to be unsupported by the source, and a synthesis based on at best unclear reasoning on the talk page.-- JohnBlackburne words deeds 11:36, 23 April 2010 (UTC)
John, I don't know why you are doing this, because you were the one who argued so strongly for the fact that the relationship in question holds in seven dimensions. You convinced me with numbers, where I was having great difficulty trying to convince myself with algebraic manipulations involving 252 terms. We are all agreed now that the Lagrange identity is a defining property of the 7D-cross product. Hence your revert over at cross product is not in line with your arguments at seven dimensional cross product. The cross product article requires the correction as I have just explained on the cross product talk page. It was a very weak argument on your part to claim that the article is only about the 3D cross product and that we should therefore keep the fact that the relationship also holds in 7D as a secret. Even if it had been only about the 3D cross product, we would still have been obliged to clarify that the Lagrange identity in relation to cross products holds in both 3 and 7 dimensions. If we allow it to only mention the case of 3D, then that will mislead readers, such as myself, into thinking that it only holds in 3D. It was the misleading information in that article and also at Lagrange's identity which caused me to believe that it only held in 3D, and hence caused all the unnecessary trouble over at the seven dimensional cross product page. We need consistency throughout all the related articles. David Tombe ( talk) 15:34, 23 April 2010 (UTC)
Please comment at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Future of mathematics. Thankyou. Bethnim ( talk) 07:31, 25 April 2010 (UTC)
I notice that on Lagrange's identity, someone recently replaced all of the {{ NumBlk}} templates with ad hoc formatting because the NumBlk template appears to introduce additional spaces. Here is what I am referring to
|
|
(1) |
Notice the unusually large gap between the formula and the surrounding text. The code for the above is: {{NumBlk|:|<math>\int x\,dx = \frac{x^2}{2} +C</math>|{{EquationRef|1}}}}
. Apart from this issue, however, I think the template looks better than the ad hoc version. Is there anyone here knowledgable about tables that could have a look at that template and try to fix it? This issue affects a number of mathematics articles.
Sławomir Biały (
talk)
23:12, 23 April 2010 (UTC)
I've found out where the extra line spacing was coming from, and how to fix it: the {{ Repeat}} in the {{ NumBlk}} is adding non-breakable spaces immediately after the <dl> and <dd> tags, which do the indentation. This User:JohnBlackburne/thinBlk seems to fix it, e.g.
(2) |
The limitation is the version of repeat I've used only goes up to 20, so no more than 20 levels of indentation, but I don't think that's too much of a limitation. It looks OK to me in Safari 4 with the vector skin, does it look OK to everyone else?-- JohnBlackburne words deeds 17:12, 24 April 2010 (UTC)
OK, I've done the bold thing and replaced {{ NumBlk}} with my version. Whether it's better or not it seems it is what's intended, and it can't be left working differently on different browsers. Now it should have changed on all pages using this template, so now's the time to check pages that use it for problems or if there's anything else that should be done while we're looking at it.-- JohnBlackburne words deeds 19:37, 24 April 2010 (UTC)
In my ignorance, I've never heard of this supposedly distinguished mathematician. The bio is unreferenced (except for publications, of course). I stumbled on the article by searching for occurrences of Acta Informatica in Wikipedia. (Off topic: This isn't the greatest CS journal nowadays; some would say only obscure stuff gets published in it. I was surprised to find that many occurrences, so I clicked on a few. Most citations are from the 70's and a few from the '80s. There was even one Gödel prize paper among them.) Pcap ping 06:24, 25 April 2010 (UTC)
Can some people have a look at that page? I've tried to clean it up according to the standards of Wikipedia, but that didn't go well with a recent contributor. Arcfrk ( talk) 17:28, 26 April 2010 (UTC)
Is there a new Wikipedia policy of blanket reversions of old contributions by banned users? I am concerned about this and several related reversions. I wasn't able to find out the reasons for the ban in the first place, it seems to be a unilateral lifetime ban with no prior warnings. Arcfrk ( talk) 19:59, 27 April 2010 (UTC)
The infobox-style Template:Divisor classes has become too long for a column list. I propose replacing it with Template:Divisor classes navbox. This has identical content but uses the navbox layout instead of the infobox style, and so would appear at the bottom of articles instead of down the right hand side. See Primitive abundant number for an example of how it appears in an article. I am happy to do all the necessary page edits myself, but just wanted to check here first in case anyone has any objections or suggestions for improving the navbox template. Gandalf61 ( talk) 11:25, 24 April 2010 (UTC)
I've re-organised the navbox and added a few more article links. I will roll it out across relevant articles tomorrow unless there are major objections. Gandalf61 ( talk) 16:08, 25 April 2010 (UTC)
What do we think of the new article titled Orthogonal analysis? Does it fit within the topic of some existing article and if so, should it get merged? It certainly barely hints at the variety of applications of the idea. Michael Hardy ( talk) 05:46, 25 April 2010 (UTC)
There are several bots that update pages for WPMATH.
Bot | Maintainer | Jobs |
---|---|---|
Mathbot | Oleg Alexandrov | Updates list of mathematics articles and list of mathematicians |
Jitse's bot | Jitse Niesen | Updates the current activity page and the list of articles needing attention |
VeblenBot | CBM | Updates the article assessment tables on WP:WPMATH and elsewhere |
Many editors here rely on these bots, so that even a short outage is widely noticed.
Oleg Alexandrov, Jitse Niesen, and I are discussing moving these bots to the m:toolserver as a "multi maintainer project". The motivation is to put these bots into a location where it would be easy to add additional maintainers if the existing maintainers are unable to continue for any reason. This is just a logistical rearrangement, and should not cause any change in the behavior of the bots. If you are interested in following or contributing to the discussion about the hosting, it is located in the "JIRA" issue tracking system for toolserver, here. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 14:11, 28 April 2010 (UTC)
It would be helpful to have some independent views at Talk:Semigroup#Section_on_group_of_fractions on the validity and relevance of some material on the group of fractions of a semigroup. Thanks. Quotient group ( talk) 20:40, 29 March 2010 (UTC)
File:Helicatenoid.gif, with some small modifications, was promoted to Featured Picture. There aren't any current nominations for math, though there is a statistics one that is active.-- RDBury ( talk) 22:29, 29 March 2010 (UTC)
The new article titled Beppo-Levi space could use some work. In particular, it's a near-orphan; probably some other articles should link to it. Michael Hardy ( talk) 03:15, 30 March 2010 (UTC)
Does our project have any preference on whether the Laplacian should be written as Δ or ∇2? I have noticed a trend in the past few months to replacing Δ with ∇2 in many articles, and I can't say that I approve. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 17:22, 28 March 2010 (UTC)
It would be helpful to have some independent views at Talk:Semigroup#Section_on_group_of_fractions on the validity and relevance of some material on the group of fractions of a semigroup. Thanks. Quotient group ( talk) 20:40, 29 March 2010 (UTC)
File:Helicatenoid.gif, with some small modifications, was promoted to Featured Picture. There aren't any current nominations for math, though there is a statistics one that is active.-- RDBury ( talk) 22:29, 29 March 2010 (UTC)
The new article titled Beppo-Levi space could use some work. In particular, it's a near-orphan; probably some other articles should link to it. Michael Hardy ( talk) 03:15, 30 March 2010 (UTC)
User:Notorious4life has recently bulk-tagged almost every number article from 2 (number) to 200 (number) with {{template:examplefarm}}, which says "This article may contain excessive, poor or irrelevant examples. " and adds the articles to Category:Articles with too many examples. I have invited the editor to come here to discuss their concerns about these articles. Gandalf61 ( talk) 11:19, 30 March 2010 (UTC)
What is this world coming to? I reverted this edit. Has anyone seen this happen before? Should we put in commented-out warnings in the hundreds of articles that use this locution? Michael Hardy ( talk) 00:49, 31 March 2010 (UTC)
I updated the rating criteria so that the C rating is official. I also updated the maths rating tag so Category:C-Class mathematics articles will populate itself. VeblenBot still needs to be updated but Carl said that won't be hard.
I think issues to consider for the future are the eventual fate of the B-Plus rating, and more generally whether we should maintain separate criteria for WPM ratings. As far as I know this is the only project (other than Statistics which uses ours) that uses it's own rating criteria; the others just link to Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Assessment. My thinking is that if we are to have are own rating criteria then it should be because there is a consensus here that ours are better, as least for math articles. The current WP 1.0 criteria are (imo) confusing and inconsistent, so coming up with better criteria should be possible, but achieving consensus may prove problematic.-- RDBury ( talk) 10:26, 31 March 2010 (UTC)
Part of Wikipedia:Manual of Style (mathematics) tells us to only write fractions in styles like 1/2 and in mathematics articles. But there was an attempt to change it today to explicitly condone 1⁄2 style as well, a style that EmilJ and I have been fighting in some recent changes on Riemann hypothesis. See ongoing discussion at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (mathematics)#Fractions. — David Eppstein ( talk) 22:29, 31 March 2010 (UTC)
Why do we have a Category:Discrete mathematics ? Surely this is just as absurd as having a Category:Continuous mathematics containing things like euclidean geometry, sine function, real numbers, Set theory, manifold, Continuous symmetry. And information theory which is currently in the discrete mathematics category could just as easily be in a continuous category. I propose deleting this category. Bethnim ( talk) 12:11, 23 March 2010 (UTC)
Our articles on the physicist John Baez and the singer Joan Baez link to each other, each mentioning that they are cousins.
Bernard Osgood Koopman's mother was a cousin of William Fogg Osgood; both were mathematicians. Should they similarly mention and link to each other? Michael Hardy ( talk) 21:47, 1 April 2010 (UTC)
I thought I'd seen it in one of the articles linked to externally. But now I can't find it. But I will eventually, unless someone beats me to it. Michael Hardy ( talk) 03:06, 3 April 2010 (UTC)
Guys, what's your favourite application/occurrence of logarithms? I'm just working on that article, which does have a few ones, but the more I read on the more crazy things I find, so I thought I should ask for broader input. Jakob.scholbach ( talk) 18:20, 25 March 2010 (UTC)
A few of my favorites:
— David Eppstein ( talk) 00:36, 26 March 2010 (UTC)
Just to add my exp(log 2)¢, to me the slide rule (already mentioned and depicted) and continuous compounding came to mind, although in both cases one could argue they are as much about the exponential function as about the logarithm. Marc van Leeuwen ( talk) 09:03, 4 April 2010 (UTC)
This is the current Navbox:
Updated 16:44, 2 April 2010 (UTC)
Today I propose the following navbox to replace the present one (whose organizational principle escapes me). It has only two lines --- the first for the general public and the second for those with special interests in mathematics. Your comments are welcome. Thanks! Kiefer.Wolfowitz ( talk) 18:56, 1 April 2010 (UTC)
I think both "Navboxes" are fairly useless. I'd prefer that neither one be in the article. Paul August ☎ 19:30, 1 April 2010 (UTC)
I prefer not to split them into advanced/elementary. Doing so requires a certain degree of judgment, so if we do it here people will just keep popping up to complain that we made the wrong choice. Moreover, splitting the topics into elementary and advanced overemphasizes the difference between them. It can be read either as "that basic stuff isn't really math" or "that advanced stuff is too hard, stick with the easier stuff", both of which are unfortunately too common as attitudes. Keeping all the areas together emphasizes the unity more, which I like. So those are two reasons to keep everything in a single list. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 20:03, 1 April 2010 (UTC)
I have finally thought of a use for these navboxes, so I feel I'm now in a position to comment on them. It seems to me that these navboxes would go fairly well on articles about major fields of mathematics: Algebra, analysis, geometry, etc. Those articles might also contain navboxes about their specific areas (e.g., algebra might have elementary algebra, linear algebra, abstract algebra, etc.) but the point of this navbox is that it's for someone who wants a taste of all the mathematics that's out there—for instance, the bright 14-year old who knows he or she likes math but has no experience and no assistance. In the past, such kids might have been lucky enough to stumble upon World of Mathematics or perhaps Mathematics: Its content, meaning and methods; ideally the navbox would guide such kids just as the tables of contents of those books guided their readers.
With that in mind, I think that neither the MSC nor the IMU listing is well-suited to the task. They are both classifications of research mathematics. They don't include trigonometry or elementary algebra or axiomatic Euclidean geometry; nobody does research in these anymore. The Princeton Companion to Mathematics's list of branches of mathematics (in Part IV) is, I think, somewhat bizarre and even less suited to our task. I think a good solution might be to take all the fields in the IMU listing and put them together with a list of historical research fields of mathematics (surely trigonometry and elementary algebra were at one time active fields of research). Perhaps there's a good historical work that does that for us. At Talk:List of important publications in mathematics, User:Lesnail mentioned Grattan-Guiness's Landmark Writings in Western Mathematics 1640-1940. Maybe that would be a good start. Ozob ( talk) 04:12, 5 April 2010 (UTC)
Hello. Lately I've creating a few new articles by translating articles from other language editions of Wikipedia (mostly German.) Does anyone know of a list of math articles that English Wikipedia don't have but other editions do? -- Taku ( talk) 22:31, 4 April 2010 (UTC)
I don't speak German (or French or any other) so I can't enrich other editions with English content. Anyway, apparently no one answered my question (we are typical mathematicians...), so I take it no. I will probably run a bot or something. (That's actually quite easy.) I'm concentrating on biographies since most of stuff in such articles are quite mandane (going to school X; got Ph.D in Y etc.) and thus machine translation works quite well. -- Taku ( talk) 11:48, 5 April 2010 (UTC)
Hi. Today I have created a new article in English; I'm italian and so my English isn't very good... if someone wants to improve my article, it is Finite difference coefficients. -- Superale85 ( talk 18:01, 5 April 2010 (UTC)
Thanks a lot, now it should be right... you can check if it's all right at this site: http://amath.colorado.edu/faculty/fornberg/Docs/MathComp_88_FD_formulas.pdf. -- Superale85 ( talk 10:01, 6 April 2010 (UTC)
Hi. I've turned the images in tables, and now it should be all right... I hope so! -- Superale85 ( talk 07:00, 7 April 2010 (UTC)
In Talk:Square root of 2#Hippasus of Metapontum and the square root of 2 somebody is arguing that Hipassus might have discovered the irrationality of the square root of 2 but didn't prove it. It seems to me they must be trying to apply some funny idea of proof. They have lots of books to quote which I don't have access to but some might be accessible from google, I haven't looked. I guess if they have cites they can stick something in but I wonder what weight there is for such stuff which I consider revisionism. Dmcq ( talk) 14:50, 6 April 2010 (UTC)
See Bearing-from-coordinates formula. Is this whole article just a triviality? Michael Hardy ( talk) 06:57, 7 April 2010 (UTC)
| ||||||||
An example of a book cover, taken from Book:Hadronic Matter |
As detailed in last week's Signpost, WildBot has been patrolling Wikipedia-Books and searched for various problems in them, such as books having duplicate articles or containing redirects. WikiProject Wikipedia-Books is in the process of cleaning them up, but help would be appreciated. For this project, the following books have problems:
The problem reports explain in details what exactly are the problems, why they are problems, and how to fix them. This way anyone can fix them even if they aren't familiar with books. If you don't see something that looks like this, then all problems have been fixed. (Please strike articles from this list as the problems get fixed.)
Also, the {{ saved book}} template has been updated to allow editors to specify the default covers of books (title, subtitle, cover-image, cover-color), and gives are preview of the default cover on the book's page. An example of such a cover is found on the right. Ideally, all books in Category:Book-Class mathematics pages should have covers.
If you need help with cleaning up a book, help with the {{ saved book}} template, or have any questions about books in general, see Help:Books, Wikipedia:Books, and Wikipedia:WikiProject Wikipedia-Books, or ask me on my talk page. Also feel free to join WikiProject Wikipedia-Books, as we need all the help we can get.
This message was delivered by User:EarwigBot, at 00:42, 8 April 2010 (UTC), on behalf of Headbomb. Headbomb probably isn't watching this page, so if you want him to reply here, just leave him a message on his talk page. EarwigBot ( owner • talk) 00:42, 8 April 2010 (UTC)
I've updated my list of missing mathematics topics - Skysmith ( talk) 13:29, 8 April 2010 (UTC)
Have we really had two days of no new mathematics articles or is a bot malfunctioning somewhere? — David Eppstein ( talk) 03:18, 9 April 2010 (UTC)
The difficulty is that there are two bots. The current activity page depends on the list of mathematics articles, and that list seems to have not been updated by MathBot since the 6th. Michael Hardy already asked Oleg about it, so hopefully it will be fixed soon. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 11:27, 9 April 2010 (UTC)
Comments would be welcome on the phrasing of the lede of Well-formed formula, at Talk:Well-formed_formula#Problems_with_the_lede. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 00:10, 10 April 2010 (UTC)
as in i^2 = -1 is it roman i or italic i —Preceding unsigned comment added by 170.170.59.138 ( talk) 17:37, 9 April 2010 (UTC)
According to WP:MOSMATH both italic i or (bold) roman i are acceptable. Also since the WP:MOSMATH recommends to use italic for variables, it might makes sense to use roman for (well known) constants to contrast them.-- Kmhkmh ( talk) 05:52, 11 April 2010 (UTC)
There's a caveat about using latex inline. It says,
Justin W Smith
talk/
stalk
05:55, 11 April 2010 (UTC)
WP:MOSMATH does "recommend" italic for i. It says,
Justin W Smith talk/ stalk 06:02, 11 April 2010 (UTC)
One of the most rapidly developing areas in Decimal. Tkuvho ( talk) 17:08, 11 April 2010 (UTC)
Why not just split it off to Traditional Chinese decimals, then ask WP:CHINA to handle it? 70.29.208.247 ( talk) 05:29, 14 April 2010 (UTC)
Codomain of a random variable: observation space (recently archived)
There are several unresolved issues, primarily pedagogical or presentational in my opinion. One is whether a random variable is real-valued, whether the codomain of a random variable is a subset of the real numbers. There is some value in consistency across articles, but that is not the only value. If the answer will be consistently yes (all random variables are real-valued) than we need a general term for those random whatchamacallem that aren't r.variables. -- P64 ( talk) 19:57, 11 April 2010 (UTC)
Here's the link above, formatted as an internal link:
Codomain of a random variable: observation space (recently archived)
Michael Hardy (
talk)
19:51, 12 April 2010 (UTC)
I just found this thread after spending hours clicking through Wikipedia's probability articles trying to find out exactly what an observation space is (after seeing the term in random variable), and (completely missing as far as I can tell) what an observation is (after seeing it elsewhere, that I can't seem to find again, but I mean the thing that is informally described as drawing a sample from a random variable). So I do think the topic is in a pretty murky state right now. Is it even a reasonable question, to ask for a formal and rigorous mathematical definition of "observation"? Maybe I will try to get a textbook. I notice my local bookstore has Renyi's "Foundations of Probability" which looks good--do ppl here recommend it? Thanks. 66.127.52.47 ( talk) 01:03, 14 April 2010 (UTC)
The article titled Urquhart graph begins like this:
But it should say this:
for some suitable value of ??????. Michael Hardy ( talk) 20:31, 14 April 2010 (UTC)
I'm skeptical that the subject of this article is sufficiently notable to include. I tried to search for the term, and aside from other work by the same authors found only a survey on proximity graphs by Godfried Toussaint that mentions these graphs briefly. My standards for whether a mathematical object is notable enough to have an article are pretty low, but they involve the object being studied by multiple independent groups of researchers. — David Eppstein ( talk) 23:04, 14 April 2010 (UTC)
It is my pleasure to announce a new subproject, WikiProject Mathematics/Typography (or WP:WPMATHTYPE for short)!
Lovers of math typography, or anyone who cares about how formulae are written or rendered, please:
To kick off, is HTML-rendered TeX (texhtml) too big for you?
Do the following all render about the same size for you? They don’t for me, and all four are commonly used.
If you, too, suffer from a too-big texhtml in your life, or just want to join the discussion, put in your 2¢/2c/2p/2¥ at texhtml is too big, and welcome!
Hello the Wiki-smarts ;-).
I know this is really not the place, but primary editor is insistent on removing {{Expert-subject|Mathematics}} from an article that only the WP:Mathematics members (Topology, perhaps?) have even half a chance of comprehending. I really don't want to escalate, so would appreciate if one of you could pop along and take a "third-party", educated beyond my abilities look :-)
The article is Augmental homology, and to make things really interesting editor has admitted wp:ORN on the Talk Page, but that doesn't mean that it isn't notable...(?)
Much appreciated, and apologies for placing request here. (It took a lot, trust me... I feel like I've stumbled into the 6th form room all over again, and expect to be hung upside down on the coat hooks again... just like all these years ago... <sigh>) -- Haruth ( talk) 11:30, 15 April 2010 (UTC)
I would like to see separate articles on the McLaughlin and Suzuki sporadic simple groups. Presently they are just treated under Conway groups. Also I would like to see an article on the Suzuki groups, which are not the same as the aforesaid group. Now there is just a disambiguation page entitled 'Suzuki group.' Scott Tillinghast, Houston TX ( talk) 19:45, 13 April 2010 (UTC)
You can comment at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Augmental_homology Tkuvho ( talk) 12:12, 16 April 2010 (UTC)
A little time ago I had a (non-mathematical) article assessed by WikiProject Germany.
As well as giving a current rating, their assessment template includes a 5-point check for how the article currently stands against the next rating up, and what would need to be fixed for promotion.
Is this something that might be worth adding into {{ maths rating}} ?
Reporting where the article stands against the systematic next-step assessment criteria is probably helpful for assuring ratings consistency.
Perhaps more significantly, in my case, being told how close my article was to getting a "B" actually got me to fix it, unlike any of the times when I have just got a "C" without further explanation.
Is this an idea that might be worth considering? Jheald ( talk) 18:55, 16 April 2010 (UTC)
I completely agree with Jheald: it would be very, very helpful from the points of view of consistency and calibration to have specific criteria in a form of a checklist next to the quality rating. Rating math articles is a very ad hoc and subjective process. I have rated many articles myself (field, importance, class) and looked at other people's ratings and, even if there had been an implicit agreement on what the criteria should have been, it was not systematically applied, at least for articles below B plus level. I think that part of the reason is that careful evaluation is time consuming, while we had several "drives" to rate the articles, where the average time spent on a single article was under a minute! Also, people who are willing to invest time in this fairly thankless task are not necessarily experts in the subjects of the articles they rate and they frequently don't leave comments for improvement on the "Comments" subpage (or even sign their rating). That is actually a strong argument in favor of clearly displaying the criteria according to which the rating was assigned. On the other hand, let us not overestimate the role of the ratings: they provide an internal mechanism for improving the mathematics coverage, but do they have the desired effect? Also, what happened to the much discussed idea of updating the fields? Arcfrk ( talk) 01:15, 18 April 2010 (UTC)
Can I encourage people to look at an example of WikiProject Germany's template in action? See eg Talk:David Hilbert, click 'show' to expand the WP:Germany project template, and then click 'show' again (next to 'B') to show the criteria breakdown.
We're not talking about a time-consuming extensive comment system, just a simple and quick pass/fail/not checked rating -- but one which makes so much clearer just why the article is not currently getting a B from WP:Germany. Jheald ( talk) 19:33, 18 April 2010 (UTC)
Nemmers Prize in Mathematics says that Terence Tao has the 2010 award. The official page at Northwestern is not updated, may not be this weekend. One blog says this is true; do we have any more? Shouldn't go into the Tao article as a rumour. Charles Matthews ( talk) 10:40, 17 April 2010 (UTC)
Hello! I just wanted to comment that another "thing to do" that could be added to the table is "Add references for mathematical facts". This is particularly easy to do for those who study mathematics: since the classes usually have some text book which the students should read, the students can add from time to time a reference in the articles about the subjects they are reading. This is somewhat easier than to choose a Wikipedia article first and then search for references for the facts in it... (you don't need to change of book =), just of article...).
I've been doing this for a while... ;)
It is just an idea... Helder ( talk) 19:20, 17 April 2010 (UTC)
For Shilov, Russian Mathematical Surveys (in English translation) probably has a long obituary - and it is online (subscription site). Someone whose library subscribes might find this easier than I do (there is basic biographical data in the Russian Wikipedia, but no new web references). Charles Matthews ( talk) 14:52, 19 April 2010 (UTC)
Please come participate in the move discussion at Talk:Seki Kōwa#Move discussion. Thanks! ··· 日本穣 ? · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe 18:03, 19 April 2010 (UTC)
Per the consensus mentioned above, I added a draft of criteria for C rating to the Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Wikipedia 1.0. In the process I tweaked the B rating criteria to make some room by raising the bar a bit. I think this is reasonable because if you look at the Wikipedia 1.0 B criteria, which is used by nearly every other project, their B rating is very close to our B+ rating. I'll allow some time for comments/revisions and then remove the "(draft)" from the criteria. It seems to be that the next step is to update the {{ maths rating}} template so it sorts the C rated articles into Category:C-Class mathematics articles. — Preceding unsigned comment added by RDBury ( talk • contribs) 08:37, 23 March 2010
I recently came across the list of zero terms (it figures prominently in Category Zero), which to me does not seem to have any use. Without stating its topic, it is a random list of mathematical terms containing "zero". For instance zero divisor is in but nilpotent is out; there is also zerosumfree monoid. I think an article about mathematical "nothingness" in general could be in place (which might even discuss why it should not be left to individual taste whether 0∈N, or whether 00 is defined ;-), but this is not it. I've proposed it for deletion for this reason, but the {{prod}} was anonymously removed, saying that is was a good topic for a list. Being united by choice of terminology only, I find it rather silly, even in comparison to most other articles in the Category Mathematics-related lists. Any ideas? Marc van Leeuwen ( talk) 14:13, 19 April 2010 (UTC)
Should the nearly orphaned discrete Fourier series get merged into discrete Fourier transform? Michael Hardy ( talk) 13:42, 20 April 2010 (UTC)
We have been accustomed to seeing a list of new math-categorized Wikipedia articles every day on this WikiProject's current activities page. That stopped functioning six days ago. Oleg can't fix it because he uses an "external module" to log in to Wikipedia, and it's broken. Whoever maintains it probably doesn't suspect it affects this WikiProject. This situation will persist until it's fixed, and "until it's fixed" is apparently all the information we will ever get about when that will be, until it's fixed.
Should we seek to establish a system that doesn't depend for its existence on someone whose identity we don't know and who doesn't know that we exist? Michael Hardy ( talk) 19:49, 12 April 2010 (UTC)
I'm told it's been fixed. We'll see what happens when it's time for the next daily update. Michael Hardy ( talk) 17:34, 13 April 2010 (UTC)
We're getting new articles, but I'm not entirely convinced that we're seeing all of them. Where are all the mathematical biographies we used to get? For instance, I created a new article Paul Finsler a couple of days ago — why is the bot not picking it up? — David Eppstein ( talk) 02:07, 21 April 2010 (UTC)
Today's "new articles" section on the current activities page, which is now less than one hour old, is much longer than usual, and nearly all of the new items are about individual mathematicians. Michael Hardy ( talk) 02:20, 23 April 2010 (UTC)
Can someone please have a look at recent changes this article, in particular this change. It seems to be unsupported by the source, and a synthesis based on at best unclear reasoning on the talk page.-- JohnBlackburne words deeds 11:36, 23 April 2010 (UTC)
John, I don't know why you are doing this, because you were the one who argued so strongly for the fact that the relationship in question holds in seven dimensions. You convinced me with numbers, where I was having great difficulty trying to convince myself with algebraic manipulations involving 252 terms. We are all agreed now that the Lagrange identity is a defining property of the 7D-cross product. Hence your revert over at cross product is not in line with your arguments at seven dimensional cross product. The cross product article requires the correction as I have just explained on the cross product talk page. It was a very weak argument on your part to claim that the article is only about the 3D cross product and that we should therefore keep the fact that the relationship also holds in 7D as a secret. Even if it had been only about the 3D cross product, we would still have been obliged to clarify that the Lagrange identity in relation to cross products holds in both 3 and 7 dimensions. If we allow it to only mention the case of 3D, then that will mislead readers, such as myself, into thinking that it only holds in 3D. It was the misleading information in that article and also at Lagrange's identity which caused me to believe that it only held in 3D, and hence caused all the unnecessary trouble over at the seven dimensional cross product page. We need consistency throughout all the related articles. David Tombe ( talk) 15:34, 23 April 2010 (UTC)
Please comment at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Future of mathematics. Thankyou. Bethnim ( talk) 07:31, 25 April 2010 (UTC)
I notice that on Lagrange's identity, someone recently replaced all of the {{ NumBlk}} templates with ad hoc formatting because the NumBlk template appears to introduce additional spaces. Here is what I am referring to
|
|
(1) |
Notice the unusually large gap between the formula and the surrounding text. The code for the above is: {{NumBlk|:|<math>\int x\,dx = \frac{x^2}{2} +C</math>|{{EquationRef|1}}}}
. Apart from this issue, however, I think the template looks better than the ad hoc version. Is there anyone here knowledgable about tables that could have a look at that template and try to fix it? This issue affects a number of mathematics articles.
Sławomir Biały (
talk)
23:12, 23 April 2010 (UTC)
I've found out where the extra line spacing was coming from, and how to fix it: the {{ Repeat}} in the {{ NumBlk}} is adding non-breakable spaces immediately after the <dl> and <dd> tags, which do the indentation. This User:JohnBlackburne/thinBlk seems to fix it, e.g.
(2) |
The limitation is the version of repeat I've used only goes up to 20, so no more than 20 levels of indentation, but I don't think that's too much of a limitation. It looks OK to me in Safari 4 with the vector skin, does it look OK to everyone else?-- JohnBlackburne words deeds 17:12, 24 April 2010 (UTC)
OK, I've done the bold thing and replaced {{ NumBlk}} with my version. Whether it's better or not it seems it is what's intended, and it can't be left working differently on different browsers. Now it should have changed on all pages using this template, so now's the time to check pages that use it for problems or if there's anything else that should be done while we're looking at it.-- JohnBlackburne words deeds 19:37, 24 April 2010 (UTC)
In my ignorance, I've never heard of this supposedly distinguished mathematician. The bio is unreferenced (except for publications, of course). I stumbled on the article by searching for occurrences of Acta Informatica in Wikipedia. (Off topic: This isn't the greatest CS journal nowadays; some would say only obscure stuff gets published in it. I was surprised to find that many occurrences, so I clicked on a few. Most citations are from the 70's and a few from the '80s. There was even one Gödel prize paper among them.) Pcap ping 06:24, 25 April 2010 (UTC)
Can some people have a look at that page? I've tried to clean it up according to the standards of Wikipedia, but that didn't go well with a recent contributor. Arcfrk ( talk) 17:28, 26 April 2010 (UTC)
Is there a new Wikipedia policy of blanket reversions of old contributions by banned users? I am concerned about this and several related reversions. I wasn't able to find out the reasons for the ban in the first place, it seems to be a unilateral lifetime ban with no prior warnings. Arcfrk ( talk) 19:59, 27 April 2010 (UTC)
The infobox-style Template:Divisor classes has become too long for a column list. I propose replacing it with Template:Divisor classes navbox. This has identical content but uses the navbox layout instead of the infobox style, and so would appear at the bottom of articles instead of down the right hand side. See Primitive abundant number for an example of how it appears in an article. I am happy to do all the necessary page edits myself, but just wanted to check here first in case anyone has any objections or suggestions for improving the navbox template. Gandalf61 ( talk) 11:25, 24 April 2010 (UTC)
I've re-organised the navbox and added a few more article links. I will roll it out across relevant articles tomorrow unless there are major objections. Gandalf61 ( talk) 16:08, 25 April 2010 (UTC)
What do we think of the new article titled Orthogonal analysis? Does it fit within the topic of some existing article and if so, should it get merged? It certainly barely hints at the variety of applications of the idea. Michael Hardy ( talk) 05:46, 25 April 2010 (UTC)
There are several bots that update pages for WPMATH.
Bot | Maintainer | Jobs |
---|---|---|
Mathbot | Oleg Alexandrov | Updates list of mathematics articles and list of mathematicians |
Jitse's bot | Jitse Niesen | Updates the current activity page and the list of articles needing attention |
VeblenBot | CBM | Updates the article assessment tables on WP:WPMATH and elsewhere |
Many editors here rely on these bots, so that even a short outage is widely noticed.
Oleg Alexandrov, Jitse Niesen, and I are discussing moving these bots to the m:toolserver as a "multi maintainer project". The motivation is to put these bots into a location where it would be easy to add additional maintainers if the existing maintainers are unable to continue for any reason. This is just a logistical rearrangement, and should not cause any change in the behavior of the bots. If you are interested in following or contributing to the discussion about the hosting, it is located in the "JIRA" issue tracking system for toolserver, here. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 14:11, 28 April 2010 (UTC)