Rychlik ( talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log), no doubt an otherwise well-intentioned editor, does appear to be adding material that is unduly self-promotional. He has already been warned of a potential COI, but perhaps further action is needed? Specifically of concern are the articles Marek Rychlik, Rychlik's theorem, and Chordal problem, all of which appear to assign undue significance to the editor's own research. I thought I should post here to solicit input on the best way to handle this constellation of articles. One possibility that seems reasonable to me is to delete Marek Rychlik and Rychlik's theorem, possibly merging some content from Rychlik's theorem to Chordal problem. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 14:47, 28 November 2010 (UTC)
Situation does look manageable. Would anyone inclined to intervene please note the key distinction: "potential COI" may be a hypothesis or it may be something that can be confirmed. But WP:COI relates fundamentally only to putting the encyclopedia's interests second, rather than first. Something like the discussion of whether equichordal point problem is a better title can actually be carried out compatibly with AGF. Charles Matthews ( talk) 13:26, 29 November 2010 (UTC)
I am not convinced that redirecting Marek Rychlik to Rychlik's theorem was a good solution. We do have notability guidelines, and in this regard Marek Rychlik clearly fulfilled the criteria. Sure, the article was poor, but if anything I'd expected Rychlik's theorem to be renamed to equichordal point problem. Nageh ( talk) 20:05, 6 December 2010 (UTC)
The other problem is that equichordal point problem is now a redirect to Rychlik's theorem. As I pointed out previously, I can find only a single source on Google that refers to this problem by "Rychlik's theorem". If anything, Rychlik's theorem should be redirected to the equichordal point problem article. Nageh ( talk) 12:38, 9 December 2010 (UTC)
I just found a paper on ZBMATH database (Wojtkowski, M.P., Two applications of Jacobi fields to the billiard ball problem, J. Differ. Geom. 40, No.1, 155-164 (1994)) which mentions Bialy's theorem and also Rychlik's theorem in the abstract. Now, two major questions arise: 1) is the user Sławomir Biały related to Rychlik in any way, if yes, did the relationship induce this discussion? 2) Independent of the first question, is one mentioning by another polish mathematician a proof for notability? I highly doubt that. DrPhosphorus ( talk) 19:39, 18 December 2010 (UTC)
I have requested a renaming of Rychlik's theorem to equichordal point problem, followed by deletion of the article name Rychlik's theorem. Discussion here. Cheers, and a happy new year! Nageh ( talk) 10:32, 31 December 2010 (UTC)
I'd like to solicit input on the recent breakage of Template:Su in the Firefox 2.0 compatible browsers (there is a thread at Template talk:Su). I've just been told off that the ~20,000 current users of this line of browsers is not enough market share to consider fixing the template. The template is totally broken for users of this line of browsers (see the image on that discussion page for details), and a solution is very desirable. Potentially the template should be retired from use in favor of using <math> instead. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 16:07, 1 January 2011 (UTC):
Hi, I was hoping to get some expert help. Operator (disambiguation) currently has over 100 incoming links, and we're having a tough time figuring out how to fix them. I'm suspicious that the disambig is missing a mathematics article or two. Could someone take a look at the mathematics articles in this list and give their opinion? Thanks, -- JaGa talk 19:06, 3 January 2011 (UTC)
Why does this project not use a project banner to identify articles that are within its purview? I put the banner on a somewhat new article's talk page while I was putting a value in |listas=
and when I previewed the page I got the message that all the mathematics articles are in a List.
Lists have to be maintained manually. Categories populate themselves. The article I was attempting to tag is not on your list even though it has been around since October, 2010.
I am not doing drive-by tagging. I am working strictly by hand because of the low level of the quality of the sort values. I merely wanted call your attention to an article you seem to have ignored.
Happy editing! JimCubb ( talk) 01:16, 5 January 2011 (UTC)
There is a project banner on the talk pages of most math articles, I think.
Perhaps Movable singularity is what he's talking about. Michael Hardy ( talk) 02:05, 5 January 2011 (UTC)
Bezdek is the one I meant. I did not see him on the list and I apologize for missing him. The talk page of his article gives no indication that this project knows the article exists. JimCubb ( talk) 02:21, 5 January 2011 (UTC)
I've created a List of topics named after Karl Weierstrass.
Tasks:
So get busy and have fun with it. Michael Hardy ( talk) 01:55, 5 January 2011 (UTC)
Movable singularity has been prodded.
Do what you can with it. Michael Hardy ( talk) 02:05, 5 January 2011 (UTC)
The article Movable singularity has been proposed for deletion because of the following concern:
While all contributions to Wikipedia are appreciated, content or articles may be deleted for any of several reasons.
You may prevent the proposed deletion by removing the {{proposed deletion/dated}}
notice, but please explain why in your
edit summary or on
the article's talk page.
Please consider improving the article to address the issues raised. Removing {{proposed deletion/dated}}
will stop the
proposed deletion process, but other
deletion processes exist. The
speedy deletion process can result in deletion without discussion, and
articles for deletion allows discussion to reach
consensus for deletion.
JeepdaySock (AKA,
Jeepday)
17:50, 4 January 2011 (UTC)
I see from their edit histories that Jeepday and JimCubb have been prodding any article that they cannot find references for. I have started a discussion about this at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Unreferenced articles#Appropriateness of PRODding articles. Ozob ( talk) 11:57, 5 January 2011 (UTC)
WP:OWN Jeepday ( talk) 01:00, 6 January 2011 (UTC)
Should one of the math categories be added to the article titled Möbius resistor? Which one(s)?
(BTW, Oleg's mathbot has stopped adding new items every day to the list of mathematics articles. Jitse's bot still seems to be working, so it's Oleg's bot's fault we're not seeing anything new on the current activities page.) Michael Hardy ( talk) 07:51, 6 January 2011 (UTC)
IPs 70.51.177.249 ( talk · contribs) and 70.54.228.146 ( talk · contribs) have been adding material which appears to me to be hoaxes, using actual (but absurd) papers by Patrick St-Amant as references. JRSpriggs ( talk) 11:55, 5 January 2011 (UTC)
Has anyone heard of this impressively named publication? I can't find any article about it in WP, nor about its publisher, Hikari Ltd.
I ask mainly because a certain Pierre St Anant seems to have published in it, and the work is referenced in the hyperoperation article. A couple of Canadian IPs have been adding references to St Anant's ideas (largely sourced to arXiv publications) to various articles, including continuum hypothesis and fundamental theorem of arithmetic. My strong suspicion is that these are not appropriate for inclusion, but I have not read them carefully enough to be sure. -- Trovatore ( talk) 02:40, 6 January 2011 (UTC)
So no one's heard of the journal, then? --
Trovatore (
talk)
20:05, 6 January 2011 (UTC)
I can see that this group is motivated, and I would like to offer a couple of suggestions that may decrease the loss of articles to prod, no mater how you feel about them, you need take them into account.
Cheers JeepdaySock (AKA, Jeepday) 12:00, 6 January 2011 (UTC)
I've created a new article called Weierstrass substitution.
Tasks ahead:
So get busy. Have fun. Michael Hardy ( talk) 18:48, 7 January 2011 (UTC)
I just patrolled a new article Highest Weight Category and verified all that I could. I've confirmed the reference and updated it with a link to an online version, but this is far beyond my expertise. Could somebody familiar with representation theory review the article and confirm it is valid? Thanks. - Hydroxonium ( talk) 22:48, 7 January 2011 (UTC)
The article is still an orphan: no other articles link to it. Michael Hardy ( talk) 18:13, 8 January 2011 (UTC)
I'm not a mathematician, although I have a science background. I sometimes do proof-reading of some scientific Wikipedia articles, but mainly from the perspectives of English and readability rather than for technical content.
Various articles have brought me to a few pages such as " Bred vectors" and " Lyapunov vectors". It seems slightly strange that their titles use the plural form "vectors" rather than the singular "vector". By contrast, the title of (for instance) " Eigenvector", being in the singular form, seems much more natural.
Does the Mathematics wikiproject have a preferred convention on plural vs. singular in such titles? Shouldn't the title usually be singular unless there is good over-riding reason to use the plural?
(In all the above, my use of the word "singular" is in the English language "opposite of plural" sense, rather than any mathematical sense "singular vectors" sense!)
Would there be any objection to renaming, in particular, "Bred vectors" to "Bred vector" and "Lyapunov vectors" to "Lyapunov vector"?
Feline Hymnic ( talk) 01:01, 8 January 2011 (UTC)
Great. Many thanks. (As I typed my request, I was trying to think of an example from Maths where the plural would be the best; I was sure there would be some but they eluded me. So thanks, too, for jogging my mind with "Maxwell's equations".) Feline Hymnic ( talk) 09:38, 8 January 2011 (UTC)
The articles linked to in {{ irrational numbers}} differ in the number of decimal places they show in the lead. Euler–Mascheroni constant shows 50 digit after the decimal point, Apéry's constant shows 45, Square root of 2 shows 65, Square root of 3 and Square root of 5 show 60 each, Golden ratio shows 10, Plastic number shows 17, etc. Should they be made consistent? I'd propose a not-too-large number of digits, e.g. 30. What do you guys think? -- A. di M. ( talk) 13:45, 6 January 2011 (UTC)
There is some confusion at these logic pages concerning the meaning of the term "first-order logic". There is a narrow sense of the term and a larger sense of the term. Thus, the page second-order logic adheres to the narrow sense, so that we find that "First-order logic uses only variables that range over individuals (elements of the domain of discourse); second-order logic has these variables as well as additional variables that range over sets of individuals." Meanwhile, the page first-order logic currently works with the larger sense, and moreover there is a bit of a back-and-forth going on, to which I have unfortunately contributed before realizing what the problem was. Tkuvho ( talk) 12:36, 9 January 2011 (UTC)
The redirect Frenet-Serret frame → Frenet-Serret formulas was recently replaced with a new article that consists of content that is crudely copy-pasted from the articles Frenet-Serret formulas and differential geometry of curves. As far as I can tell, apart from the brief lead, no new content was added in the process (and all of the content still remains at Frenet-Serret formulas and differential geometry of curves). Should we have this separate article or should this content forking be reverted? It seems to me that the already existing article Frenet-Serret formulas is intended to cover both the formulas and the frame. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 14:16, 9 January 2011 (UTC)
If you have an opinion, please comment here: Talk:Operator#Requested move. Paul August ☎ 21:14, 9 January 2011 (UTC)
Today, someone removed a large number of items from List of scientific journals in mathematics. I undid that edit. More eyes on the article and opinions on the talk page would be nice. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 20:49, 11 January 2011 (UTC)
Mathbot doesn't seem to have added any new mathematics articles since January 2. I assume that the articles showing up lately in the current activity have been added manually somehow. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 15:01, 13 January 2011 (UTC)
I was able to run Mathbot myself, and it seems to have worked fine. For those who don't know, there is a "multi-maintainer project" named wpmath on the toolserver, which has the mathbot code. I am hoping to eventually get Jitse's bot there as well. The goal of this is to put us in a position that someone else can take over the code smoothly if the current maintainers leave. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 21:47, 13 January 2011 (UTC)
It seems that maybe some people involved in this project do not regularly look at Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Current activity and see the daily update on new articles. Because of the recent bot problems we have ten days of new articles simultaneously. Here are those new articles:
Happy editing! Michael Hardy ( talk) 03:37, 14 January 2011 (UTC)
Tricomplex number has been prodded. Is it worth keeping? Michael Hardy ( talk) 20:48, 14 January 2011 (UTC)
I've added some references to the article and a link from hypercomplex number saying " Tricomplex numbers - a 3d vector space over the reals, one of a family of systems of commutative hypercomplex numbers in n-dimensions over the reals.". Still not very notable, but neither are multicomplex numbers. 89.241.233.7 ( talk) 23:52, 15 January 2011 (UTC)
An anonymous editor at transfinite induction is under the remarkable impression that there is no successor step in transfinite induction. Please help out. -- Trovatore ( talk) 22:13, 14 January 2011 (UTC)
Is this reliable? A certain editor is adding "facts" sourced to it, and in cube root, what was attributed to it about the history of the cube root of two was totally wrong. I'm asking here, before going to WP:RSN, as I'd like to see what other mathematicians have to say about it. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 18:19, 15 January 2011 (UTC)
Please see Talk:Entailment#Duplication of content. - dcljr ( talk) 19:55, 15 January 2011 (UTC)
Editor User:NewtonEin (as well as some anon ips) has been inserting material on Lapierre-Roy vectors and the Lapierre-Roy Law (such as in recent edits to Riemann zeta function). These two articles and related edits seem to be non-notable and OR. I'd be tempted to prod them, but I've never actually done this so I don't really know what it means. The first article appears to be renaming the concept of "infinite-dimensional vectors" while the second appears to be elementary estimates on values of the zeta function. Could anyone look at this? RobHar ( talk) 03:18, 16 January 2011 (UTC)
Is this a common misconception? You can comment at Talk:List of common misconceptions#0.999.... Tkuvho ( talk) 03:41, 16 January 2011 (UTC)
I've created a new article titled Advances in Applied Mathematics. As it stands, it needs work. Michael Hardy ( talk) 20:35, 16 January 2011 (UTC)
After weeks of nothing there are now three nominations at once. Follow the links to see the discussions:
-- RDBury ( talk) 14:41, 17 January 2011 (UTC)
post away. perhaps some day i'll find a better place to gather such a list.
also, another idea might be sort of a prize for clear and accessible articles. Kevin Baas talk 02:51, 18 January 2011 (UTC)
Personally i've grown tired of this. there is way to much adversity to change making itself plainly obvious, despite what some people say. i just posted one suggestion here and see all the resistance that resulted. WhatAmIDoing was right: it's pointless; all it's good for is raising one's blood pressure. and i'm not really in to that sort of thing. it's sad, really (unfortunate), but what are you going to do? i can certainly find more productive uses for my time than dealing with this kind of blood-boiling resistance, utter lack of sympathy, or even listening, and worst of all condenscion, and getting nowhere. Kevin Baas talk 19:45, 19 January 2011 (UTC)
Tkuvho really gets credit for that link. I did copyedit the lede some. I think that the main questions that the lede needs to answer are the following, along with their answers from the lede of Riemannian geometry
It is not always feasible to give a full answer in the lede, in which case we should still try to say something non-trivial (and at least nearly correct). For example, here are the answers from Kleene's T predicate:
The answer to #1 there is intentionally vague, but it's still explanatory. Especially in longer article, the lede also serves as a summary of the main points of the article. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 14:01, 19 January 2011 (UTC)
Just to note that is at least one attack at WQA basically at all the editors here (by Gregbard). Dougweller ( talk) 12:51, 19 January 2011 (UTC)
Some encyclopedic editors are reverting my addition of a sentence in the lead at exterior algebra providing a link to more elementary pages that should be read first. Are they being too encyclopedic? Tkuvho ( talk) 19:50, 19 January 2011 (UTC)
...for that I go to wolfram mathematica or planetmath or essentially anywhere else.
and it seems this state has been getting progressively worse throughout the years. as if there are a number of people who are actively making it worse.
something really needs to be done about making the articles coherent and accessible. badly.
Kevin Baas talk 17:36, 17 January 2011 (UTC)
The truth is that enWP's mathematics coverage is the go-to reference for those seriously studying the subject, i.e. graduate students. This is clear from the attitude on the MathOverflow site: search WP first, then ask us. In other words the articles this project curates are doing the work of a mathematical encyclopedia. It may be that we should look at criticisms that we are not performing other functions; but I for one am not prepared to accept such criticisms from User:Kevin Baas, whom I don't consider a reliable witness. Charles Matthews ( talk) 19:27, 17 January 2011 (UTC)
[22]. Bully yourself. You have been making assertions about the treatment of mathematics here for seven years, and I have yet to see you do any actual work towards improving it; you have certainly scrambled up the tensor topics, but forgive me if I don't count that as a plus. Charles Matthews ( talk) 20:27, 17 January 2011 (UTC)
(ec)
Maybe we should start collecting these discussions, in a FAQ-type listing. It might be a much more efficient method of communicating this group's apparent disinterest in addressing this ongoing problem.
Someone complains that the math-related articles are needlessly opaque several times a year, and as far as I can tell, every single complaint gets blown off. Typically, the closest we come to a solution is someone inviting the complainants to magically know enough about the subjects to fix basic problems (e.g., the absence of a paragraph about "why anyone cares about this concept"). In my experience, identifying specific, concrete problems in specific, named sentences in individual, linked articles earns you exactly the same kind of dismissive response that vaguer complaints produce. I've personally seen a complaint about a basic grammar problem get dismissed, as if editors who work on math articles shouldn't have to use the level of English that one expects from a typical 12 year old.
So Kevin, let me assure you that far from the first person to complain about this problem, but unfortunately the people who appear to be primarily responsible for creating the problem are perfectly satisfied with the status quo, so complaining here will accomplish nothing except raising your blood pressure. WhatamIdoing ( talk) 22:05, 17 January 2011 (UTC)
@WhatamIdoing: I, for one, have on many occasions addressed issues raised by users concerning the accessibility of math articles. Typically, these occur on talk pages of the corresponding articles, in which case they are much easier to address. I'd venture to say that most accessibility issues raised on this discussion page are rather vague and hence much harder to address appropriately. It is true that it would difficult for the one person raising the issue to fix everything him/herself, but with a complaint like "almost all math articles on wiki are incoherent and inaccessible", it's not like the ~20 regulars who hang out in this forum can fix everything either. Other times I've disregarded a request to improve accessibility are along the lines of "I have a college degree in engineering, and even I don't understand what the article Class formation is saying", and while that article could be improved and made more accessible, knowing college level math is by no means sufficient to have any idea what that article is about.
As for the discussion at hand, the OP's original comment was certainly not the best way to approach this issue. In fact, the only phrase the people in this forum are likely to somewhat agree with is that accessibility needs to be improved. I, for one, am pretty sure most of our articles are "coherent", and I'm only on wikipedia because I find planetmath and mathworld mostly unhelpful. I'm also fairly certain our articles have not been getting worse. (You could argue that maybe the number of good ones as a percentage of the whole is going down, but only because there's an increasing amount of articles, so that's not a very good measure). Finally, while there are people making articles actively worse, they are presumably not the people from whom the OP is asking for help, so there's no need to leave a lingering potential insult lying around. So, as I said, there is at most one thing out of six that the OP said initially that participants here could identify with. That's not a good score if you're trying to get people to help you. RobHar ( talk) 22:39, 17 January 2011 (UTC)
I agree with the OP that the maths articles do let WP down. I've a maths-physics background, and the maths articles fall below the physics articles in clarity, IMO. Some are good, but a lot are really bad in that they don't communicate the concepts to all audiences. They look like they are written by PhDs for PhDs. A good article can communicate on many levels, explaining the concepts at an elementary level and more advanced levels. -- cheers, Michael C. Price talk 10:52, 18 January 2011 (UTC)
I can understand why people think it makes sense to compare physics and mathematics, but in reality it can only lead to false comparisons. The basic language of physics involves electrons, atoms, forces, time, energy, etc. In other words, (for the most part) it involves concepts that are taught to high school students. Other than that, the term "quantum" is an element of pop culture, and the concepts of Lagrangian and Hamiltonian are a step away from energy. Hell, kids even use the term "force field"; not totally accurately mind you, but still. The basic language of mathematics involves functions, topological spaces, groups, invariants, manifolds, graphs, rings, vector spaces, R-modules, categories, etc. While some of these are introduced at a high school or undergraduate, many of them are graduate topics. This makes it inherently more difficult to provide down-to-earth explanations on many wiki math articles. Take for example one of the biggest mathematical proofs of the recent past: Wiles' proof of Fermat. Luckily, you can fairly easily say a bunch of things about Fermat's Last Theorem; however, you'd be hard pressed to give a down-to-earth explanation of what the modularity theorem even says. Anyway, that's a bit of my rant. RobHar ( talk) 16:02, 18 January 2011 (UTC)
Greetings Kevin, You have made an excellent observation and contribution to the discussion for this group. I have read your user page, and I am impressed by the time and thought you have put into NPOV. Please take a look at User:Gregbard/Mathematosis which is content that members of this group actively suppressed, and was moved from Wikipedia:MMSS to user space. It is no surprise to me that you have appropriately brought this important issue to the attention of the proper community, and have gotten a negative response from several of them. The prevailing attitude is represented by CBM (who is a wonderful and reasonable editor to discuss things with, however is still guilty of having this attitude that it isn't important at all for non-mathematicians to be able to understand mathematics articles in Wikipedia --a position he has stated in this discussion). Most of the active members couldn't care less if articles are only intelligible by themselves and their mathematician buddies. They are territorial and hostile to any interdisciplinary treatment of topics which might lend a great deal of clarity to non-mathematicians. As a note to the group, this poster Kevin has made a good faith report to this group for a need for improvement which the group has heretofore failed to achieve. His observation is valuable, as criticism is how we improve. Do not take this opportunity to dismiss him. Put away your arrogance, and adopt the humble position that he is speaking to an valid issue on behalf of the reading audience. Show some respect. Greg Bard ( talk) 21:17, 18 January 2011 (UTC)
I'm still awaiting outside input at exterior algebra. In light of some of the comments made here, I have completely rewritten the lead of the article. However, since the issues were never clearly identified (beyond a general lack of understanding), it is difficult to determine if I have hit the right mark. It does seem at the very least that those complaining loudly about its original inaccessibility should offer there feedback on the revision. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 15:30, 20 January 2011 (UTC)
I have been inspired by the above discussion to start an FAQ. It's currently visible at the top of this page. Anyone who wants to edit it is free to do so; it's at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mathematics/FAQ. Ozob ( talk) 01:35, 18 January 2011 (UTC)
The first answer in the FAQ likened the difficult of mathematics articles to those in "law and medicine".
User:WhatamIdoing has recently visited
WP:MED and
WP:LAW attempting to get them to say that their concepts can be made accessible; see
WT:MED#Advanced topics and
WT:LAW#On making technical articles accessible. By and large the folks at WP:MED were of the opinion that most of their material could be explained to the layman, though to me they didn't sound particularly enthusiastic. WhatamIdoing Anthonyhcole has used this as justification for removing "and medicine" from the FAQ answer, and I am sure he hopes to do the same for "law". I've replaced "medicine" with "medical science" since that seems to me to be closer to the actual consensus in that thread.
I'm starting this thread in the interest of centralizing discussion. I'll shortly be posting to the Law and Medicine WikiProjects directing them here. Ozob ( talk) 12:37, 20 January 2011 (UTC)
I am totally impressed with the huge improvements to the lead at Exterior algebra. I finally understand what the subject is, and why anyone should care about it. (It's the biggest tool for certain purposes! It provides complete, precise, unambiguous definitions instead of just vague descriptions! It's sometimes convenient! It has desirable properties! It's useful! It's compatible with some other things!)
In terms of practical feedback:
The subject is advanced so the material is naturally dense, and I read the lead slowly, trying to reactivate some rather rusty neurons. The occasional parenthetical comment (e.g., the degrees add (like multiplication of polynomials)) helped me connect the current subject to some basic but apparently rusty concepts (going from "The degrees add?!" to "Oh, he means the degrees add! How could I have forgotten!"). It's still not going to be accessible to someone at the pre-algebra level and that's okay. I think it's going to be accessible to someone who has studied vectors past the introduction-to-physics level.
The lead makes judicious use of occasional "needless verbosity" as a way of introducing unfamiliar terms. For example, it says The exterior product of two vectors u and v, denoted by u ∧ v, lives in a space called the exterior square, rather than The exterior product of two vectors u and v, denoted by u ∧ v, lives in the exterior square. The difference from the perspective of the non-expert is that the chosen construction says "Now you know what we call this bit, and that's all you need to know about that for now" rather than "Here's another bit of jargon to prove that you don't know what we're talking about!" I found this so effective that I plan to adopt this strategy for other technical subjects.
The newly added image helped me check my understanding of the first paragraph.
In the end, I felt like I understood the main point of every single sentence, at least to a first approximation—well enough, in fact, to confidently identify and fix a minor typo that the spilling chucker missed, without wondering if perhaps this was some strange new mathematical concept.
I'm enormously happy about the new third paragraph, which contains most of the "What's it useful for" and "What field is it studied in" answers. (The short answers to those two questions are "Lots of things" and "Several", and as a result, I know why this article is a high priority on this project's WP:1.0 assessments.)
This is such a wonderful bit of work. Thank you to all who helped, directly and indirectly. WhatamIdoing ( talk) 18:24, 21 January 2011 (UTC)
Ono et. al. have recently published a paper which is getting a lot of hype. If someone can work on Partition (number theory) in preparation for that would probably be good. The paper deals with congruences and a new closed-form formula (I've only skimmed it so far); we should, in particular, work on Partition (number theory)#Congruences if at all possible. At the moment that section directly contradicts itself.
CRGreathouse ( t | c) 00:15, 22 January 2011 (UTC)
Although I did Maths up to it being a subsidiary subject at first-year university level, I've forgotten most of it, although I do like to try to get a vague grasp of concepts as I come across them (see, for example, the above discussion about Lyapunov vectors). So I can heartily commend and congratulate that article for including a diagram which, more than thousands of words could do, gives the outside reader a rough idea of what's going on. Excellent. Any chance of a few more articles doing likewise? If diagrams are tricky, then use a real world example if possible: "Imagine this scene 'X' ... aspect 'Y' is described by mathematical concept 'Z'." (I realise this really may not be possible in various cases, but I'm sure it must be in some, as per Lyapunov vectors.) In short, could articles, where possible, attempt to teach a non-mathematician? Thanks. Feline Hymnic ( talk) 09:52, 8 January 2011 (UTC)
There are places where diagrams would help. But even when you can sketch a diagram in a few seconds on the back of an envelope, it may take two hours, or eight hours, to create something that can be uploaded. Michael Hardy ( talk) 16:57, 9 January 2011 (UTC)
Although I've tended to emphasise pictures, diagrams, etc. to help the outsider get a finger-hold on a concept, another really valuable way to do this is a "motivating example". For instance, many years ago I couldn't see any point to the vector cross product. "Why bother?", I thought. "Completely perpendicular to the usual vector plane? Crazy!", I thought. But in another isolated compartment of my poor little brain was already squirrelled away the right-hand rule for electro-magnetic induction. Then in one physics lesson about electromagnetism, the lecturer said, almost as a throw-away, "...and we can express this mathematically as a vector-cross product." And the light went on: "Yes, at last, I get it!". So, if reasonably possible, could articles have some sort of "motivating example" near the top? Feline Hymnic ( talk) 12:38, 22 January 2011 (UTC)
Midy's theorem is being enriched by unsourced material. Tkuvho ( talk) 04:05, 19 January 2011 (UTC)
Hadamard's maximal determinant problem is a quasi-orphan (in the article space, one "article" and one list link to it (and I shouldn't have to tell you which list)). Try to figure out which other articles should link to it, and add the links. Michael Hardy ( talk) 18:14, 22 January 2011 (UTC)
Tangent half-angle formula has long been a deficient article. It's not as bad as it was 30 minutes ago, but more work is needed.
The illustration would accompany a geometric proof fairly well, but it's badly titled, and also see my commented-out comment on it within the article.
I'm not sure the Weierstrass substitution should be mentioned other than very tersely. There's a main-article link for that. Michael Hardy ( talk) 02:45, 23 January 2011 (UTC)
In the last 3 days, User:David Eppstein created articles on the mathematical economists Andreu Mas-Colell and Graciela Chichilnisky (yesterday).
Chichilnisky's continuous social choice theory may interest topologists, especially; her work on international trade, development, and environmental economics has received international attention; further, she has received national attention in the USA because of a (now settled) sex-discrimination law-suit.
Also, another article started by David, the Shapley-Folkman lemma, received "Good Article" status today, thanks to the reviewing of User:Jakob.scholbach, who guided the needed revisions. Further editing, especially copy-editing, would be appreciated.
Best regards, Kiefer.Wolfowitz ( talk) 22:54, 19 January 2011 (UTC)
There is a new article on the algebraic/additive number theorist Henry Mann, who was also a statistician.
I nominated the 3 mathematical articles for DYK, and so I encourage mathematical-project editors to review the DYK facts. Thanks, Kiefer.Wolfowitz ( talk) 02:18, 24 January 2011 (UTC)
A user at Talk:Exterior algebra asked me to define what I mean by "Bourbakism". As this is an important issue I am starting a thread here. As pertaining to the style of the pages here, particularly the ledes, what I am referring to is the idea that the latest fad in the foundations of mathematics is also the foundation of human thought and therefore should be the foundation of education. In the sixties, set theory was fashionable as a foundation. This foundationalist mentality therefore led to the New Math debacle in education. Concepts such as "naturality", "universal constructions", "equivalence of categories" are certainly appropriate on some math pages, but not most. Thus, understanding the naturality and universality of the exterior algebra is important in its applications in de Rham theory and building the exterior differential complex, etc. However, such concepts are basically a Bourbakist infestation when it comes to explaining basic concepts such as exterior algebra, and should be relegated to the last section of the page. I appreciate the effort that went into the upgrading of the page exterior algebra recently, but at the same time misguided educational principles should be checked. The elaboration of the "categorical" material has been accompanied by the deletion of material on simple-minded topics such as rank, minor, and cross product which can serve to connect the topic to the reader's previous experience. However, if you are Bourbakist, connecting to previous experience counts little when one is dealing with alleged foundations of human thought. Tkuvho ( talk) 10:00, 23 January 2011 (UTC)
The discussion at Talk:Exterior algebra is quickly becoming tiresome and unproductive. A nutshell version is that Tkuvho feels that the lead of a mathematics article should not even attempt to summarize the more advanced parts of the article, because of accessibility concerns. Some outside comment is obviously needed. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 14:07, 23 January 2011 (UTC)
Considering that Bourbaki was founded in the 1930s, calling it a recent fad is a bit odd. And trying to tie in Bourbaki's stated wish to write an encyclopedic reference for contemporary mathematicians with the New Math is something of a slur; if you wish for more context read the introduction to Dieudonné's Infinitesimal Calculus; it was much more of a question of getting the French university examiners to consider whether undergraduate teaching should have some relevance to research topics. The excesses of American educators, post-Sputnik, are really only vaguely related. It is obviously the case that our treatments of graduate-level topics should reflect graduate-level textbooks. Those are a mixed bunch, but the "formalist" treatments will be in evidence in certain areas of higher algebraic content, and it is perfectly fine that our articles should reflect that to some extent. My impression is that the anti-algorithmic and "no pictures" prejudices of Bourbaki are now pretty much obsolete, so that heuristics on how you compute with the exterior algebra (say), and some geometrical interpretations, are appropriate. Also some history gives a chance to speak to why ideas were introduced in the first place, which usually helps. Charles Matthews ( talk) 15:47, 23 January 2011 (UTC)
Certainly the basic principle is that the choice of content should not be anyone's personal taste, but a reflection of a mainstream view. Charles Matthews ( talk) 17:34, 23 January 2011 (UTC)
I agree with posts I have seen elsewhere. I think the lead for Exterior algebra generally looks great. Thank you to all the editors who have worked on that text! --- My Core Competency is Competency ( talk) 18:30, 23 January 2011 (UTC)
User:Gauravmisra del mentioned on his userpage last month that he was having trouble with the wiki-syntax necessary to add his Remarkable Discovery to the article on subtraction without borrowing. He subsequently went ahead and added it (I guess he figured it out?), so that's fine, I guess.
Problem is, I'm concerned about his description of this as a Discovery, which evokes Original Research. But this really isn't my field. I'm sure I could follow his step-by-step instructions if I tried, but I wouldn't be able to recognize whether this is something new and original or old and familiar (and his mention of the psychological side effects of ordinary subtraction seem... unusual, to say the least). Anyone care to have a look? DS ( talk) 15:12, 24 January 2011 (UTC)
IMO the sentence about the connection almost complex structure has two errors:
I'm writing here because I don't think many people are watching that page :) — Kallikanzarid talk 18:49, 24 January 2011 (UTC)
Anyone willing to join me in making this article Good? I think prime numbers [c,sh]ould be a showpiece maths article, ranging from most elementary math's to jungles of unsolved conjectures and recent top-notch work. Everybody, please inscribe yourself here! Jakob.scholbach ( talk) 23:17, 26 January 2011 (UTC)
Is the Australian Mathematical Society ranking of mathematics journals a reliable source for list of mathematics journals? Opinions on that question are welcome at Talk:List_of_mathematics_journals#AustMS_journal_rankings. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 04:49, 28 January 2011 (UTC)
My suggestion is to adopt a guideline for math pages (particularly the more advanced ones) that they should include a specific pointer to the more elementary topics that need to be mastered in order to understand the more advanced page. The pointer should consist not merely in a mention of a page imbedded in a clause in a long sentence, but a specific mention that the linked page is more accessible. Here is an example. Riemannian manifolds and their curvature cannot even begin to be approached until the student has mastered the theorema egregium of Gauss and the idea that Gaussian curvature is an intrinsic invariant. Pages such as Riemannian manifold should make it clear that the reader has to understand surfaces first. A similar example: I believe the reason the contributor who expressed himself above cannot make any headway in exterior algebra is because the wedge product appears there in a completely "ex nihilo" fashion. By the time the article gets around to construct the exterior algebra in terms of the tensor algebra (!), we have already lost all beginners. The page exterior algebra is a great page, but it could be made more accessible to someone with basic background in linear algebra, but not much more. I tried to link it to more elementary pages in the spirit of my suggested guideline above, but encountered reverts on the grounds of being "unencyclopedic". We should adopt a guideline making it encyclopedic to try to help beginners. Tkuvho ( talk) 22:09, 19 January 2011 (UTC)
"The idea" is that a beginner who looks at, say, riemannian manifold, should not walk away baffled, intimidated, and non-plussed, having learned nothing. If we offer him some leads to lower-level articles, he will either look at those and learn something, or else say, OK, to understand Riemannian manifolds I need first to know what Gaussian curvature is. This is far less discouraging than walking away completely baffled, which seems to have been the experience of some of the beginners who expressed themselves above. Every college course has a list of prerequisites in the course catalog. I am not sure why some mild approximation in wiki should be viewed as such anathema. And I don't think this is "condescending" toward the beginner (see comment below), on the contrary, endless blather about "non-encyclopedic" is condescending. Tkuvho ( talk) 14:00, 20 January 2011 (UTC)
I think it is generally a bad idea to start of an article by saying: "you should know this, this, and that before attempting to read this." (Or any friendlier message with the same content.) It feels really condescending to me. Moreover, it encourages laziness on part of the editors, by just allowing them to put up some prerequisites and not push to obtain the uttermost accessibility that is possible for the subject. In particular, it encourages starting articles at a high entry level, instead of steadily increasing the difficulty level as the article proceeds. Another thing to keep in mind, is that there can exist vastly different roads to understanding a mathematical subject. A pattern I sometimes see in the thinking about accessibility of math pages on this project, is that it tends to focus on the path that a typical mathematics student would take in learning about the subject. This is not surprising since it is the path that many of contributors here followed/are following, but many users will actually have a different background, which often misses some of the mathematical foundations that a mathematics student would have, but might on the other hand might include a lot of hands experience of using similar structures. For example, students of theoretical physics will learn about Riemannian manifolds in a GR class without any solid knowledge Gaussian curvature or the theory of surfaces (that a mathematics student would have.) Similarly, when (even if) physics and engineering learn what a tensor of a vector bundle is, they usually have been working with examples of these structures for years. I think that a similar effect to providing a list of prerequisites, (without the possible condescending connotation) can be achieved by detailing in the lead what types of things a concept is generalizing and/or naming a few well-known (to people that do not already know about the subject) concrete examples. This typically are things that a reader should know about to understand the article. A reader that has never heard about any of these things, will generally get the clue that he has encountered an article for which he doesn't even properly understand the basic context. Although hopefully he will have a much better idea of the context then before. TimothyRias ( talk) 13:29, 20 January 2011 (UTC)
Here are some suggestions for the lead. I've itemized them for easier discussion.
-- Sławomir Biały ( talk) 23:40, 22 January 2011 (UTC)
1) Should this discussion be moved to another location? Maybe the talk page of WP:MOSMATH, since I think it is a good idea to record the result of this discussion somewhere, for example as a section of WP:MOSMATH. 2) I generally agree with the points above. Something that could be add is that, if use of jargon is unavoidable, it is generally a good idea to avoid using more than one new piece jargon in a sentence. This way it is possible for readers with a vague acquaintance of the subject, but who are fuzzy on the jargon to get some idea of the meaning of the jargon from the context. T R 08:59, 31 January 2011 (UTC)
Perturbation problem beyond all orders could use some work. Michael Hardy ( talk) 04:54, 30 January 2011 (UTC)
I know, I'm beating this horse over again going over the archives but there few issues and common themes that seem to repeat themselves. WP:NOTTEXTBOOK is often referenced (like in the FAQ above and essay reference) as the excuse for the difficulty of what it's hard to learn anything from WP:Math pages. I do not believe this fair that it's intended purpose. That was meant to leading questions followed by systematic problem solutions as examples. In that same section it states:
Also in right below that in that same section:
This is the problem with the current state of WP:Math and it's infamous for this, both inside and out of the wikipedia community.
I've done my part in the past few years to link jargon to appropriate pages, fix circular definitions across pages by providing an entrance for someone trying to find an in, and created a few images (all of which to been replaced by better ones it seems). I totally get that it's one it's one of the best resources for the intelligentsia and I don't want to diminish that but that isn't the goal of an encyclopedia. I recently was shocked when I popped in an old copy Encarta and compared the text of our math articles. The articles are brief but you can actual pick up the topic if you not an expert. I feel a little overwhelmed though and hope someone hears and understands the community's pain. --ZacBowling ( user| talk) 11:05, 30 January 2011 (UTC)
FWIW, I have always in interpreted the "academic language" section to be referring to articles like apple that are commonly discussed in non-academic settings. It would be possible to fancy up that article with a lot of terms from biology, for example by saying "endocarp" instead of "core". But the common term for the core of an apple is "core".
The intended audience for apple is much broader than the intended audience for Galois cohomology, and it would be silly to expect the latter to be accessible in the same way that the former should be. The common, everyday word for "homological algebra" is "homological algebra"; there is no other, more common, term to use.
The "research papers" section, which claims that readers should not need to follow wikilinks, has been at odds with actual practice for years, and should generally just be ignored. This is not just in math; see B flat major for another article that you couldn't read unless you knew many terms. The lede of that article is also full of specialized terminology, and is also perfectly appropriate. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 12:27, 30 January 2011 (UTC)
This section's heading looks like someone didn't pay much attention before posting. "Just facts and proofs"? There aren't very many proofs in Wikipedia math articles. Proofs are something we have very little of here. Michael Hardy ( talk) 17:57, 30 January 2011 (UTC)
I'm a software engineer myself with a focus on user experience so that is where my brain goes. (coincidentally I used to work a TI developing the software for graphing calculators). Here are a couple of ideas:
It's sad that WP:Math is the only Wikipedia area that makes me feel like I should be using Simple English Wikipedia. --ZacBowling ( user| talk) 01:56, 31 January 2011 (UTC)
I have some relevant thoughts on the original post of this thread. The fact is that there are a great many mathematics articles that are inaccessible, and I don't think anyone can credibly deny this. There are plenty of terrible mathematics articles, some of which no doubt I myself have inflicted on the world. I do think that improving the accessibility of mathematics articles is an important and worthy goal, and I think the best we can hope for in general discussions here is a systematic solution, such as bringing the MOSMATH in line with our current best practices. But project members often display a lack of concern for these issues, or at least a lack of sensitivity to them, and various often sinister reasons have been ascribed for this. But I would like to make some candid observations that I think help explain why things are this way.
Wikipedia's mathematics editors seem to be mostly academics of one stripe or another, and this also seems to be less true of other content areas. To some extent, this dictates how our coverage of mathematics topics develops. I have written articles for the following reasons, and I think that so have many other mathematics editors if I had to guess at their motives based on their behavior: (1) to understand the topic of a seminar I am involved with, (2) as a convenient reference for myself (and other researchers), (3) as a resource for my students (who may be undergraduate or graduate students), (4) to help learn a subject myself or out of sheer curiosity of a subject that I know little about. While I'm sure that the whole altruistic "free encyclopedia" thing may make us feel good about our contributions, it's much too rarefied to elicit any real work on the encyclopedia (for me, at any rate). Out of my own motivations (and I presume those of others), very little has to do with making the encyclopedia accessible to Joe on the street. The only time accessibility is a big personal concern is when I am writing for students, but in their case I assume a fairly specific background (especially when they are graduate students) that the wider population isn't likely to have.
Wikipedia's mathematics editors themselves are also products of the wider world of mathematics, which seems to lack expository source material aimed at Joe on the street. For us, articles published in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society are expository, although most of these articles are almost certainly not understandable to Joe. The rest of the sciences have serious expository outlets like Scientific American, the American Scientist, Nature, and Science, that attempt to explain cutting-edge developments in the sciences to laypeople. But mathematics has no such outlet: Journals in mathematics that specialize in exposition do not emphasize mathematics that is of substantial contemporary interest. One can attempt to rationalize this by saying that "It's the nature of the subject" and "It's much more difficult to make mathematics accessible than other content areas". Critics here dismiss these rationalizations as mere excuses, but I think it is significant that there are so few expository sources for most of mathematics. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 13:06, 31 January 2011 (UTC)
I clearly said that advanced mathematics generally lacks expository sources aimed at Joe on the street: that is, aimed at a completely non-mathematical audience. I wouldn't argue that there are expository sources aimed at mathematical audiences. The Princeton Mathematical Companion is pitched at about the same level as many of the "Notices" articles, and most of it is not accessible to Joe on the street. But I think this is a good example because it illustrates about the right level of expository style for several distinct groups of people in this discussion: those who wish to improve the accessibility of portions of our encyclopedia, those who feel that the compendious style of many of our articles is ok, and those that post here to complain that mathematics articles are inaccessible. There is obviously tension between these three groups, and getting them to agree on an acceptable style might be one way forward. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 12:42, 1 February 2011 (UTC)
Also, what is the Japanese Encyclopedia? I'm familiar with Ito's Encyclopedic dictionary of mathematics, though I would emphatically disagree that the exposition in that text would be comfortable to non-mathematicians. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 12:45, 1 February 2011 (UTC)
I have been working recently on List of mathematics journals. The list was pretty much unattended for a while, and recently some editors from the Academic Journals wikiproject asked us to clean it up. Journals aren't our core focus, but this list is certainly in the broad scope of the math project, as well as the scope of the journals project.
There is a notability "essay" WP:NJournals, which apparently has some weight at AFD discussions, which says that (as one possible criterion) if a journal has an impact factor and is indexed in Math Reviews and Zentralblatt MATH, then we can create an article on it. So I have pruned the redlinks on the list to journals that meet those criteria, and I am working on creating the articles. I made a journal article helper program that can help format the information about a journal into a reasonable stub. If you're interested, you can look up information on your favorite redlinked journal and make a stub article about it (this is easiest if you are at a computer with access to MathSciNet and Journal Citation Reports). — Carl ( CBM · talk) 15:17, 1 February 2011 (UTC)
Another pair of cellular automata animations have been nominated, see WP:Featured picture candidates/Non-intermediate phases of BML Traffic Model. See are related to the CA animations that were promoted to FP a week or so ago.-- RDBury ( talk) 16:01, 1 February 2011 (UTC)
The article titled Flat function is somewhat orphaned, i.e. very few other articles link to it. This sort of function plays an important role in the theory of test functions, used in developing generalized functions. It also is used to show why complex differentiability is so much stronger than real differentiability. There must be other things that ought to link to it. Michael Hardy ( talk) 20:06, 1 February 2011 (UTC)
I declined a WP:PROD on this article but am sending it to AFD on request from the original PRODer. Some input from those familiar with computer science and mathmatics would be helpful. The discussion can be viewed here. -- Ron Ritzman ( talk) 01:40, 3 February 2011 (UTC)
The Dehn plane article is up for deletion. While plausible searching the usual suspects Planet Math, Encyclopaedia of Mathematics don't yield and references.-- Salix ( talk): 05:28, 3 February 2011 (UTC)
User:Tkuvho continues to accuse me of Bourbakism. He feels that the lead of Exterior algebra, because it mentions the universal construction, is "engaging in Bourbakism" (whatever that means). Could someone else please comment on what he means? Is he right and I just don't see it? Or is he just trying to provoke me? If so, it's working and it needs to stop. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 12:33, 1 February 2011 (UTC)
Let's ask that everybody avoid personal attacks. It may be wise for some participants to take a few days off, for their own good and the project's. The participants have been very valuable members of WP and this project. Kiefer.Wolfowitz ( talk) 15:20, 1 February 2011 (UTC)
I think I'd reserve the term "Bourbakism" for articles that start immediately with the most general possible approach to a topic that doesn't warrant it. On several occasions Bourbaki use monoids where most people would be happy with groups, or when they first develop integration they do it for arbitrary locally compact spaces (which I'm quite happy with, but would be the wrong place to start on wikipedia). I completely disagree with saying that mentioning category theory or functor in the lead of an article is "Bourbakist" and more importantly I disagree that it is wrong. Exterior algebra isn't the article "Prime number", it's an article about a formal algebraic tool. A tool which is commonly used in a functorial way. Almost nobody actually takes the exterior algebra of a vector space (at the very least, people use it for a module over a ring, or a representation of a group). If there is an article whose problem is unnecessary use of jargon, then it's problem is "unnecessary use of jargon", not "Bourbakism". For example, using "set" in the first sentence of the article "natural number" is an unnecessary use of jargon. An infringement that would more merit the term "Bourbakism" would be some sort of high-brow axiomatic description such as "In mathematics, the natural numbers are the standard model of Peano arithmetic." RobHar ( talk) 17:48, 1 February 2011 (UTC)
Actually the knack is to take out excess "mathematics made difficult" formalism, while not being "anti-Hilbert" (retaining the idea that mathematical concepts are axiomatic and "sharp-edged", not vague). And being entirely accurate in what is said, unless flagged up with language such as "roughly speaking". Charles Matthews ( talk) 20:34, 1 February 2011 (UTC)
The above discussion gave me an idea — let us have a new bot which looks at the lead of an article and assigns it a number which is the smallest natural number greater than the numbers assigned to the articles to which it is linked. If it is not possible to calculate such a number due to a closed loop in the links, then it would report that fact and give a list of the links in the loop. This tool could be used to try to break circular definitions and reduce the depth of searching which readers have to do to understand the lead. JRSpriggs ( talk) 13:24, 3 February 2011 (UTC)
The article on affine Grassmanians AGr(n;k), i.e. the k-dimensional affine linear subspaces of an n-dimensional vector space need some additions. For example, it says that as a homogeneous space it can be realised as
At first it didn't even say what O(n−k) was, never mind link to the article. (It's the orthogonal group and E is the Euclidean group.) I think this expression needs explaining. I'm half way to understanding it, but not completely. You start with a k-dimensional subspace passing through the origin, say S0. You can move that onto any other k-dimensional affine subspace, say A0, by a Euclidean transformation; so we start with E(n). But different Euclidean transformations take S0 to A0; look at the image of the origin when you take S0 to A0. That's why we quotient out E(k); we get a map A0 → A0 given by different Euclidean transformations taking S0 to A0. This is where I start to get stuck. I can see that the O(n−k) term comes from the different choices of original subspace instead of S0. But that's just the ordinary Grassmannian Gr(n;k) and not O(n−k). Could some one possibly explain to me where O(n−k) and then add the explanation to the article itself? — Fly by Night ( talk) 16:27, 4 February 2011 (UTC)
There seems to be a big flaw in this article. The space of lines in P3 is a projective concept. Yet Plücker coordinates are defined in terms of a Euclidean structure defined on R3, e.g. the construction uses a scaler product. Cross products and scaler products depend upon the choice of Euclidean structure and are not projectively invariant. Is it just me, or does that seem a little alarming? — Fly by Night ( talk) 02:09, 5 February 2011 (UTC)
You should think of R3 is an affine coordinate patch of P3 (that is, it is just P3 minus the plane at infinity). Io describe lines in P3, it's enough to describe those in R3, and then add in the ones at infinity (e.g., take the projective closure).
That said, I'm not defending the approach taken by the article, though, which I find to be quite awkward. I think a better way to define the Plucker coordinates is to think of the space of lines in P3 as Gr(2,4). Planes through the origin in R4 are defined by simple two-forms in , which are uniquely defined up to scale, so there is a one-to-one correspondence of Gr(2,4) with the set of simple two-forms in (this is the Klein quadric). The coefficients of a 2-form in a basis then define the Plucker coordinates. The article should probably discuss this approach more explicitly. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 13:00, 5 February 2011 (UTC)
Input needed at Talk:Applied mathematics, where Michael P. Barnett ( talk · contribs) has proposed various re-writes of the lead paragraph of the article. My own view is that his writing style is poor, his proposed leads are rambling and do not summarise the article, and he makes several unsourced claims; in short he is proposing to replace the current brief and clear lead paragraph with a POV mini-essay. But that's just my opinion - views of other editors would be useful. Gandalf61 ( talk) 10:30, 5 February 2011 (UTC)
The situation regarding the articles titled ABC triangulation XYZ, for various values of ABC and XYZ, seems less than satisfactory. In particular:
How much difference is there between the topics of these articles? Should some be merged? How should they link among each other? Should we have a disambiguation page titled triangulation (mathematics) that would link to these and also to triangulated category and Delaunay triangulation and upper triangular matrix (apparently "triangulation" sometimes means putting a matrix into that form)? Michael Hardy ( talk) 22:25, 6 February 2011 (UTC)
![]() | "WikiProject Report" would like to focus on WikiProject Mathematics for an upcoming edition of The Signpost. This is an excellent opportunity to draw attention to your efforts and attract new members to the project. Would you be willing to participate in an interview? If so, you can find the interview questions here. Just add your response below each question and feel free to skip any questions that you don't feel comfortable answering. If you have any questions, you can leave a note on my talk page. Have a great day. – SMasters ( talk) 04:06, 7 February 2011 (UTC) |
Two animations related to maze generating algorithms have been nominated for FP. See Wikipedia:Featured picture candidates/Maze Generation 2.-- RDBury ( talk) 08:20, 7 February 2011 (UTC)
The brand-new article Groupoid algebra has been nominated for deletion. -- Lambiam 19:30, 7 February 2011 (UTC)
Greetings! This month, we have a large number of links to the disambiguation page, Adjoint representation - 61 links, to be exact. We at the Wikipedia:Disambiguation pages with links project would appreciate any help you could give us in fixing these ambiguous links. Cheers! bd2412 T 00:41, 8 February 2011 (UTC)
Project members might want to keep an eye on links that feed into gyrovector space. Someone has been trying to do quite a bit of WP:UNDUE promotion of this article, which perhaps includes some legitimate mathematics, but also appears to include some crackpot ideas. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 13:32, 8 February 2011 (UTC)
I have nominated logarithm for peer review. Please talk here. Thank you all, Jakob.scholbach ( talk) 21:41, 9 February 2011 (UTC)
The new article De Groot Fourier Transform has some very strange statements. E.g.,
I find myself doubting that "groot" is actually used as a parameter. The only reference in the article doesn't seem to talk about an analog of the Fourier transform at all.
I have the feeling that this is an elaborate hoax, but this is not a field that I'm familiar with. Can someone else take a look? Ozob ( talk) 02:55, 12 February 2011 (UTC)
WP has improved its math articles greatly since just 3 years ago, when reading an article on a topic one did not already know involved nested (and sometimes circular) link chasing for definitions (links that refer to articles with more links, and so on). I propose that editors try to put a WP:HAT on each article that does not define all its terms, with something like, "This article might be easier to read if you read article A first", in the case that terms come up that can best be understood by reading prerequisite article A, instead of the reader having to chase links for definitions. This might be something like a bottomless pit leading into philosophy of math, but it might also back link to an article the reader is already familiar with, breaking the "infinite" regression back. Remember what Hawking said about what the flat-earth-on-the-back-of-a-turtle-woman in the audience said to Bertrand Russell when he asked her upon what did the turtle upon which the earth rested rest, "its turtles all the way down" [26]. PPdd ( talk) 05:32, 12 February 2011 (UTC)
Another related proposal regards "suggested prerequisite for more easy comprehension", which is subtly different from a "more general treatment" hat. PPdd ( talk) 15:17, 12 February 2011 (UTC)
I keep having trouble with
inkscape—could somebody please help me out with this image:
? I want the black rectangle be replaced by a z and the extraneous red phi removed. Thanks!
Jakob.scholbach (
talk)
14:48, 12 February 2011 (UTC)
This has likely been covered before on talk, but I propose a general suggestion to add a "Definitions" section at the bottom, for terms defined in the article, for ease of reference. An opposition to this proposal might be that a user can do a search in the article, but this likely produces numerous results (the first of which should be the definition, if a definition has been made in the article. PPdd ( talk) 15:59, 12 February 2011 (UTC)
Very often the definition of the concept that the article is about is in the first sentence or otherwise near the beginning of the article. Michael Hardy ( talk) 18:26, 12 February 2011 (UTC)
There is a proposal to rename the category Recursion theory to Computability theory that hasn't received any response yet. Please comment there if you have any thoughts on the matter.-- RDBury ( talk) 08:19, 13 February 2011 (UTC)
Comments on Talk:Fundamental solution indicate a need to explain the relationship with Green's function. This is one of those interfaces between traditional language and contemporary mathematical language that has been discussed here. That would be part of the issue only, though. Charles Matthews ( talk) 12:24, 15 February 2011 (UTC)
Following the promotion of rhodocene to FA status, some discussion has started again at Wikipedia talk:Make technical articles understandable. That guideline is written in a way that does allow for some technical articles, although it was written to encourage all articles to be as accessible as possible. There have been some useful conversations here recently about accessibility, and people who contributed to those may be interested in following the discussion on the guideline page. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 13:00, 15 February 2011 (UTC)
Hey all. In looking through the discussion at Wikipedia talk:Make technical articles understandable mentioned by Carl in the previous section, in particular some comments of User:Sławomir Biały on the "target audience" of an article, I had a crazy idea: we could add a field to the Maths rating template banner we put on talk pages that holds the "target audience" of the article. It certainly seems like the target audience of an article is something that it is important to establish. Editors who have spent a long time on certain articles end up having to justify the work they've done to editors who have just shown up and are unhappy with the level of exposition. And that's fine, but it would help if the "seasoned" editors of the article had some way of pointing to an established consensus of what the "level" of the article is. I think there are several other ways this would help. The types of "levels" could be something like "Basic", "High school", "Undergraduate", "Advanced undergraduate", and "Graduate" (where the last should be used sparingly, and the specific terms used could be made more international or otherwise clarified). The approach of "one level down" that Carl has been talking about at Wikipedia talk:Make technical articles understandable would provide a guideline for how to assess the "target audience" of a given article. For some other articles, one would also want to use the subject's popularity to "lower" the level. Thoughts? RobHar ( talk) 14:46, 16 February 2011 (UTC)
The Mathematics WikiProject aims for this article to be accessible to a general readership. If this article is too technical for its intended audience, please feel free to edit it; see our advice for writing mathematics articles for tips. |
The Mathematics WikiProject aims for this article to be accessible to a reader whose has completed the beginnings of an undergraduate degree. If this article is too technical for its intended audience, please feel free to edit it; see our advice for writing mathematics articles for tips. |
If this article is too technical for its intended audience, please feel free to edit it; see our advice for writing mathematics articles for tips. |
I'd appreciate if people citing math papers in WP articles could make an effort to include non-paywall links to copies of the papers when such are available. The papers are often on the authors' personal websites or preprint sites like arxiv, and at other times can be found through citeseer or by googling the title, but sometimes they can be a bit obscure. I try to add such links when I come across them, but that's just a drop in the bucket. Thanks. 71.141.88.54 ( talk) 01:27, 17 February 2011 (UTC)
Also, if there's not a good non-walled copy of the paper but there is a JSTOR scan, we should include that, since lots of public libraries subscribe to JSTOR while usually only academic libraries will subscribe to Springerlink and the like. JSTOR improves accessibility over journal publisher sites in that regard. 71.141.88.54 ( talk) 06:53, 17 February 2011 (UTC)
{{
cite doi}}
. This thread has made me consider also adding a link to the end something like [
preprint], when such is available.
Qwfp (
talk)
10:29, 17 February 2011 (UTC)
{{
arxiv}}
". Note that this will link to the abstract page rather than directly to the pdf. This gives readers the choice what format they want. (usually both PS and PDF are available). Also note that only DOI links, will send you directly to the journal page, MR, JSTOR, PubMed, bibcode, etc. will provide a link to the article's entry in the respective database/repository.
T
R
11:30, 17 February 2011 (UTC)
Continuing the accessibility trend of late, there is a conversation visible on my talk page [30] about Poincaré conjecture. Since this is one of the Millennium Prize problems, it really should be as readable as possible up top. I made a minimal change to the lede to point out the fact, which is well known to confuse students, that the 3-sphere is the surface bounding the 4-dimensional unit ball (rather than, say, the 3-dimensional solid from grade school geometry). My change was reverted. Maybe someone else can find a better wording? — Carl ( CBM · talk) 12:31, 17 February 2011 (UTC)
A couple of editors are attempting to rewrite the lede at Linear algebra. I reverted the first try here (as I didn't think it was an improvement) other edits have been made since. Other views welcome. (I'm traveling all day today and unable to give much attention to this.) Paul August ☎ 11:24, 19 February 2011 (UTC)
Am I the only person on Wikipedia who is actually monitoring Lists of integrals? The page is viewed 1900 times a day and supposedly has 49 watchers. Just today, substantial vandalism was left untouched for more than 13 hours. Xanthoxyl < 02:46, 20 February 2011 (UTC)
On my user page you'll see an easy way to tell how many people are watching. But I may not be watching all the pages that I'm watching. (Apologies to Yogi Berra.) Maybe Xanthoxyl is the only person monitoring that page. Being the only person watching a page has happened to me sometimes. Michael Hardy ( talk) 07:35, 20 February 2011 (UTC)
Hi
As a result of my nominating a page (Dehn plane) for deletion. Consensus was that the name was incorrect as it could not be sourced and the deletion discussion is here Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Dehn_plane.
My move, based on the deletion discussion, was discussed here Talk:The_Dehn_plane#Bold_page_move
Several moves later it was left at Non-Legendrian geometry.
Now a single editor has gone against consensus and changed it back to a badly titled " The Dehn plane"
Firstly "The" should not be used, secondly consensus was against using Dehn plane and thirdly it seems as though some editors are deciding that their way is the right way even though it is against consensus.
I fully appreciate being bold, but something has to be done about this. There is no proof given so far that shows a convincing argument for using Dehn plane in any apart of the title. It has so far only produced one neologism from one source.
Chaosdruid ( talk) 21:24, 20 February 2011 (UTC)
At best the title of this new article is confusing since it's not about Curves in the mathematical sense. I thought flexible strips used in drafting were called splines, from which the mathematical term was derived; please confirm or correct me on this. It seems like we should have an article on them, whatever they're called. We also have a rudimentary article on Elastica theory which covers a mathematical model of these things.-- RDBury ( talk) 01:24, 22 February 2011 (UTC)
I recall something about "absurdity constants" (not absurdity "constraints") in relations to Suppes' Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science, Church's thesis, and Curry's paradox, but that is all I remember. Can anyone help with this for the absurdity article? PPdd ( talk) 05:39, 12 February 2011 (UTC)
Hi
I have just added the maths project banner to Talk:Rake (angle)
I think it is within your scope but would appreciate someone checking that !
Thanks Chaosdruid ( talk) 02:26, 22 February 2011 (UTC)
Existential theory of the reals is an orphaned article: nothing links to it (except the list of mathematics articles). Some links to it could be created and it would bear expansion.
It's in three categories (maybe others should be added?): Category:Real algebraic geometry, Category:Mathematical logic, Category:Computational complexity theory. Michael Hardy ( talk) 16:54, 23 February 2011 (UTC)
Directing it to "elementary" rather than "existential" doesn't seem to make sense, since that's an essentially different problem. It's about sentences that begin only with existential quantifiers, and one can imagine statements like the one about NP-completeness changing if one allowed universal quantifiers. Michael Hardy ( talk) 00:48, 25 February 2011 (UTC)
The article singular value decomposition is up for A-class review. It needs both reviewers and editors. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 14:14, 24 February 2011 (UTC)
The page Dehn plane contains a discussion of an example of a plane where the parallel postulate fails. The example satisfies Legendre's theorem to the effect that the sum of the angles in a triangle is π. The page has now been moved back to non-Legendrian geometry, even though the geometry discussed here is eminently Legendrian. This is the kind of committee decision we are getting famous for. Tkuvho ( talk) 12:42, 21 February 2011 (UTC)
The new article Sum of squares (disambiguation) includes a number of maths topics and hence might be worth checking. Melcombe ( talk) 17:27, 25 February 2011 (UTC)
I just needed a beautiful theorem which lots of people know but is not written down anywhere (asfaik) in an accessible way including elementary examples. Suppose a probability space is invariant under a compact group of transformations on . Suppose for simplicity that only the trivial subgroup leaves all elements of the space fixed (otherwise we must divide it out). Assume smoothness. Then the space is essentially the product of two independent probability spaces: one space carrying the maximal invariant, the other being the group itself with Haar measure. There is a neat elementary example in the Monty Hall problem.
The result is also much used in ergodic theory, it's called the ergodic decomposition.
Question: what to call it, what to link it to? I'd like to start writing the article but I'm a mathematical statistician, not an analyst or ergodic theorist or whatever.
There are connections to sufficiency, to invariance (in statistics), to experimental design, and so on. Everywhere where symmetry can be used to simplify statistical models or statistical reasoning. Multivariate normal distribution and multivariate analysis.
References:
R. Wijsman (1990), Invariant measure on groups and their use in statistics
P. Diaconis (1988), Group representations and their applications in statistics and probability
Richard Gill ( talk) 15:54, 22 February 2011 (UTC)
The above article is up for AfD here. I've had my say but there is some new discussion basically asking for more expert opinions, so please have your say if you can bring some mathematical expertise to the issue.-- RDBury ( talk) 21:49, 26 February 2011 (UTC)
R. Catesby Taliaferro is a stubby new article, doubtless imperfect. Do what you can. Michael Hardy ( talk) 00:49, 27 February 2011 (UTC)
After constant editing conflicts for years, a discussion archive probably running several volumes as printed books and 2 failed mediations the article has ended up in arbitration now.
Maybe it is of interest for some of the editors here or they even want to provide an assessment/opinion.
Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Monty Hall problem
-- Kmhkmh ( talk) 22:06, 20 February 2011 (UTC)
Categorical bridge has been prodded. Michael Hardy ( talk) 04:33, 21 February 2011 (UTC)
Would someone please monitor. I'm at 3RR, and I can't say the edits I'm reverting are vandalism, just completely, and obviously, inappropriate. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 16:05, 27 February 2011 (UTC)
There is a discussion underway at Wt:MTAA that concerns this project. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 17:46, 28 February 2011 (UTC)
The new article Anti geometric mean and anti harmonic mean has been proposed for deletion for a lack of sources. This article needs rescuing. These two means are legitimate: one of them is the same as the contraharmonic mean. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 14:02, 28 February 2011 (UTC)
I've fixed the punctuation in the article's title. Michael Hardy ( talk) 23:21, 1 March 2011 (UTC)
Someone has been adding sections on and links to something called multilinear subspace learning to a variety of articles on linear algebra and multilinear algebra. I have removed one such section from the tensor article since it obviously didn't belong where it was. I'm wondering whether the rest of the added content is worth keeping though. There seem to have been only a handful of papers] published (in fairly obscure places) on this topic, most of them in the past few years and mostly by the same group of authors. What should we do about this, if anything? Sławomir Biały ( talk) 11:53, 1 March 2011 (UTC)
Jurvetson2 ( talk · contribs) has created articles 33550336 and 8589869056. As far as I can see, the only interesting property of these numbers is that they are perfect numbers, so I don't think they meet the criteria for notability of specific individual numbers at WP:NUMBER. Speedy deletion was proposed for one article, but declined. I have noted my concerns on Jurvetson2's talk page. Should we take these articles to AfD ? Gandalf61 ( talk) 09:32, 1 March 2011 (UTC)
I've just saved the Kappa-Poincaré page from speedy deletion for the time being, but it definitely needs to be changed into something else, either be deleted (Wikipedia's search does seem to find all the k- K- and κ- variations already) or converted into a disambiguation page or a redirect. I'm not conversant in math issues, so I need to ask a question: Is there some particular reason that both the K-Poincaré algebra and K-Poincaré_group articles shouldn't be merged into subsections of the Poincaré group article followed by the creation of redirects for the various k- kappa- κ- -algebra -group variant names to that article? Alternatively, how about an article for k-Poincaré with the -algebra and -group versions as subsections. Because I don't understand the math or the significance of the math, I'm clueless but I'm sure one of you do. Best regards, TRANSPORTERMAN ( TALK) 16:38, 1 March 2011 (UTC)
The article titled chain rule currently says:
Does this last form really fail to "specify where each of these derivatives is to be evaluated"? It seems to me that the first form above clutters things in such a way as to interfere with understanding, and that the second, read correctly, doesn't really fail to do anything that should be done.
Opinions? Michael Hardy ( talk) 23:04, 1 March 2011 (UTC)
Just out of interest why is chain rule marked as "mid priority"? T R 09:20, 2 March 2011 (UTC)
There appear to be a series of disputes with Optimering ( talk · contribs). One is listed at Talk:Algorithm. Another is at WP:COIN#Optimering and is mostly about an edit war at Luus–Jaakola. The assumption is that the user is the person whose work the user keeps citing, thus making WP:SELFCITE relevant. As Optimering has announced a preference to deal only with people who are also mathematical experts, I was hoping that some of you would please look at these disputes and see if you can help resolve them. WhatamIdoing ( talk) 17:02, 28 February 2011 (UTC)
I just created a new article titled G. J. Toomer. Quite a large number of articles link to it, but it's very stubby. Do what you can to improve it. Michael Hardy ( talk) 00:22, 4 March 2011 (UTC)
Hello, I saw on the discussion page of C*-algebra that this WikiProject supports the page. Is there anyone here who knows of references to support the statements found in the "Some history: B*-algebras and C*-algebras" section (that I have recently added 'fact' tags to)? Any help would be appreciated. 121.216.130.64 ( talk) 11:45, 28 February 2011 (UTC)
Should Archimedean property and non-Archimedean ordered field get merged? Michael Hardy ( talk) 21:42, 5 March 2011 (UTC)
This article needs scrutiny:
"no free lunch theorems... 'state[s] that any two optimization algorithms are equivalent when their performance is averaged across all possible problems.'" (The probability measure on all possible problems would be an interesting object, I assume.)
There is a related article, No free lunch in search and optimization, which cites an article by the well-known computer scientist Wegener, which probably can be salvaged. Kiefer.Wolfowitz ( Discussion) 14:04, 5 March 2011 (UTC)
I'm not sure it's the right board to post it on, but the article axiom caught my eye. AFAIK the notion of axiom being self-evident truth is very outdated: even when talking about logical axioms as described in the article, we cannot treat them as 'self-evident truths', if only because there are several logics (e.g. classical, intuitionist) that use different axioms, so calling them self-evident seems moot.
Is there anything that can be done to improve the article? I'm a complete layman in logic, so I didn't edit it myself. — Kallikanzarid talk —Preceding undated comment added 13:13, 6 March 2011 (UTC).
The "traditional" sense of the word makes sense in certain contexts other than mathematics. For example, in epistemology. To say it's outdated is to limit one's world-view to mathematics and forget that other subjects exist. Michael Hardy ( talk) 19:26, 6 March 2011 (UTC)
Our article titled Basel problem currently begins like this:
Should we change "number theory" to "analysis", or to something else, or should we just delete it? Or let it stand? Michael Hardy ( talk) 19:24, 6 March 2011 (UTC)
I've changed it to read thus:
Michael Hardy ( talk) 03:49, 10 March 2011 (UTC)
Recent changes were made to citations templates (such as {{
citation}}, {{
cite journal}}, {{
cite web}}...). In addition to what was previously supported (bibcode, doi, jstor, isbn, ...), templates now support arXiv, ASIN, JFM, LCCN, MR, OL, OSTI, RFC, SSRN and Zbl. Before, you needed to place |id=
(or worse {{
arxiv|0123.4567}}
|url=
http://arxiv.org/abs/0123.4567
), now you can simply use |arxiv=0123.4567
, likewise for |id=
and {{
JSTOR|0123456789}}
|url=
http://www.jstor.org/stable/0123456789
→ |jstor=0123456789
.
The full list of supported identifiers is given here (with dummy values):
Obviously not all citations needs all parameters, but this streamlines the most popular ones and gives both better metadata and better appearances when printed. Headbomb { talk / contribs / physics / books} 03:05, 8 March 2011 (UTC)
{{
cite book}}
: Check |isbn=
value: checksum (
help); Invalid |ref=harv
(
help); Unknown parameter |address=
ignored (|location=
suggested) (
help)|isbn=0123456789
translate into a raw "
ISBN
0123456789", which is linked via the software rather than being linked through the template. So this means you can use |isbn=0123456789,
ISBN
0987654321 Parameter error in {{
ISBN}}: checksum,
ISBN
1029384756 Parameter error in {{
ISBN}}: checksum
and it will be converted to Bob's Book.
ISBN [[Special:BookSources/0123456789,
ISBN
0987654321 Parameter error in {{
ISBN}}: checksum,
ISBN
1029384756 Parameter error in {{
ISBN}}: checksum|0123456789, '"`UNIQ--templatestyles-0000003E-QINU`"'[[ISBN (identifier)|ISBN]] [[Special:BookSources/0987654321 |0987654321]]<span class="error" style="font-size:100%"> Parameter error in {{[[Template:ISBN|ISBN]]}}: checksum</span>, '"`UNIQ--templatestyles-0000003F-QINU`"'[[ISBN (identifier)|ISBN]] [[Special:BookSources/1029384756 |1029384756]]<span class="error" style="font-size:100%"> Parameter error in {{[[Template:ISBN|ISBN]]}}: checksum</span>]]. {{
cite book}}
: Check |isbn=
value: invalid character (
help); templatestyles stripmarker in |isbn=
at position 13 (
help).
Headbomb {
talk /
contribs /
physics /
books}
18:41, 8 March 2011 (UTC){{
cite book}}
: Invalid |ref=harv
(
help); Text "|isbn=9781852238923,
ISBN
185233892X
" ignored (
help){{
cite book}}
: Check |isbn=
value: invalid character (
help); Invalid |ref=harv
(
help); Unknown parameter |address=
ignored (|location=
suggested) (
help); templatestyles stripmarker in |isbn=
at position 16 (
help) —
David Eppstein (
talk)
20:57, 8 March 2011 (UTC)This pretends to be a piece of theory of Lorentzian manifolds, but… it is a theory of doubtful notability. Incnis Mrsi ( talk) 09:18, 9 March 2011 (UTC)
I've created Ptolemy's table of chords, in its present form an imperfect article. Work on it! Michael Hardy ( talk) 23:12, 10 March 2011 (UTC)
Mathematics WikiProject members, please, this is being discussed at:
Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Names of small numbers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Names_of_small_numbers#Names_of_small_numbers
Thank you. Pandelver ( talk) 00:05, 12 March 2011 (UTC)
There's a math-related arbcom case in which someone has proposed something along the lines that discussing math on talk pages without references or (lord forbid) pointing out an error in a WP:RS is a blockable offense (after warning, of course). Linky here. Tijfo098 ( talk) 07:22, 12 March 2011 (UTC)
You are invited to comment on the content dispute regarding the stubbing of the Mathematics in medieval Islam article Thank You - Aquib ( talk) 04:11, 14 March 2011 (UTC)
Please see Talk:Numerical_approximations_of_π#Requested_move. Cheers, Ben ( talk) 11:52, 16 March 2011 (UTC).
The usage of {{ pi}} is under discussion, see Template talk: pi . 65.95.13.139 ( talk) 13:40, 18 March 2011 (UTC)
Another editor is insisting on adding their bit on calculating quarter squares to Multiplication algorithm and I'm failing to get them to desist, latest round at Talk:Multiplication_algorithm#Construction_of_tables. ANyone like to have a look at it thanks? Dmcq ( talk) 13:11, 20 March 2011 (UTC)
There are many used notations for cardinal numbers and cardinality. In all (advanced) mathematical articles which use them, we need to clarify whether the axiom of choice is assumed, and whether the von Neumann cardinal assignment and/or the assumption that cn(cn(X))=cn(X) (i.e. that "the" cardinal number of a set has the same cardinality as the set) is made. The "Union" of cardinal numbers requires some assumption similar to the von Neumann cardinal assignment, and the Sum or Product of an infinite set of cardinal numbers requires some version of the Axiom of Choice to define.
I would like to have a centralized discussion on this, putting pointers on all the articles which refer to "cardinality". I was also thinking that merging initial ordinal with aleph number might be a good start. The constructions are the same, but the assumptions are different. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 23:20, 20 March 2011 (UTC)
I would not merge those two, no. I think aleph number is an appropriate title for a brief, and not extremely mathematical, article of fairly limited scope, namely just to tell people what these funny , , thingies that they may have seen somewhere are. For deeper information, readers should be directed to articles like cardinality. -- Trovatore ( talk) 00:00, 21 March 2011 (UTC)
@Arthur: Personally, I am not very worried about the (potential) conflict of interest. The articles we are talking about are on completely established subjects, and the books by H. and J. Rubin are mainstream, not fringe sources in any way. There are plenty of other editors who watch the articles and can edit them to add other references. Your identity is known, and you are a long-time contributor to the project. Given those facts I think you should not be too worried about editing the articles, and I will say that again if anyone raises the issue. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 00:29, 21 March 2011 (UTC)
I was thinking about puttting in a link to interval (mathematics) for things like (−π, π] because people keep 'correcting' it to two round brackets. However there is a little problem in that one then gets three right square brackets or else one has to put in a space or the right bracket is black as in (−π, π]. Any ideas on a good way of getting it looking right thanks? Dmcq ( talk)
We had this discussion a while ago (in 2003 or so?) and one of the things that got decided was that the brackets in asymmetric intervals should be enclosed within "nowiki" tags. Has that been neglected lately? Michael Hardy ( talk) 17:22, 14 March 2011 (UTC)
I've seen bots "correct" semi-open intervals and similar mathematical notations. I'm aware of the nowiki solution, but seem to recall that this doesn't always discourage the more vigilant bots. A template solution seems best. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 12:35, 15 March 2011 (UTC)
I have formatted the argument (complex analysis) article using math type formatting for any inline mathematics throughout. I also set up a {{ mvar}} template to do individual variables easily. Any comments gratefully received. Dmcq ( talk) 15:14, 21 March 2011 (UTC)
The article Florentin Smarandache has been nominated for deletion for a 2nd time ( AfD here); members of this project may be interested in commenting. Mlm42 ( talk) 18:35, 17 March 2011 (UTC)
Opine here. Jakob.scholbach ( talk) 17:59, 21 March 2011 (UTC)
On the suggestion of one of the editors interested in the arbitration on Monty Hall problem, I started a little essay on mathematical notation in probability theory and its applications. First draft is at essay on probability notation; you can talk about it at: probability notation essay-talk. Comments are welcome! Especially if you can tell me that this is all superfluous because it's been done, and done better, before. Richard Gill ( talk) 18:21, 21 March 2011 (UTC)
I've put an "orphan" tag on Duffin–Schaeffer conjecture, so get busy and think of a few (dozen) articles that should link to it. Michael Hardy ( talk) 02:49, 22 March 2011 (UTC)
A new article on the Criss-cross algorithm for linear optimization has been nominated for Did You Know?:
Corrections and comments are especially welcome. Best regards, Kiefer.Wolfowitz ( Discussion) 03:48, 22 March 2011 (UTC)
I was looking at Normal number and there seems to have been an edit by a well-meaning anonymous user which broke the markup. I would revert his edits, but I don't know enough about the subject to know if he was correcting an error in the article and made a mistake. Could someone with some more math skills than I take at look at the last two edits? Thanks.
DavidSol ( talk) 01:34, 22 March 2011 (UTC)
Pick's theorem seems pretty applicable to your project. You might want to examine it and tag it if appropriate. Cliff ( talk) 05:50, 22 March 2011 (UTC)
The arbitration of the Monty Hall problem is nearing its decision phase.
Two proposals for the arbitration committee's decision concern Wikipedia policy on mathematical articles, especially original research versus secondary sources. Both proposals endorse editors' use of "arithmetic operations". This language could be of great concern to this project, and deserves your attention. Sincerely, Kiefer.Wolfowitz ( Discussion) 23:47, 13 March 2011 (UTC)
I think that the OR rule together with the Copyright law make coverage of mathematics (or any other subject) impossible. You have to think (commit 'original research') to do mathematics. The only alternative is to blindly copy from 'reliable' sources which violates copyright. Of course, such copying and the verification that the source is indeed reliable also require thought (OR). So the rule against OR is an absurdity which should be repealed.
The reason we have a rule against OR is to try to avoid disputes about what is correct reasoning by appealing to an outside source. Notice that in mathematics, this is usually only necessary when one or more of the disputing parties is a crank or troll. However, refusing to allow an edit on grounds that it is OR is ultimately just an excuse for rejecting what we think is false without having to get the agreement of a crank or troll. JRSpriggs ( talk) 03:05, 14 March 2011 (UTC)
I (K.W.) suggest the following changes:
I would suggest that we strive for consensus language here, and then ask our leaders to communicate consensus suggestions to the ArbCom page. Kiefer.Wolfowitz ( Discussion) 11:34, 14 March 2011 (UTC)
If you guys can get together a variant form of words quickly, and post it on the proposed decision talkpage, it can be put in as an alternative.
Providing examples is not a problem - slotting in different variables to a sourced method is not OR, nor is it really deriving from first principles. Glossing should not be a problem if you have some referencing to show the general applicability of the gloss. I do have concerns with the example Kiefer gave on his talkpage [32], but I'd have more problems with the old version that the new, assuming that somewhere in the sources cited are the two equations, the definition of limits, and the information about strictness in relation to Minkowski sum. It is the old example which seems to have lots of derivations without referencing. -- Elen of the Roads ( talk) 14:20, 14 March 2011 (UTC)
I've only had a chance to skim most of the Arbcom case, but it seems like the main issue is the detailed derivations from first principles. The language used should more closely reflect the actual problem, rather than casting an overly broad net against anything that could possibly be construed as original research. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 16:10, 14 March 2011 (UTC)
I don't have much to say about the MHP apart from thanking the people who have commented on the arbcom page. I did want to say something related. Lately, after discussion at WT:TECHNICAL and WT:NOR, and looking at WP:NOT, I have been thinking about the underlying issues that lead to these disagreements. I'm only thinking about articles at the advanced undergrad level and beyond here; articles on basic topics are less problematic because there are plenty of low-level references. But there are few references on advanced topics that are accessible to an untrained reader.
Three points:
I think that we do a reasonable job at balancing these things in our articles, both overall and in mathematics. My main point is that if we realize that Wikipedia's goals are sometimes in conflict with each other, it can help us find a middle ground. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 13:43, 14 March 2011 (UTC)
In response to comments made by editors from this WikiProject, Arbitrator Elen of the Roads has proposed an alternative wording of the principle, which caused concern here, for other arbitrators to consider and vote upon. You can comment on the proposed principles at Wikipedia_talk:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Monty_Hall_problem/Proposed_decision. Geometry guy 23:42, 14 March 2011 (UTC)
Regardless of the OR statement of principle that ArbCom may or may not adopt, I am concerned by what the examples of what they are claiming is OR in their statement of facts -- specifically the three claimed examples cited at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Monty_Hall_problem/Proposed_decision#Article_has_been_subject_of_original_research Article has been subject of original research.
As far as I can see (more detail on the decision talk page here, here, and here), none of these three examples properly constitute original research.
It seems to me that this is no small issue, because the examples Arbcom cite are going to be the most direct operational indication of what they consider to be OR, and how they mean whatever principles they adopt to be interpreted.
I'd welcome second and further opinions on these examples, and whether we think they are OR or not, because the Arbcom members are refusing to engage on the merits of these links; yet are still happily voting for the proposition. Jheald ( talk) 09:55, 15 March 2011 (UTC)
Even some ArbCom members refused to vote on using its exact current wording in their principles (which they are still struggling to formulate in that respect). So, clearly WP:CALC is deficient. I suggest you guys take this opportunity to improve the wording in the policy, so you won't have to put out this kind of fire in the future. All the best, Tijfo098 ( talk) 18:27, 16 March 2011 (UTC)
There is a new proposed wording. It works for me. Does anyone else have any thoughts about it? Sławomir Biały ( talk) 14:11, 17 March 2011 (UTC)
The decision has been publicized. Kiefer.Wolfowitz ( Discussion) 00:44, 25 March 2011 (UTC)
Just to let you know, I have updated my mathJax user script to recent version 1.1 of MathJax. Notable change is the support for webfonts via CDN (i.e., no local font installation requirements). Details at the user script documentation page. Feedback welcome. Nageh ( talk) 21:37, 23 March 2011 (UTC)
... is John Milnor, who has been awarded the Abel Prize. The article is OK as such, but could obviously be expanded quite a bit. Charles Matthews ( talk) 09:43, 25 March 2011 (UTC)
There seems to be a bit of hostility to the newly-listed article Drinker's paradox on the article's discussion page. Various editors are grumbling about deletion, original research, etc. I thought perhaps someone in the project should investigate. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 12:16, 25 March 2011 (UTC)
Apparently someone rediscovered the trapezoidal rule and managed to get it published. See Tai's method. Just an article about the trapezoidal rule under another name? Or an article about how something weird like that can happen? Either way, is the article in some way worth keeping? Michael Hardy ( talk) 03:49, 26 March 2011 (UTC)
The 'Math and logic' symbols in the editor include a load of special symbols. Is it okay to use all these in maths articles? For instance can I say ℝ rather than in inline maths? And by the way I don't believe I should bold that as in ℝ, would that be right too? Dmcq ( talk) 12:56, 26 March 2011 (UTC)
"Inline" as opposed to "displayed" use of TeX within Wikipedia has always been problematic. Things like the following can happen:
Obviously the e should be at the same level as the surrounding text and the x3 should be in superscript, but that's not what happens. Also on some browsers, the part in math tags looks comically gigantic. You can also get siuations like this:
The right parenthesis is on the next line! It also happens with periods, commas, etc. "Displayed" TeX, on the other hand, generally looks quite good:
So I generally prefer non-TeX notation in an "inline" setting. Michael Hardy ( talk) 00:54, 27 March 2011 (UTC)
Over at Talk:N-dimensional space we're having a traditional merging discussion. The issue is that these articles (and probably others) all contain redundant material: Space (mathematics), Vector space, Dimension, Dimension (vector space), Basis (linear algebra), Euclidean space, Manifold (mathematics), N-dimensional space. So I thought I'd bring it up here.
My opinion: Each kind of space (vector, Euclidean, manifold, etc.) obviously deserves its own article. Additionally the Space (mathematics) and Dimension articles seem useful as catalogues/overviews. But Dimension (vector space) could be merged into Basis (linear algebra) and/or Vector space, and N-dimensional space could be merged into Space (mathematics) and/or Dimension.
Any comments? Mgnbar ( talk) 16:39, 26 March 2011 (UTC)
Special case is currently a stub article that could use a lot of work, both within the article and in other articles that should link to it. Get busy. Michael Hardy ( talk) 00:45, 27 March 2011 (UTC)
Hi! I use Wikipedia very often and thought for sure that a policy of yours was to add in a "page history" page that showed any changes to an article and by whom for that page?
I ask because your page on Summation had early in its write-up an image of an example of Induction ( http://upload.wikimedia.org/math/5/d/1/5d1ba66a7aca2c258985399ff22410ef.png ) ... odd that that very image wasn't there just a few days ago for another image that was the exact same equation but in different form.
I looked for the history of why and who changed that image because its odd I been coincidently writing a paper on the example of Induction used of the original image and linking this very page for that image and sending that paper to leading Set Theory specialists and other university piers and that image was very helpfull in dealing with the issues the paper regarded. Now suddenly someone changed the image to a different example of Induction and I find the timing very peculiar. It doesn't change anything about my paper except for it to be easier to understand for anyone needing to see the example of Induction I was using from here but is now changed. I only linked to the page on Summation.
Anyways, how did that image change on the Summation page without anyone ever knowing it happened or why in the pages history?? — Preceding unsigned comment added by G2thef ( talk • contribs)
In looking over some project work I did for an undergrduate computing degree I noted that the academic supervising me had come up with what he called a 'slew' transform.
I've put a rough note in my userspace at Wikiversity (because of concerns about verifability here) The link is : http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/User:ShakespeareFan00/Slew_transform
I'd appreciate someone from the WikiProject that understand 3D transformation stuff, to help provide a better citation , or indeed a creative commons licensed proof that will show what's stated is correct.
A 'slew' transform is a transform where 'distances' parrallel to an axes before a 'slew' are preserved, as opposed to a 'shear' where they are not.
I'm also trying to understand how to abstractly define a 'grid'. ( The best definition I can think of for 2D is that a 'grid' is
a regular arrangement of points and lines that fills a plane.
For a 'cubic' style of grid, this regular arrangement can be more formally considered as a (Lattice Graph?) formed by the Cartesian product of 2 path graphs, representing lines perpendicular to each other. However, I'm thinking I need to put in some kind of constraint on where the grid points can be placed, and I'm not entirly sure how I specfiy that constraint in an abstract math way...
A 'polar' style of grid is however more complex, being the Cartesian product of a number of path graphs(?) with some kind of cycle graph , ( aka a Prism Graph?). Again some kind of constraint would need to be defined on where grid points can be placed..
And finally Has this sort of thing been done before in a textbook a math noob can understand? Sfan00 IMG ( talk) 22:36, 27 March 2011 (UTC)
The context of the slew transform by the way in the original project was based on being able to convert a 'cubic' lattice to be transformed into a 'heaxagonal' or 'parallelogrammic lattice' one (in 2 dimensions).
Can you suggest a better way to describe what a slew transform appears to be doing, because I'd like to be able to explain it clearly to other people? Sfan00 IMG ( talk) 09:52, 28 March 2011 (UTC)
While this unreferenced article looks cool, I can't find anything in google books to support it. WP:OR? Tijfo098 ( talk) 05:21, 25 March 2011 (UTC)
I guess most of these are perfectly okay but is there some that even someone familiar with Charles Saunders Pierce isn't familiar with or thinks is unnecessary? Dmcq ( talk) 18:50, 25 March 2011 (UTC)
Logical graph is a nebulous article that could use work. I think the term existential graph has been used more recently, and perhaps even by Pierce. Tijfo098 ( talk) 04:09, 30 March 2011 (UTC)
There is a deletion discussion under the auspices of our project that could benefit from its input. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 00:21, 31 March 2011 (UTC)
Is this a notable article? Jakob.scholbach ( talk) 21:19, 27 March 2011 (UTC)
An editor is insisting in marking the lead of Fourth dimension as dubious in "In mathematics, the fourth dimension, or a four-dimensional ("4D") space,[dubious – discuss] is an abstract concept derived by generalizing the rules of three-dimensional space". They say a four dimensional space could be any sort of space not necessarily Euclidean whereas others have said it referes in this instance to an extension of Euclidean 3-space. I would like to remove the dubious tag or otherwise resolve this. This is a bit similar I guess to the N-dimensional space business mentioned in a section above but as far as I can see there has been no real follow up to that, also I think they are a bit different in that N-dimensional space is actually used for many other things like configuration spaces whereas four-dimensional space is rather specific. Talk is at Talk:Fourth dimension#Title?. Dmcq ( talk) 11:00, 31 March 2011 (UTC)
I have no idea what these two are about exactly, but these two articles seems to be about the same thing. Opinions on what should be done? Headbomb { talk / contribs / physics / books} 19:16, 31 March 2011 (UTC)
Our page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:0.999.../FAQ lists a number of frequently asked questions about 0.999... One of the answers to these questions deals with the "number" 0.000...01 (with an implied infinity of zeros before the last digit). The answer asserts, correctly, that this number is meaningless as a real decimal. I added a brief parenthetical comment here to the effect that one can make sense of such a number in a proper extension of R, providing a link to a page where this is discussed. The parenthetical remark was apparently too much for the guardians of purity at 0.999... and was reverted, most recently here. I would appreciate some input. Tkuvho ( talk) 20:24, 31 March 2011 (UTC)
I have just been reading a mathematics article about the Halting Problem (Turing et al) and found it to be very difficult to read. A lot of text books on subjects particularly in the field of science and maths have been written in this style and it leaves the reader frustrated and confused. Surely an encyclopedic article should be accessible to the widest audience possible? I think some simplification of the language with perhaps more steps and examples would help to get across to the reader some of the concepts involved. Readers are generally not stupid people (else why would they be there) but the knowledge should be communicated better. Language, next to knowledge, is the most important asset an encyclopedia can have.
Sam- Helsinki, Finland —Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.231.106.209 ( talk) 08:21, 1 April 2011 (UTC)
The style/tone could also use some work there, e.g. Minsky exhorts the reader to be suspicious—although a machine may be finite, and finite automata "have a number of theoretical limitations": It reads like one of those controversial, he-says-she-says, social science articles. Tijfo098 ( talk) 21:26, 1 April 2011 (UTC)
In view of the date, please have a look at this article and confirm my suspicions. JohnCD ( talk) 19:07, 1 April 2011 (UTC)
One of the more elaborate hoaxes. Created on the appropriate calendar date for such. Michael Hardy ( talk) 22:40, 1 April 2011 (UTC)
Can anyone think of a reason not to merge these? Tijfo098 ( talk) 22:36, 1 April 2011 (UTC)
Frobenius determinant theorem is a near-orphaned article. So if the internal-link-muse speaks to you, figure out which articles should link to it and add the links. Michael Hardy ( talk) 22:37, 1 April 2011 (UTC)
Does the Futurama theorem merit its own article ? A merger proposal is being discussed at Talk:Futurama theorem. Gandalf61 ( talk) 15:15, 2 April 2011 (UTC)
The group of Jacques Tits is important in mathematics, and it might be a suitable article for this project to improve to Featured Status in time for next year's April Fool's Day. Kiefer.Wolfowitz ( Discussion) 17:44, 2 April 2011 (UTC)
There were a bunch of really obvious copy-editing issues that I've just taken care of. Michael Hardy ( talk) 19:26, 2 April 2011 (UTC)
Opinions of Simon Davis (mathematician)? It's been prodded. It says he applies the theory of perfect numbers to physics. I wouldn't have guessed those would be connected, but maybe I'm just naive. Michael Hardy ( talk) 17:14, 2 April 2011 (UTC)
It would seem that we currently have no article about Ivar Ekeland, although nine other articles link to it. Michael Hardy ( talk) 02:53, 3 April 2011 (UTC)
{{
cite journal}}
: Invalid |ref=harv
(
help)Tkuvho has now created the article and some others have contributed to it. Michael Hardy ( talk) 19:35, 3 April 2011 (UTC)
The article Pi is about the mathematical constant. There is a question about whether the lead image should be relevant to the topic of the article, or should be an image of the Greek letter. Please comment at Talk:Pi#Pi "Unrolled" animation. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 19:41, 3 April 2011 (UTC)
The usage of Π is under discussion, see Talk:Pi. 65.93.12.101 ( talk) 01:27, 4 April 2011 (UTC)
Many of you will enjoy reading about John Rainwater, who led the functional-analysis seminar at the University of Washington over a 5-decade career. His research achievements and long-relationship with UW are remarkable especially given his graduate-student record, which included plagiarism and planting an explosive device for his professor. Sincerely, Kiefer.Wolfowitz ( Discussion) 09:51, 2 April 2011 (UTC)
Note two related articles on other functional analysts, Robert Phelps and Peter Orno. Kiefer.Wolfowitz ( Discussion) 02:34, 5 April 2011 (UTC)
There's a request to move Fourth dimension to Four-dimensional space at Talk:Fourth dimension#Requested move Dmcq ( talk) 00:52, 5 April 2011 (UTC)
We seem to have three articles on the same subject:
Does anyone know why? Are there any objective reasons to have three articles on this relatively elementary topic? — Carl ( CBM · talk) 00:49, 29 March 2011 (UTC)
Actually, that article is well-written, so perhaps there is a way to keep it available to the public on WikiMedia servers. I don't now much about that, but I think Wikiversity would accept that page as-is. Although Wikiversity doesn't get the same google juice as Wikipedia, we could link it from Boolean algebra; I'm not sure what are the standards for that. Perhaps someone here has experience in that area? Tijfo098 ( talk) 12:21, 29 March 2011 (UTC)
FWIW, there is a book chapter in Padmanabhan & Rudeanu [38] (full ref given in Boolean algebra (structure)), so I have created Axiomatization of Boolean algebras as a redirect, but it's conceivable that it could become a list-type sub-article at some point. I don't have interest in developing it myself though. Tijfo098 ( talk) 21:45, 1 April 2011 (UTC)
I'm not sure I understand what the purported proof systems article could contain that's not already in propositional calculus. Can someone enlighten me on that? Tijfo098 ( talk) 21:57, 1 April 2011 (UTC)
There's a proposal to merge that as well at BATF. Tijfo098 ( talk) 20:09, 6 April 2011 (UTC)
A. H. Lightstone is on sale here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/A._H._Lightstone Tkuvho ( talk) 15:20, 31 March 2011 (UTC)
I've proposed a merger of these articles at Talk:Subrandom numbers. It's not a merger that I myself feel competent enough to carry out, though. Are there any volunteers here? Sławomir Biały ( talk) 11:51, 7 April 2011 (UTC)
Could a mathematician take a look at this new article by a new contributor - it seems a bit odd to me but I don't know much about this subject.-- Physics is all gnomes ( talk) 13:31, 7 April 2011 (UTC)
Now proposed for deletion at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Exact Prime Counting Method. -- The Anome ( talk) 14:26, 7 April 2011 (UTC)
I have nominated Monty Hall problem for a featured article review here. Please join the discussion on whether this article meets featured article criteria. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. If substantial concerns are not addressed during the review period, the article will be moved to the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Delist" the article's featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. Tijfo098 ( talk) 22:58, 7 April 2011 (UTC)
A somewhat odd and certainly under-referenced article. I looked it up after this thread, which is certainly enough to show the interest of this concept as basic geometry. (Of which I wasn't aware.) The corresponding Cut locus (Riemannian manifold) is better, but still looks neglected. Charles Matthews ( talk) 15:54, 8 April 2011 (UTC)
Artin's conjecture on primitive roots and Artin's constant substantially overlap with each other. Each has a hatnote linking to the other. Should they get merged? Michael Hardy ( talk) 03:19, 9 April 2011 (UTC)
I wanted to let you know I submitted a recommendation to delete an unused and probably uneeded redirect relating to template:Maths rating. You can see the request here. -- Kumioko ( talk) 19:53, 10 April 2011 (UTC)
Inappropriate language is being used at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:0.999.../Arguments Tkuvho ( talk) 11:25, 11 April 2011 (UTC)
Taylor series, a top importance article, has been nominated for good article status (see WP:GACR for good article criteria). The review is here. We need reviewers and probably also editors. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 18:18, 11 April 2011 (UTC)
Hi all,
I stumbled upon
Fuzzy matrix theory, and it looked slightly odd and fringey. The sole source is
this which looks rather like cargo-cult maths to me; so I've sent it to
AfD. All expert inputs would be welcomed on the
AfD page... alternatively, if it could be rescued somehow, that's cool too.
bobrayner (
talk)
21:48, 11 April 2011 (UTC)
Until my revision the article Center (group theory) stated that
That may be true, but it sounds as if A4 had a nontrivial center, which is not true, as can be seen in the Cayley table on the right. So maybe it should read
If someone knows that's true he may add it to the article. Until now the sentence is <!---hidden--->. Lipedia ( talk) 09:42, 13 April 2011 (UTC)
Help. Trying to wikify Wright Camera ( | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) but, it needs some math expertise. Thanks, Chzz ► 05:58, 14 April 2011 (UTC)
The article Taylor's theorem has a largish proliferation of proofs. (It used to have three, and has recently had as many as five. Now it's down to four. At least I've recently simplified two of those considerably.) I can see the usefulness of having some simple proofs that illustrate the basic relevant techniques (like the Cauchy mean value theorem, and restricting to a line segment in the case of several variables). However, there is some discussion of including complete proofs of basically all the results in the article. To me this seems rather contrary to the well-established consensus here, but I'd appreciate some outside input. Thanks, Sławomir Biały ( talk) 22:47, 11 April 2011 (UTC)
Circle (topology) currently redirects to circle group. Some knot-theory articles mentioning circles probably should link to circle (topology) but not to circle group. I've made circle (topology) into a "redirect with possibilities". So how about those possibilities? Should, or will, someone do something? Michael Hardy ( talk) 03:11, 14 April 2011 (UTC)
I just found that circle action was a red link from quaternionic projective space, but nothing else linked there. So I redirected it to circle group. Michael Hardy ( talk) 14:33, 14 April 2011 (UTC)
For now I've redirected circle (topology) to n-sphere, while leaving the "redirect with possibilities" tag intact. Michael Hardy ( talk) 02:03, 15 April 2011 (UTC)
What about creating something like WikiProject Prime numbers. I know there is already the sub project Wikipedia:WikiProject Numbers, but I (and I think some other editors as well) are especially interested in prime numbers. The project could serve as a centralized point of discussion for editors interested in prime numbers, but not working on other number related articles. The scope of this project would include all of the articles about the classes of prime numbers listed in List of prime numbers. It could also include articles where the number class includes a subsequence of prime numbers that do not have an own article (like for example Leyland number). Toshio Yamaguchi ( talk) 16:05, 14 April 2011 (UTC)
At Talk:0.999... inexperienced editors sometimes leave comments that are not directly related to improving the page. For this reason, a separate "arguments" page was created where such discussions can continue. Comments not directly related to improving the page are supposed to be moved to the "arguments" page. Recently, a couple of editors started a new trend of summarily deleting comments that are not to their liking. Furthermore, one of them threatened to "report" any further reinstatement of the deleted material. This would not appear to be consistent with minimal standards of politeness we expect at wiki. Tkuvho ( talk) 04:42, 15 April 2011 (UTC)
Euler on infinite series has been prodded for deletion. 64.229.100.45 ( talk) 04:58, 15 April 2011 (UTC)
I'm actually coming back to this as a result of some discussion at Talk:The Prisoner of Benda (where the ridiculous suggestion that minor copyedits to a proof were "original research"). In the past, we've had many discussions on inclusion of proofs in articles, and now there is even the dedicated subpage Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Proofs. A basic editing principle that I have always adhered to is that it's better just to say why a result is true than to give a detailed derivation of it. This often means communicating the main ideas of the proof, without going into details. (In some sense, to "talk about the proof" rather than give it.) I find that this produces more seamless prose suited to an encyclopedia article. I've always thought that somewhere this was codified in a guideline or essay. It's certainly a point that I bring up in most discussions about proofs in mathematics articles. But it doesn't seem to be in either WP:MSM or WP:WPM/Proofs. Is this idea, or something like it, something we agree on? Should it be added to WP:WPM/Proofs? Sławomir Biały ( talk) 11:47, 13 April 2011 (UTC)
{{démonstration| * Si on prend un élément <math>x_n</math> dans chaque <math>F_n</math>, la suite <math>(x_n)</math> est de [[suite de Cauchy|Cauchy]]. En effet, pour un <math>\varepsilon>0</math> fixé, il existe un rang <math>N</math> tel que le diamètre de <math>F_N</math> soit majoré par <math>\varepsilon</math>, et en particulier <math>d(x_n,x_m)\le\varepsilon</math> pour tous <math>m, n\ge N</math>. Cette suite est donc convergente car <math>E</math> est complet. * De plus, sa limite <math>x</math> appartient à chaque <math>F_n</math>. En effet, pour tout <math>n\in\mathbb{N}</math>, la suite <math>(x_m)_{m\ge n}</math> est à valeurs dans <math>F_n</math> (puisque <math>m\ge n\Rightarrow x_m\in F_m\subset F_n</math>) donc sa limite <math>x</math> aussi (puisque <math>F_n</math> est fermé). On a donc prouvé que l'intersection des <math>F_n</math> est non vide. * Enfin, elle est réduite à un point puisque son diamètre est nul (car majoré par tous les diamètres des <math>F_n</math>, dont l'inf est 0).}}
The editor at Talk:The Prisoner of Benda has become increasingly aggressive in his stance that summarizing published proofs and making slight copyedits to them is original research. I would appreciate it if someone uninvolved could have a look. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 13:13, 14 April 2011 (UTC)
I think this ridiculous episode makes it glaringly obvious that we need clarity on whether summarizing proofs, or rewriting proofs in our own words without substantively altering them, or changing notation, is considered to be original research. It is painfully clear to me that, in the case of discussion, no original research has been committed at any time, in any version of the article under discussion. It has already been (convincingly, to my mind, by Kmhkmh), suggested that Andrevan has been misrepresenting the spirit, if not the letter, of WP:OR by insisting on an overly rigid interpretation of it. Also, a lot of this is explained by the fact that Andrevan is of the opinion that WP:V means that a lay-person should be able to verify the content of an article, without requiring any special subject knowledge. This is an untenable position for any encyclopedia that covers a wide range of serious topics, in my opinion. But there it is. Perhaps we need to formalize some clarity about that as well. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 00:14, 15 April 2011 (UTC)
May be a little off-topic here, but I don't know where else to ask. Can someone figure out what's the deal with Birkhäuser Verlag vs. the Springer math & science book series, which is still published under that imprint? We might need to create a dab for Birkhäuser. Tijfo098 ( talk) 06:51, 17 April 2011 (UTC)
Blackburne, of A. H. Lightstone fame, is now attempting to delete a brief quotation at Adequality on the grounds that it is a copyright violation. Help! Tkuvho ( talk) 12:24, 17 April 2011 (UTC)
There is a deletion discussion for this article which is getting a lot of attention. This is related to Fibonacci number which is #7 on our list of most frequently viewed (really more like #1 if you take out physics and statistics articles).-- RDBury ( talk) 18:10, 17 April 2011 (UTC)
Can someone improve Heinz-Dieter Ebbinghaus before it's nominated for deletion? Tijfo098 ( talk) 09:12, 18 April 2011 (UTC)
Maybe someone here has an opinion whether clause in logic only means a disjunction. Tijfo098 ( talk) 16:14, 18 April 2011 (UTC)
The DYK nomination for the new article on Ivar Ekeland, which Tkuvho started (and which I expanded) should get a lot of DYK hits.
5x expanded by Kiefer.Wolfowitz ( talk). Self nom at 10:55, 12 April 2011 (UTC)
There's a number of links to non-Newtonian calculus being stuck in to various articles by User Talk:Smithpith ( contribs). He has warnings in the talk page but we should figure out exactly what link should be kept if any I think. Dmcq ( talk) 20:02, 18 April 2011 (UTC)
From Michael Grossman: I thought those links were pertinent. If I was wrong, I'm sorry. I have no intention of violating Wikipedia's rules. Smithpith ( talk) 22:58, 18 April 2011 (UTC)
I created an infobox for articles about integer sequences a while ago (see Template:Infobox integer sequence for the template and Special:WhatLinksHere/Template:Infobox integer sequence for articles, where it is currently being used). I would like to include an image in every case, where the infobox is in use. For this purpose, it would be nice to have some input on which ways of visualizing integer sequences could be used for creating images for use in the infobox. My preference is in favor of ideas that can be easily realized using simple image editing software. Also I am aware of the visualization methods used by OEIS. Finally, the image should be interesting, without being distracting, even if only two or three terms of the sequence are known. Any additional input is welcome. Thanks. Toshio Yamaguchi ( talk) 23:07, 18 April 2011 (UTC)
....currently redirects to errors and residuals in statistics. That obviously doesn't make sense. So:
Michael Hardy ( talk) 19:31, 19 April 2011 (UTC)
I propose to move the controversial page Non-Newtonian calculus to a more appropriate title Modifications of the calculus. It can be decided later what to do about multiplicative calculus. The term "non-Newtonian" is a neologism coined by the author of the book that has not been widely accepted. The term makes it appear as if this approach is a significant modification of the calculus, somehow going against the Newtonian approach. Meanwhile, the main idea of this approach seems to amount to apply log to a product before differentiating. Whatever the possible applications of this method may be in engineering, the title should reflect the contents more precisely. Also in any future AfD the participants will have a more accurate picture of the intrinsic merit of the approach. Tkuvho ( talk) 10:09, 21 April 2011 (UTC)
The article has been nominated for deletion: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Non-Newtonian calculus (2nd nomination). Please direct your comments there. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 14:38, 21 April 2011 (UTC)
I've created List of numeral systems and would appreciate help making it somewhat complete. -- Bea o 17:36, 21 April 2011 (UTC)
The BBC has a collection of audio programs related to mathematics at [44]. Many of these are episodes of the radio series "In Our Time". Just mentioning it for general interest but I'm also thinking it would be a worthwhile project to make sure we have a link to each program in the "External links" section of the corresponding WP article.-- RDBury ( talk) 17:38, 20 April 2011 (UTC)
I'm looking for reactions to the idea at File talk:Pi-unrolled-720.gif#Radians. In a nutshell, the idea is to make a relatively minor change to that animation changing the radius from 1/2 to 1 and the circumference from π to 2π (I don't really know whether this would be controversial, but at least to me the reasons for it are pretty sound and in line with the mathematical tendency to deal with circles of radius one). The intro (where it lines up the circles) would probably best be changed to somehow visually emphasize the radius a bit more than the diameter. Whether the new image replaces the old one or just gets used places like Radian and Turn (geometry) is to be determined. If people like the idea, we can presumably get help from Wikipedia:Graphic Lab/Illustration workshop and/or Wikipedia:Graphic Lab/Photography workshop (I would have thought the former, but I guess the people at the latter are more accustomed to working with raster images). Kingdon ( talk) 01:33, 23 April 2011 (UTC)
I expect most of us who have math articles on our watchlists see this from time to time -- an article contains the word provably, used correctly, and someone, usually an IP, changes it to probably.
I was just idly wondering if anyone else has an opinion on this. Is it a specific person who just likes to do this for fun, maybe figuring it's a subtle change that might escape notice? Or, is it that a lot of people just don't know the word provably and fix the "typo" in good faith?
Either way, it seems likely that some such changes go uncaught. Just thought I'd mention it so that the next time one of us sees the word probably in a math article, we might give half a second's thought to whether it's really supposed to be provably. (Or, I suppose, the reverse is also possible, but I don't recall an example of that.) -- Trovatore ( talk) 04:56, 23 April 2011 (UTC)
I've created a new article titled Haynsworth inertia additivity formula.
That article and Sylvester's law of inertia treat of this particular concept of "inertia". Is this so called because of a conceptual connection with physical inertia? If so, those article ought to explain the connetion.
To do:
Michael Hardy ( talk) 18:07, 23 April 2011 (UTC)
Should we have a list of matrix topics or list of matrix theory topics? Michael Hardy ( talk) 18:15, 23 April 2011 (UTC)
But navboxes seem to be for navigating, whereas lists are (partly? largely?) for browsing. Michael Hardy ( talk) 00:29, 24 April 2011 (UTC)
Branching random walk is a stubby new article. Work on it. Michael Hardy ( talk) 21:03, 22 April 2011 (UTC)
For MF, search among the primary writers of featured articles on English WP.
Malleus Fatuorum and I discussed hyphens previously, with good humor, also. See
the MOS, also.
Kiefer.Wolfowitz (
Discussion)
23:42, 22 April 2011 (UTC)
Regarding the article on Hadamard's lemma. It is presented as a first order application of Taylor's theorem; which is fine. But then it assumes that the function is real valued. I'm sure that it works for functions from C to C. Moreover, I'm sure that the statement can be generalised in terms of other fields. Does the statement holds for functions from a field K to a field K? If not, then what are the necessary conditions? What is the most general form of the lemma? All we need is for a function from K to K to be continuous, and for its first order derivative to be continuous. I've listen to talks about p-adic differentiation and integration (i.e. where the field K is a finite field with a prime number of elements); surely the article can be extended. What do we think? — Fly by Night ( talk) 21:40, 22 April 2011 (UTC)
In the article titled quasisymmetric map, this is given as the definition:
What does mean? Does it mean ? Clearly the article needs work. Michael Hardy ( talk) 15:11, 26 April 2011 (UTC)
The Template:Cubes has been proposed for deletion: {{ cubes}} Please see the discussion regarding its deletion.
Also, consider expanding and improving the Cubes navbox, which was recently created and newly expanded: In particular, crystallography may have many cubic articles. (It was never meant for mathematicians, who are served by the fine navboxes on polytopes, etc., but for civilians.)
Thanks! Kiefer.Wolfowitz ( Discussion) 17:14, 22 April 2011 (UTC)
The article Shapley–Folkman lemma has been nominated for A-class review. Your comments are most welcome. Best regards, Kiefer. Wolfowitz 22:58, 27 April 2011 (UTC)
The article Peter Scholze is at AfD: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Peter Scholze. What do we think of this? (Initially I had missed that he was a Clay fellow, but this could tip the discussion the other way.) Sławomir Biały ( talk) 13:14, 28 April 2011 (UTC)
Another IMO related AfD discussion is here: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Iurie Boreico. This one seems more clear-cut. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 19:46, 28 April 2011 (UTC)
Can someone knowledgeable in commutative algebra add the details about Rees' contribution form some math source (and not a newspaper obit of someone else)? I've added the semigroup theory stuff I knew of. Tijfo098 ( talk) 02:01, 29 April 2011 (UTC)
Also the page of his (former) student Michael P. Drazin could enjoy more than a sentence. Tijfo098 ( talk) 02:05, 29 April 2011 (UTC)
New article looks like it was done as an extra credit project. Well done for what it is but not really encyclopedic in style. Copy to WikiBooks?-- RDBury ( talk) 04:12, 29 April 2011 (UTC)
Does anyone have some details on Volterra's role in developing multiplicative calculus and to what extent this was influential? The impact of this subject seems to be not much greater than non-Newtonian calculus (see deletion page). Unless we can justify it as a historical page, it may be next. Tkuvho ( talk) 04:58, 24 April 2011 (UTC)
Since the arbitration committee ruling, Monty Hall problem has become a much more cooperative place. Alas, it has also become a place where there are very few editors. If you walked away from the article because of the battleground it became, you might want to consider revisiting it. Guy Macon ( talk) 12:52, 25 April 2011 (UTC)
To Tkuvho: Rather than put the Monty Hall problem specifically into the list of misconceptions, you should figure out what general misconception about probability or statistics is responsible for the popular misunderstanding of MH and put that into the list. Then MH could be linked to as an example. That would make the entry much more useful and important. JRSpriggs ( talk) 13:49, 29 April 2011 (UTC)
Do we need Category:Non-Newtonian calculus ? Tkuvho ( talk) 08:14, 29 April 2011 (UTC)
Loosely connected to the recent Signpost Interview, I was thinking about the project's aims etc. Taking the article assessment as a first (rough) indicator for where we are, I was looking at the most important, but worst articles. This is the list ("<500" means that the article is among the 500 most viewed math articles, vital articles are also bold).
After the Signpost interview the other day, I was curious where WP:MATH will be going etc. Given this list, I'm wondering whether we might want to identify particular target articles etc. For example, I'm personally most concerned/astonished about the group "branches of maths". I did not check each individual article above for its quality, but most are really crappy (or at least short). Another criterion might be "importance to the general public" (i.e., the <500 ones). Most of them are either basic notions or probability/statistics. What do you guys think about all this? I.e., 1) what aims do we have and 2) how do we get there? Jakob.scholbach ( talk) 19:31, 24 April 2011 (UTC)
I agree with what Sławomir is saying about the vital articles list. But as far as I can tell, the list is not used for anything important. A much more important list is at m:List of articles every Wikipedia should have. This seems to be used by those starting Wikipedias in other languages. The current list is:
Logic and probability appear not under mathematics but under philosophy. Algorithm appears under computers. This list seems okay considering its size, but I think there are improvements we can make. If it were up to me, I would:
Before I propose this change, I'd like some feedback. What would you like to see changed on this list? (Note that the size of the list is fixed; you can't add something without removing something else.) Ozob ( talk) 00:34, 27 April 2011 (UTC)
Isn't it a bit pretentious to tell other WPs what they should have?-- Kmhkmh ( talk) 12:15, 27 April 2011 (UTC)
(unindent) I don't consider this question foolish, just difficult. Moreover, I think coming up with the best list of vital topics etc. is not what's most important. It seems that most (all?) people around agree at least that the topics listed above under "Branches/theories" are crucial (in order to use a word that is not "vital", "top importance" etc.). Yet, many of them are in poor state. For example, look at real analysis. I would love to initiate a drive that turns these articles (one by one, obviously) into decent articles. Does not need to be good, but maybe B-ish would be nice. Do(n't) you share this wish? Jakob.scholbach ( talk) 20:28, 28 April 2011 (UTC)
The preface at Wikipedia:Vital articles/Expanded (level 4) implies to me that the Wikipedia:Vital articles have a function that others naysay (I don't like hyphens), underlying some cooperative effort across wikipedia editions. Unlike the level 3 list, this list is nowhere near being worked on across the various wikis for other languages.
I don't now have time to read more or to comment.-- P64 ( talk) 22:48, 27 April 2011 (UTC)
Going back to the list at the top of this section: we can see here that most of the ratings are some years old. Although many of the articles aren't in perfect condition, I think the majority have moved beyond start-class. How are the ratings used? Is there any value in going through this list and updating ratings where appropriate? Jowa fan ( talk) 07:03, 28 April 2011 (UTC)
For example,
Is there any such tool here at Wikipedia? -- P64 ( talk) 15:05, 30 April 2011 (UTC)
Does anyone here think "we" is used improperly at powerset construction? The books cited use pretty much the same tone. Tijfo098 ( talk) 23:25, 29 April 2011 (UTC)
This sort of "we" is often better rephrased. But a while ago various strange people were construing it literally as referring to the author of the article, and saying that makes it an expression of personal views, to be tagged as an "essay-like" article. That is absurd. Michael Hardy ( talk) 04:24, 30 April 2011 (UTC)
Is there a wiki policy that editors should try to help rather than prod? See generality of algebra. Tkuvho ( talk) 20:23, 30 April 2011 (UTC)
What is our opinion of this edit? Michael Hardy ( talk) 17:09, 20 April 2011 (UTC)
<big>
for his examples.) There will always be readers with deviating font- and screen settings. I crafted {{
math}} (and by extension {{
pi}}), to suit the majority of readers that have default screen and font setting... on multiple platforms. It is those readers we have to accommodate. And while your example may not be the prettiest to look at, it isn't unreadable either. That makes your objection purely one of personal preference, and we simply cannot cater for all personal preferences. (You can however specify your own font for math and pi in your personal CSS.) —
Edokter (
talk) —
22:11, 20 April 2011 (UTC)π
and leave the rendering up to the user's browser.Somehow this discussion has moved on to the merits of serif versus sans. The more immediate problem is whether the ratio of the circumference to the diameter should be represented by the ordinary string of letters "pi" (as some are arguing) or by the Greek symbol. (I don't personally care whether it has serifs). Sławomir Biały ( talk) 22:52, 20 April 2011 (UTC)
I suggest we make a list of all the math articles with pi or π in the title and then submit a formal multipart move request. Kauffner ( talk) 23:34, 20 April 2011 (UTC)
I don't think the screen reader argument mentioned above is a good one: we should be very careful about demanding our article content satisfy some limitations of certain pieces of software. Lots of examples come to mind with that thought, but in the case of the screen reader the solution should be to fix the screen reader so it pronounces π correctly, not change all of our articles so the screen reader pronounces things as expected. Personally I value consistency; in mathematics we overwhelmingly use the symbol π to refer to the constant and in Wikipedia our articles largely use the same symbol. I would prefer to be consistent and use only π (with obvious redirects from the spelling pi), including for the article title of the pi article (a brief note about the usage of pi is of course acceptable). I have no opinion on the choice of font. Cheers, Ben ( talk) 03:09, 21 April 2011 (UTC).
So, some of the affected articles have been moved back to the versions with π in the title. I can't seem to move Liu Hui's pi algorithm back to Liu Hui's π algorithm, Chronology of computation of pi back to Chronology of computation of π, or List of formulae involving pi back to List of formulae involving π. This requires administrative powers, apparently. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 12:48, 22 April 2011 (UTC)
I have proposed that the remaining articles be moved back at Talk:Liu Hui's pi algorithm#Requested move. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 07:13, 27 April 2011 (UTC)
I propose that we clarify the math MOS to explicitly point out that the symbol π should not be spelled out 'pi' in running text when it is being used to refer to the mathematical constant. I think most people already expected that was the case, but recently there have been articles where the symbol was replaced by the spelled out 'pi'. Article titles are more complicated, and I prefer to handle them on a case by case basis, but in running text we routinely use lots of Greek letters without spelling them out. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 12:45, 21 April 2011 (UTC)
If you look at the cover photos of "The joy of π" [50] and "π: a biography" [51] they obviously both use π. The Borweins do use pi in book titles, but if you look in the Amazon Preview of the table of contets of "Pi: A Source Book" [52] (it is a collection of math articles), there are 2 articles that use pi in their titles; 3 that use π and 1 about Roger Apéry's proof that ζ(3) is irrational, that uses the greek letter ζ. If you look in the contents of "Pi and the AGM", [53] the Borweins themselves use π in the individual chapter titles, which might be taken as more akin wikipedia's constituent articles. There is also "π unleashed", [54] "π Algorithmen, Computer, Arithmetik", [55] and several movies like "π" [56] and on the other hand "pi Geschichte und Algorithmen einer Zahl" (tr. "pi History and algorithms of the number") [57] which (like Pi and the AGM) also uses π in its chapter titles. I get the impression that book and journal article titles are somewhat inconsistent and that Kauffner is cherry-picking sources, while chapter titles of math books use π more consistently. So I think that we should restore the earlier title and text. Opening an RM or talkpage discussion about article titles is much more acceptable than trying to impose a fait accompli. As for what dictionaries do: WP:NOTDICT. Similarly for other non-math sources. 69.111.194.167 ( talk) 19:45, 21 April 2011 (UTC)
I haven't seen the Van Nostrand encyclopedia but other such books of theirs I've seen haven't been very impressive. The premier "math encyclopedia" whose quality we should IMO be striving towards is the The Princeton Companion to Mathematics. Its π article is called "π" (ironically alphabetized as if it were spelled "pi".)
All in all, things were fine the way they were and there was no reason to mess with them. If you want to open an RM discussion, that's fine, but once again, I think it is proper to undo all the moves first, rather than presenting a fait accompli. (edited) 69.111.194.167 ( talk) 05:23, 22 April 2011 (UTC)
I notice "π: Algorithmen, Computer, Arithmetik" is also inconsistent. Its cover says π, its title page says pi, and its copyright page says "[Pi] π [Medienkombination]" ("Media combination" since the book comes with a CD-ROM). "π: a biography" says π on the cover, Pi on the copyright page, and [Pi] in the online LOC record. [59] "π Unleashed" appears to be a translation of "π: Algorithmen, Computer, Arithmetik". Its copyright page on Amazon appears to give the German title but not the English one. The LOC record says "Pi-unleashed" with a hyphen. Overall this LOC and copyright info doesn't seem that authoritative. "The Number π" says π on the cover, [pi] on the copyright page, and mentions on the copyright page that it's a translation of a French book "Autour du nombre π" which says π on the cover, [60] doesn't have a preview with a scan of the copyright page, but says [pi] in the LOC. [61] I also notice that two of three books on π-calculus (a computer science topic, not related to the number π=3.14159...) that I found in the LOC say [pi] or [symbol for pi]. [62] Anyway, Beckmann's and Blatner's books are obviously not unique. Could you please stop wasting our time with this stuff? 69.111.194.167 ( talk) 06:44, 22 April 2011 (UTC)
To summarize and hopefully finish this conversation, only one editor ever objected to π in running text, and he did so only briefly, and he has not argued for that position in 10 (oops --- ten) days. Is it fair to say that we have a consensus for altering Math MoS as proposed by Carl? (N.B. This is a different issue from π in titles, still being argued below.) Mgnbar ( talk) 16:43, 1 May 2011 (UTC)
Something to work on:
Gauss is currently a disambiguation page. A very large number of pages link to it. Either (1) those links should get disambiguated or (2) the page should be moved to Gauss (disambiguation) and Gauss redirected to Carl Friedrich Gauss. Michael Hardy ( talk) 16:32, 30 April 2011 (UTC)
I don't think it's Wikipedia's business to solve that philosophical issue, but perhaps someone with more experience in side-stepping that should probably comment at the FAC for logarithm, which has been open for who knows how long, and seems to attract all sorts of nitpickers. Tijfo098 ( talk) 22:04, 1 May 2011 (UTC)
There seemed to be a consensus above that for articles in the scope of this project, there is nothing wrong with "π" in the title and that this should not be replaced by "pi". There was even talk about updating MATHMOS to reflect this. This consensus is currently not reflected byanother requested move discussion, which is going on at Talk:Liu Hui's π algorithm#Requested move. To me this indicates that more (focused) discussion is needed, either in the relevant section above or in the new requested move discussion.
Also, I was going to move List of topics related to pi back to its correct title, but because of the title blacklist only an admin can do it. Hans Adler 08:19, 1 May 2011 (UTC)
Please see also Talk:Leibniz_formula_for_pi#Requested_move. Cheers, Ben ( talk) 08:13, 4 May 2011 (UTC).
Someone also opposed the FAC for logarithm on this. I'm curious if there's an easy way to fix that. I think Wikimedia use dvipng, which can probably be tweaked to make smaller pix by default. Tijfo098 ( talk) 22:27, 1 May 2011 (UTC)
As we have been incessantly discussing since February 2003, there are lots of problems with using TeX in an inline setting on Wikipedia (whereas in a "displayed" setting it seems to work well). One of those is improper alignment, thus:
Another is this:
The period at the end of a sentence appears on the next line. The same thing happens with commas. (Of course, this varies with the window geometry.)
Michael Hardy ( talk) 03:53, 3 May 2011 (UTC)
I recently came across User:Nageh/mathJax which is a wikipedia extension for using the MathJax javascript library for displaying LaTeX expressions. It uses the raw Latex input rather than the Texvc images. All rendering is done via javascript and it does take a couple of seconds to render a page, but this time is comparable to the time it takes to download all the png images. It does require downloading a font pack and setting a user preference to use.
I've been using this for about a month now and I'm very happy with the results, there are a few snag but the overall rending is good. I find it less jarring than the Texvc. It probably not ready for primetime yet but some more people trying it to spot any bugs. -- Salix ( talk): 22:36, 3 May 2011 (UTC)
I just declined an AfC from an anon IP wanting to recreate Boubaker polynomials, which appears to have been persistently popping up and being deleted over the last few years. On closer inspection the content came from User:Rirunmot/User:Rirunmot/subpage6, which in turn must have saved from an old version of the deleted article (hence the cleanup tags), and I suspect the AfC was submitted by User:Rirunmot himself. He's apparently been working on several versions of it in his user space recently. Anyway, I have no idea whether the new version of the article is better or if the subject has recently become notable, I just thought there might might be people here who would want to keep an eye on it. — Joseph Roe Tk• Cb, 13:13, 3 May 2011 (UTC)
Your note about link to Chebyshev polynomials could be understood, but specialists say Polynomials are generally linked to each other, and ther are rules for differentiating (i. e; Chebyshev polynomials are linked to Luckas polinomials by a simple mutiplying act, nevertheless they exist separately) ). Please have a look on the references and give your opinion Rirunmot ( talk) 15:04, 3 May 2011 (UTC)
I want to point out that User:Rirunmot recruited me to chime in on my talk page. I was one of the few people arguing to keep the article in the third nomination, but I wasn't exactly crying when the article was deleted because I am outright disgusted by the use of the page on this topic as a platform for self-promotion. Yes, I personally believe that it's technically well above the notability threshold. In my opinion, it doesn't matter that the only scholars to write about these polynomials are the original author and his friends. In my opinion, it doesn't matter that they're only a small trivial variant of the Chebyshev polynomials. What does concern me here is the use of Wikipedia as a platform for self-promotion. It seems to me that there is a clear conflict of interest here. I'd rather us semiprotect the article and ban any of the offending users from editing it. Then if some more impartial editor wants to re-create it, fine. But I'll say, even though I technically think it's notable, this whole thing has left a bad taste in my mouth and I know I'm not going to put in any effort to re-creating this page. Cazort ( talk) 16:00, 3 May 2011 (UTC)
I notice that several references link to Project Euclid. A bit like how many reference link to Mathematical Reviews. I think we should give Project Euclid its own identifier (and its own article as well) so references can be tidied up like the others.
For example, a citation with a link to Mathematical Reviews like
{{cite journal |last1=Gottwald|first1=Siegfried |year=2008 |title=Mathematical fuzzy logics |url=http://www.ams.org/mathscinet-getitem?mr=2413003 |journal=[[Bulletin of Symbolic Logic]] |volume=14 |issue=2 |pages=210–239 |doi=10.2178/bsl/1208442828 }}
gets cleaned up to
{{cite journal |last1=Gottwald|first1=Siegfried |year=2008 |title=Mathematical fuzzy logics |journal=[[Bulletin of Symbolic Logic]] |volume=14 |issue=2 |pages=210–239 |doi=10.2178/bsl/1208442828 |mr=2413003 }}
I think that it would be a good thing to clean up
{{cite journal |last1=Gottwald|first1=Siegfried |year=2008 |title=Mathematical fuzzy logics |url=http://projecteuclid.org/euclid.bsl/1208442828 |journal=[[Bulletin of Symbolic Logic]] |volume=14 |issue=2 |pages=210–239 |doi=10.2178/bsl/1208442828 }}
to something like
{{cite journal |last1=Gottwald|first1=Siegfried |year=2008 |title=Mathematical fuzzy logics |journal=[[Bulletin of Symbolic Logic]] |volume=14 |issue=2 |pages=210–239 |doi=10.2178/bsl/1208442828 |euclid=euclid.bsl/1208442828 |mr=2413003 }}
Which would look something like
or similar.
I've also made {{ Project Euclid}}, similar to {{ MR}} and {{ doi}}. Appearance can be tweaked since I've no idea how a link to Project Euclid should be presented. Headbomb { talk / contribs / physics / books} 16:59, 11 April 2011 (UTC)
|id=
field of a citation template. But I'm not sure I see the point when the doi goes to exactly the same place. —
David Eppstein (
talk)
21:52, 11 April 2011 (UTC)Any feedback on how to present the link though? Like which of pe: euclid.bsl/1208442828 (as the doi) vs. PE euclid.bsl/1208442828 (as most other identifier, but is PE understood to mean Projet Euclid as MR is understood to mean Mathematical Reviews?) vs Project Euclid: euclid.bsl/1208442828 vs... is best? Headbomb { talk / contribs / physics / books} 14:36, 14 April 2011 (UTC)
Hi! This is a useful template.
{{
cite journal}}
: Cite has empty unknown parameters: |1=
, |2=
, |3=
, and |4=
(
help); Invalid |ref=harv
(
help); Unknown parameter |month=
ignored (
help)I would prefer the deletion of the (redundant) prefix "euclid." from the identifier. It would be useful to provide documentation and examples on its use; also, the documentation has 3 levels of parentheses, where I believe 2 are intended. Kiefer. Wolfowitz 13:10, 2 May 2011 (UTC)
From the three pages: Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Boubaker_polynomials, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Boubaker polynomials (2nd nomination), and Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Boubaker polynomials (3rd nomination) it seems that two facts are admitted by everyone :
Now the matter is neither the correctness; nor the mathematical value, these are problems of specialist as discussed in the accessible and verifiable academic refernces i.e. Meixner-Type Results for Riordan Arrays and Associated Integer Sequences, Chapter 6: The Boubaker polynomials (by Paul Barry, Aoife Hennessy and Modelling Nonlinear Bivariate Dependence Using the Boubaker polynomials (by E. Gargouri-Ellouze, N. Sher Akbar, S. Nadeem)... The real matter is about notability, which is quite admitted by the 3680 hits there [64]adn 163 there Scholar Publications along with the academic and encyclopedic publications. So please give your opinion on this particular question: Notable or Not-Notable. Thanks Rirunmot ( talk) 19:03, 3 May 2011 (UTC)
Is there any reason not to lump Rirunmot with all the blocked users in Category:Wikipedia sockpuppets of Mmbmmmbm? — David Eppstein ( talk) 06:47, 4 May 2011 (UTC)
In the phase-type representation section, where τ is mysteriously chosen to be (0,1,0,0); am I right to assume that that is the initial condition? In other words, does the system start in state two? The end of the article needs a lot of explanation. It starts off nicely, but then there's jumps to using some scary looking formulas, lots of technical language, and zero explanation. There is a link to another article, but that doesn't help at all. — Fly by Night ( talk) 15:19, 5 May 2011 (UTC)
Someone spammed my department's list with a link to the article on Hilbert's eighth problem. The claims on the page seem dubious and there are no sources to speak of, but I'm only just dipping my toes into Wikipedia and don't feel comfortable deleting a ton of stuff. Could someone pass definitive judgement? -- Dylan Moreland ( talk) 03:37, 6 May 2011 (UTC)
Please help verify an existence claim for Indian derivatives in the 12th century. Tkuvho ( talk) 10:55, 6 May 2011 (UTC)
The articles on Hilbert space and Inner product space use:
The first is easy enough to fix (If one agrees that they should be the same symbol for consistency of notation between related articles, which I think they should be) but the Math MOS only states:
which I read to mean it's OK to change for consistency *within* an article, but not strictly OK to change one to the other for the sake of consistency *between* articles. Thoughts? Thanks. BrideOfKripkenstein ( talk) 21:01, 6 May 2011 (UTC)
A new account (not, I think, a new editor) is trying to make whole number something other than a disambig page. My opinion is that there is no content justifying an article. Please comment at talk:whole number. --- Trovatore ( talk) 23:58, 6 May 2011 (UTC)
Having fought for two years on the Monty Hall problem, almost getting banned from wikipedia for OR and COI, I am looking for a new brawl, and am getting stuck into the two envelopes problem. Have been accused of gross arrogance and incivility within one day (practice makes perfect! I didn't want to waste time with ritual dances but went straight to the nitty gritty). There is a big problem with that page, that a lot of people have been writing up their own common sense solutions (both sensical and nonsensical) but almost no one actually reads the sources. I just wrote up two mainsteam solutions to two main variants of the two envelopes problem, both "out of my head", ie without reliable sources. (Very evil, very un-wikipedian). After all, I have been talking about these problems with professional friends for close on fourty years now, and setting them as exam questions, talking about them with students, without ever actually carefully reading published literature on the problems.
Maybe some of you folk here can get access to some of those papers in journals where you have to pay a big tax to the publishing company before you can actually read the pdf. That would be useful.
Looks like the two children problem is equally much a mess.
Of course I could be completely wrong that what I think are the solutions to the two main variants of the two envelopes problem are indeed the solutions, or for that matter, are correct at all... Richard Gill ( talk) 08:14, 3 May 2011 (UTC)
Thanks Yoenit ! The link you provided here allows concentring debates of serious contributors (efforts and time) on the simple question: Sourced or not? -- Rirunmot ( talk) 09:35, 4 May 2011 (UTC)
I have opened a sockpuppet investigation at Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Mmbmmmbm. Ozob ( talk) 11:44, 4 May 2011 (UTC)
How to become a famous mathematician
Seriously, maybe this trick ought to be explained in the appropriate article on wikipedia. Then the article on Boubaker polynomials can simply refer to that article and to the article on Chebyshev polynomials. Similarly the article on Chebyshev polynomials can refer to this trick-article and mention Boubaker polynomials as an example. Richard Gill ( talk) 16:22, 8 May 2011 (UTC)
PS the topic is clearly ignotable rather than notable (cf infamous, igNoble, ignominious, ignorable) Richard Gill ( talk) 06:08, 9 May 2011 (UTC)
See Wikipedia:Featured picture candidates/Quantum Harmonic Oscillator.-- RDBury ( talk) 23:34, 8 May 2011 (UTC)
See
Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Karl-Theodor Sturm,
Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Emil Hilb,
Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Stephan Luckhaus,
Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Ernst Hairer,
Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/K. David Elworthy,
Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Xue-Mei Li,
Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Abhinav Kumar, and
Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Alison Miller, and please weigh in. Several of these could use more mathematical expertise. —
David Eppstein (
talk)
15:15, 7 May 2011 (UTC)
The second one week, see Wikipedia:Featured picture candidates/Simple harmonic oscillator. It is May after all.-- RDBury ( talk) 22:25, 9 May 2011 (UTC)
I'm used to treating MacTutor History of Mathematics Archives (i.e., http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/) as a pretty reliable source for history of mathematics, especially of the biographical kind. But is it? If so, how do we justify that? The context is that William Connolley at Talk:History of calculus asked if it's just some blokes' web page. I am tempted to say, based on our article, that it has won many prestigious awards for online content. But how do historians of mathematics rate it? Sławomir Biały ( talk) 12:51, 4 May 2011 (UTC)
MathWorld's problems are usually omissions rather than errors, but for instance its Lattice article is hopelessly confused. (It seems to be trying to imply that all partial orders are lattices and that all lattices are distributive and modular). And Cubic Lattice links to and is linked from the wrong kind of lattice. My general preference is to link to MathWorld as an external link, and to check the MathWorld article to make sure there aren't important aspects of the problem or important references that we're omitting here, but not to actually use it as a source. On the other hand, I've never encountered any problems with MacTutor, and RDBury's description of the OEIS process makes it sound clearly within what we accept as reliable. — David Eppstein ( talk) 04:36, 5 May 2011 (UTC)
Well I'm not math historian, but so far I found MacTutor relatively reliable on the topics I've used it for. It is indeed an expert website that has won some rewards and was also reviewed/described in math or science journals. It is definitely not just a website hosted by some bloke, to very least it would be a self published by notable experts (both principal editors/maintainer are math profs at one of UK's top rates universities (St. Andrews), where the project is hosted rather than on some private webspace/account). Most of their articles are carefully sourced and so far I've discovered only minor errors as you might find them in reliable/reputable literature as well (typos, small mistakes with non european dates, small errors in graphics). In particular as far as historic subjects are concerned I'd consider them much more reliable as MathWorld, which however I still consider as a reliable source for WP.
It is might be wortwhile to note however, that both editors are not trained (math) historians afaik. So they primarily compile material (available in English) written by others. In cases where an larger historic context knowledge might be required (in particular being able to read original sources in foreign and ancient languages) that can lead to errors. This might matter in individual biographies for (historic) non European mathematicians and related math topics. But then again this problem exists for many math sources we consider as reliable as well (any historic information in regular math textbooks, normal mathematician writing on historic subjects, etc.).-- Kmhkmh ( talk) 11:32, 5 May 2011 (UTC)
Well going to the thread it seems to me we all agree that student papers hosted on MacTutor are not to be treated as reliable sources, that however the regular MacTutor entries can be treated as such.-- Kmhkmh ( talk) 10:35, 10 May 2011 (UTC)
I've created a new article titled Patrick Billingsley. Billingsley died recently at the age of 85.
The article is imperfect. Work on it! Michael Hardy ( talk) 17:14, 10 May 2011 (UTC)
At Lamé function, we find this:
and then:
But it doesn't say specifically what the change of variable is. Can some add that information? Michael Hardy ( talk) 15:42, 8 May 2011 (UTC)
Our page titled Lists of mathematics topics (notice that it's plural: lists) is a magnificent thing, unprecedented in all of intellectual history, just as Wikipedia is. It is a former featured list. We should work on returning it to that status. As I recall, all that was needed was references. Michael Hardy ( talk) 20:13, 10 May 2011 (UTC)
See Talk:Leibniz formula for pi#Requested move. Hans Adler 15:22, 12 May 2011 (UTC)
“ | Probably the hardest part of writing a mathematical article (actually, any article) is the difficulty of addressing the level of mathematical knowledge on the part of the reader. For example, when writing about a field, do we assume that the reader already knows group theory? A general approach is to start simple, then move toward more abstract and general statements as the article proceeds. The suggestions below are intended to help us achieve this. | ” |
The above passage is part of the project page. An editor inserted the following comment, which I now move here. — Tamfang ( talk) 18:41, 13 May 2011 (UTC)
I do not think, that such transclusions (e.g. explaining groups in an article about fields) improves an article.It may be useful to distinguish clearly between motivation and definition. Stephan Spahn ( talk) 14:36, 13 May 2011 (UTC)
The article Musean hypernumber is mostly the contribution of editor Koeplinger. A quick google scholar search reveals mainly a text "Modular parts of a function" by K Carmody - Applied Mathematics and Computation, 1990 cited by... one (1). Tkuvho ( talk) 14:40, 9 May 2011 (UTC)
I have noticed a recent trend to replace ordinary html formatted equations in articles with the {{ math}} template. I noticed that our WP:MOSMATH barely mentions the use of this template (although some editors seem to act as though it is mandatory). Strangely, it does appear in Help:Formula as the only option for properly typesetting mathematics formulas. It seems like there should at least be some degree of accord between the recommendations of these two pages. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 12:55, 13 May 2011 (UTC)
I generally agree with Jacob Scholbach that, in general, plain HTML/wikitext is fine, without the additional use of Template:Math. If you edit the help page, you should also edit the original at meta:Help:Displaying_a_formula. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 12:45, 15 May 2011 (UTC)
Low-dimensional chaos has been prodded for deletion. 65.95.13.213 ( talk) 04:58, 17 May 2011 (UTC)
Whole number (number theory) has been prodded for deletion. 65.95.13.213 ( talk) 04:20, 18 May 2011 (UTC)
A thread on mathoverflow compiled names of mathematical ideas named after places. I've listed them here: User:Michael Hardy/Named after places
Could this evolve into a Wikipedia article? Michael Hardy ( talk) 15:27, 14 May 2011 (UTC)
WP:MOSMATH tells people to write
<math>\sin x \,\!</math>
where I would have written
<math>\sin x \,</math>
.The purpose of the spacing at the end is to force png rendering. It doesn't actually add space between sin x and whatever follows it on the line, if anything, since nothing follows sin x inside the math tags. Why is the \! there? Doesn't this just complicate the thing pointlessly? I've seen this in lots of articles and wondered why it was there; by hindsight maybe I should have suspected it was in MOSMATH. Michael Hardy ( talk) 14:14, 20 May 2011 (UTC)
User:David Eppstein removed a (new) reference from cellular automata, questioning its notability. The other editor then questioned the notability of the David Eppstein article and has made a lot of comments about Eppstein, as editor and real-world person.
I have written some articles with David, so others should monitor this situation.
Sincerely, Kiefer. Wolfowitz 22:08, 18 May 2011 (UTC)
It's been several days since Current activity has been updated; is there reason why the bot might not be working?-- RDBury ( talk) 04:14, 21 May 2011 (UTC)
We currently have two articles about the general topic of tiling: Tesselation and Honeycomb (geometry). The honeycomb article is rather short, while the tesselation article is, in my opinion, a horrible mess. The article almost completely lacks inline citations. Furthermore there is way too much trivia and a lot of totally inappropriate or unhelpful images. All of this stuff should be rewritten as one single article, either under the title Tiling or Tesselation. Honeycomb should be a seperate section in that new article, because it seems to be an often used term. Some sources:
In the context of aperiodic tilings, I have mostly seen the term Tiling do describe these arrangements (for example, Chaim Goodman-Strauss who is quite active in current research on aperiodic tilings never uses the terms Tesselation or Honeycomb and refers to all arrangements (even to the higher-dimensional ones) as Tiling).
I welcome comments on whether things should be merged and where and what would be the most reasonable title for the article. Thanks. Toshio Yamaguchi ( talk) 16:04, 21 May 2011 (UTC)
Mathbot has recently been blocked from editing List of mathematics articles (actually the {{ nobots}} template was added to these lists). There is a discussion about this at User talk:Oleg Alexandrov. Apparently the reason is that Mathbot adds disambiguation links to these lists. Mathbot is essential to the proper working of the Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Current activity page, which many mathematics editors rely on. What do we think about this? Sławomir Biały ( talk) 11:29, 9 May 2011 (UTC)
I am sure we can work something out if everyone makes an effort to be nonconfrontational. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 15:17, 9 May 2011 (UTC)
I see that some lists were moved to project space after Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of mathematics articles (J-L) and move discussion (now) recorded at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mathematics/List of mathematics articles (A-C) Presumably not all of them?? Tijfo098 ( talk) 09:37, 10 May 2011 (UTC)
I don't like the idea of putting it in the project space. Especially if other article-space pages could not link to it. The list is mainly for browsing, and at most secondarily for navigating. Michael Hardy ( talk) 20:08, 10 May 2011 (UTC)
Okay, I went ahead and took care of this:
Now all you need to do is direct the maintenance bot to use these indiscriminate lists for its maintenance tasks. I will be glad to improve the organization of the alternate lists remaining in mainspace. I noticed that most of them are about twice as long as the recommended article length, which may make page loading difficult for people with older computers and on older computer networks (particularly our most vulnerable users in third world countries). I'd be glad to attend to that while otherwise restructuring these lists into a user-friendly format. Cheers! bd2412 T 23:48, 10 May 2011 (UTC)
This is getting very repetitive. I'm getting a very strong sense of WP:IDIDNTHEARTHAT from BD2412. Regardless of that, is there some way that the bot could be persuaded to link only to the "(disambiguation)" form of a mathdab page rather than whatever other form might also exist and regardless of which one is primary? That would seem to appease the disambiguators while still allowing the lists to function properly. — David Eppstein ( talk) 04:11, 11 May 2011 (UTC)
Here is an idea. Perhaps we could put a Wikipedia:Editnotice on each of the list of mathematics articles pages. It could say something like:
![]() | This list is automatically generated.
Changes to this list may be overwritten by
User:Mathbot. To change something on this page, leave a note at
User talk:Mathbot. |
That would stop most people from editing the lists. But it wouldn't prevent manual maintenance and it wouldn't require maintaining two lists. Ozob ( talk) 12:20, 11 May 2011 (UTC)
Re a comment by David Eppstein: if we link to redirects instead of linking to the pages themselves, it makes the "related changes" tool not work for those pages, because "related changes" only looks at links, it does not bypass redirects. This is one reason the lists need to link directly to the desired pages. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 17:54, 11 May 2011 (UTC)
My current opinion, by the way, is that the people who go around changing dab links need to find a way to whitelist these lists. In the end: If they are editing manually, it is trivial to just skip these lists. If they are using a script, it is trivial to tell the script to skip them. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 17:56, 11 May 2011 (UTC)
I pointed this out on a user talk page, but I don't know if it has been pointed out there. A key reason that these lists need to link directly to disambiguation pages is that the "related changes" tool does not bypass redirects. So this link [75] shows no changes, even though I did edit the disambiguation page that is indirectly linked from User:CBM/Sandbox. This link [76] does show the changes. We have no control over the "related changes" tool to make it bypass redirects. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 11:35, 12 May 2011 (UTC)
“ | To link to a disambiguation page (rather than to a page whose topic is a specific meaning), link to the title that includes the text "(disambiguation)", even if that's a redirect – for example, link to the redirect America (disambiguation) rather than the target page at "America". | ” |
You know, I think we would have found a solution that satisfies everyone long ago except for this vigorous opposition from Carl. I would gladly contribute to update Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Current activity, for instance, but I'm sure Carl has a reason this cannot be done. The disambig problem can be fixed, if only you were willing to work with us instead of against us. -- JaGa talk 16:04, 13 May 2011 (UTC)
It would really be helpful to get a straight answer to this question, since different people seem to be suggesting that these lists have different strictures. If it is not necessary to include all redirects to disambig pages on these lists (and it would seem that it is not, based on the fact that they are not there already), then moving the disambig pages is a solution that can be effected through the disambig project without troubling this project any further. If redirects must be included as well, then I think we have a bigger problem with the lists themselves indiscriminately including links. For example, must a redirect to a theorem from a common misspelling of its name be included in the list? bd2412 T 00:13, 15 May 2011 (UTC)
In light of the broad discussion of this issue, and the many proposals made by various participants, I have initiated a straw poll at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mathematics/Straw poll regarding lists of mathematics articles. Please make your preferred resolution known there. Cheers! bd2412 T 18:46, 23 May 2011 (UTC)
Our article titled Miquel's theorem tells us that:
etc.
At the very least, it should say
possibly with a link to the article about ??????? Miquel.
Is there nothing in one of our style manuals that says this sort of omission is an error? There should be something. Michael Hardy ( talk) 16:51, 20 May 2011 (UTC)
Very often one should not put the statement of the theorem in the initial sentence, since the statement of the theorem can require a lot of prefatory stuff.
seems OK to me.
I do think "In geometry" should usually come first, lest the non-mathematician reader fail to realize that it's not about politics, chemistry, mythology, etc. In the early history of the article titled schismatic temperament, I had to read into the second paragraph before I found out that it was not about a psychiatric condition, but rather about musical scales.
But if the article is called Fundamental theorem of geometry, then that context-setting initial phrase is superfluous.
And one should never write "In category theory" or "In representation theory" or anything like that, that will mystify the lay reader who's never heard of those things (a reasonable reader could think that "representation theory" is about politics). Michael Hardy ( talk) 23:03, 20 May 2011 (UTC)
At Standard part function, [PA redacted - WMC: summary: there is a dispute]. The editor does not seem to realize that the standard part was part of Robinson's solution of the paradox of the infinitesimal definition of the derivative by Leibniz, as criticized by Berkeley in 1734. Berkeley's criticism of infinitesimals as inconsistent entities was widely accepted until the 1960s. Certainly neither Weierstrass nor Cantor thought of the limit approach as resolving the paradox of the infinitesimal definition, contrary to what ill-informed editor seems to think. Claiming that the limit approach was a resolution of the paradox amounts to an unsourced, whiggish rewriting of history. The editor in question is pursueing a similar misguided agenda at ghosts of departed quantities, even after having admitted at a talkpage that he is not fully knowledgeable about the infinitesimal approach to the calculus. Tkuvho ( talk) 22:02, 21 May 2011 (UTC)
You have been escalating the situation unnecessarily. Especially calling William M. Connolley by his first name and then, when he objected to that and directed you to his subpage where he explains why, you outright refused to read it and addressed him as "William" again. Very bad idea. I also had to refactor a section title which was a personal attack, and the title of this section isn't much better, either.
As far as I can see there is some very normal disagreement between the two of you of the kind that should normally result in improvements to the articles that satisfy everybody. I don't understand why that shouldn't be possible. Hans Adler 01:15, 22 May 2011 (UTC)
Can't say I much appreciate the section title here, so I've retitled it. Also, I would have expected T to have the bare minimum of courtesy required to have informed me of this discussion. As to the substance: T appears to have appointed himself the expert, and disses everyone else's expertise should they have the temerity to disagree with him. The person with the "agenda" (since he chooses to use that term) is T: and his agenda would appear to be non-standard analysis William M. Connolley ( talk) 20:19, 23 May 2011 (UTC)
There is a discussion about WP:Notability/PROF (for mathematicians), now that the article on Mikhail Katz (a student of Gromov's) is up for deletion. Kiefer. Wolfowitz 00:57, 23 May 2011 (UTC)
As an aside, I would encourage as many people as have the time to review the article and the deletion discussion. These kind of discussions set presidents, and it's important for the mathematical community on Wikipedia to have a say. So far the AfD is being discussed by non-reference desk and non-wikiproject editors. We really do need more people from the maths project to give some input. We should be involved in possible mathematical president-making discussions. — Fly by Night ( talk) 17:23, 23 May 2011 (UTC)
Semiregular 4-polytope was prodded for deletion. 65.95.13.213 ( talk) 06:00, 24 May 2011 (UTC)
I've raised this issue before, but we have a large number (in the hundreds) of articles on specific polytopes and more are being added all the time. I looked at one of the more dubious ones, Bipentellated 8-simplex, and found no reliable references and it seems to be largely original research. Most of these seem to be the work of a single editor and judging from the red links {e.g. Pentistericated 8-simplex) present on the page it looks like the final tally for these articles could be in the thousands. I find it difficult to believe that the majority of these articles meet the GNG so perhaps there should be a review to decide on a few dozen articles that are worth keeping.-- RDBury ( talk) 16:42, 30 April 2011 (UTC)
Another popular "word" in all of this business is "bicantellated", which also gets zero Google books and Google scholar hits. The naming conventions in these articles, and the overall program, seems to be inspired by the "uniform polychora project" of Norman Johnson (mathematician) and George Olshevsky, but this project no longer seems to exist. I can't seem to find any published materials from the project that these articles can be sourced to. However, I also feel that a lot of work has gone into making these articles, and that we should make every effort to preserve this content. Even if it is original research, it seems like worthwhile and possibly useful original research. So I think that rather than deleting, all of these articles should be transwikied to WikiBooks. (I assume they allow original research.)
If there is consensus that either deletion or transwiki is appropriate, then I think the next order of business would be to make a list of all of these articles. There are various subcategories and subsubcategories of Category:Polytopes that are populated primarily with these sorts of articles. Does anyone (*cough* Carl *cough*) have a script that will unwrap a few levels of a category into a list? We can then go through this list and strike the ones that are either obviously OK, or ones for which there are good references. The remaining ones can be transwikied or deleted by the appropriate process. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 13:37, 1 May 2011 (UTC)
Maybe we can borrow from Wikipedia:Notability (numbers)#Notability of specific individual numbers? If a polytope has three or more unrelated and distinctive properties (e.g. its skeleton is a Cayley graph, it has a record-high genus for its number of faces, stuff like that, not "it is the teratopentellation of the dodecadodecahedron"), if it has obvious cultural significance, or if it is treated individually and nontrivially in published works such as Wells Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Geometry, then we can include it, otherwise not. — David Eppstein ( talk) 01:40, 3 May 2011 (UTC)
Here's an analogy. The multiplicative inverse is an important operation on numbers, important enough to have its own article. And many small integers are important enough to have their own articles. But we do not have articles on the multiplicative inverses of very many integers — many fewer than the articles on integers. So, truncation is important, and simplices are important, but that doesn't mean we need a separate article on seven dimensional truncated simplices. There just isn't that much to say about them that is different from six dimensional truncated simplices or whatever. The parts that are different (the f-vectors, for instance) can probably just be summarized in a table. I can't think of any justification for having an article on this particular polytope and not having an article on the number 1/21. And I am perfectly happy not having an article on the number 1/21 — there's not much to say about it that wouldn't be in the article 21 (number) — but I think that Truncated 7-simplex is even less worthy. And that's one of the less baroque ones. — David Eppstein ( talk) 06:34, 4 May 2011 (UTC)
If we're going to start deleting/moving, let's start from the bottom and plan comprehensively! Here's a bunch of categories on polyhedra alone: Some are "finite sets" and some are open-ended sets. Should all 75 of the uniform compounds, compiled from a single paper be included? Should all 92 Johnson solids have their own articles, again, compiled from a single paper that enumerated them. Should all 53 nonregular star uniform polyhedra be included?
At this stage I would leave the three dimensional ones its more the higher dimensional polytopes which are in question.
From these the definite keeps are the various lists
Also of greater significance seem to be those mentioned in Template:Polytopes which are the "Fundamental convex regular and uniform polytopes in dimensions 2–10"
The various honeycombs seem to be of some significance including:
Beyond that I don't know enough about the subject to know which ones deserve special pleading.-- Salix ( talk): 06:45, 6 May 2011 (UTC)
What about merging rather than deleting? For example merge the content of Bipentellated 8-simplex into 8-simplex, rather than simply deleting it. In order to prevent the article from becoming too long, tables such as Bipentellated 8-simplex#Related polytopes could be made collapsible. Of course citations directly describing these polytopes would be needed such that no original research is required to extract the presented information. For example, there should be a source that calls the Bipentellated 8-simplex by this name, otherwise the most common name used by the sources should be used I think. As I don't have access to most of the references used in the Polytope articles, unfortunately I could not help with that. Toshio Yamaguchi ( talk) 14:48, 7 May 2011 (UTC)
Hello,
I am working with the Account Creation Improvement Project (my latest report is here). Now I need your help to find some easy things for newcomers to do.
To guide the new users into working on the articles, we have created a step-by-step process that starts right after the new user has provided a username and a password. Here is the first step. If you click on "mathematics", for instance, you go to a page where you are asked to state your skills. And based on your choice there, you go to a page that combines these two choices. Here is what it looks like if you choose copyediting.
Right now, that list of articles that needs copyediting in the field of mathematics, has been created manually by a rather small set of users. That is not a scalable solution. Especially considering that these articles could very well be edited by the time we have created all the lists.
That's why my question to you in WikiProject mathematics is if you could create four templates for each of the four skillsets: Copyediting, Research & Writing, Fact checking, and Organizing - and keep them updated? We could then transclude those templates in the account creation process.
This is probably one of the most efficient things you can do in this project. Yes, really! There are roughly 5-7000 new users - each day. Around 30% of them start to edit. So if only a sixth of them sees the mathematics templates, that's around 250 potential new editors in your field - each day. Possibly more. And they want and need something easy to do. Some of them will continue to edit if they think that the tasks are fun and they are welcomed into the project.
So, what do you say about those templates?
I will gladly answer any questions you may have about this question or the project. Best wishes// Hannibal ( talk) 16:42, 20 May 2011 (UTC)
AfD for Elementary_Calculus:_An_Infinitesimal_Approach. Please comment here.-- Kmhkmh ( talk) 21:15, 24 May 2011 (UTC)
Doesn't need to be here
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Yet another tiresome AfD: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elementary_Calculus:_An_Infinitesimal_Approach Tkuvho ( talk) 00:55, 22 May 2011 (UTC) Tagging of articles?Tkhuvho has been writing a paper today on Gromov's famous book, and it's already being slapped with cn and unreferenced tags, by what looks to be the same group of editors. If there is a problem with Tkuvho's contributions (and I don't believe there is), then it should be discussed here, rather than by such edits, which I hope don't start to constitute harassment. Kiefer. Wolfowitz 20:41, 23 May 2011 (UTC)
I don't see anything here that can't be resolved on the talk page of the relevant article (although the tone there is less civil than it could be). How many more
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Klein bottle says:
I'd like to Wikilink "boundary", but I'm not sure what article we want.
The obvious choice seems to be Boundary (topology), but I'm not sure. (Also see the disamb page Boundary.)
Does anybody know for certain on this?
-- 186.221.141.36 ( talk) 21:58, 23 May 2011 (UTC)
Could we go back to assuming good faith, and all that stuff? This project is not alone in facing notability issues that are on the margin, and other contentious matters that can generate lengthy debate. But there is a fairly good consensus about what we should be doing, in general. Charles Matthews ( talk) 12:32, 24 May 2011 (UTC)
Help at Larry Guth would be appreciated. Tkuvho ( talk) 04:17, 25 May 2011 (UTC)
This RfC discussion could use a another viewpoint or two. At issue is the use of notation such as -- RDBury ( talk) 19:00, 9 May 2011 (UTC)
The AfD discussion Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Relation reduction as been relisted to get more participation.-- RDBury ( talk) 02:30, 26 May 2011 (UTC)
There is currently what looks to me like a mess of duplicated content between the five pages cycle (mathematics), cyclic permutation, cycle notation, transposition (mathematics) and cycles and fixed points. I'm not sure where to begin dealing with this, but I think it could use some attention. Suggestions welcome. Jowa fan ( talk) 08:47, 25 May 2011 (UTC)
The page Tangent vector currently is a disambiguation page with two entries; both of these entries discuss tangent vectors but neither one is an article about tangent vectors as such. It is not clear to me whether tangent vector really has two distinct meanings, or whether it is a single concept with one meaning but with applications in multiple areas of mathematics. If the latter is true, then this should be an article, possibly listing the relevant fields in which tangent vectors are used, rather than being tagged as a disambiguation page. -- R'n'B ( call me Russ) 12:06, 27 May 2011 (UTC)
Currently Elementary Calculus (with a capital "C") and elementary calculus (with a lower-case "c") both redirect to Elementary Calculus: An Infinitesimal Approach, the article about Jerome Keisler's book. Lots of pages link to the lower-case version. I think possibly the lower-case version should become a disambiguation page, with the capital version redirecting to it, and then the ones that should link to the book's title should link there directly. Michael Hardy ( talk) 17:28, 27 May 2011 (UTC)
OK, I've
Still to be done:
....and now I've edited the one at logarithm so that instead of
it says
Maybe the others should link to the book........ Michael Hardy ( talk) 02:39, 28 May 2011 (UTC) ...and remember: book titles are italicized. Michael Hardy ( talk) 02:42, 28 May 2011 (UTC)
Done. Michael Hardy ( talk) 02:50, 28 May 2011 (UTC)
At ghosts of departed quantities, a few editors are attempting a whiggish rewriting of the history of the calculus. George Berkeley criticized both the infinitesimal and fluxional procedures of the calculus, which he claimed amounted to the same thing. Weierstrass and his followers in the 1870s did 3 things: (1) they largely accepted Berkeley's critique of infinitesimal procedures; (2) they sought to eliminate infinitesimals; and (3) they developed infinitesimal-free foundations for analysis, namely foundations based on the real numbers and epsilontics. Then in the 1960s, Robinson came along and restored infinitesimals to respectability, in particular removing whatever logical inconsistencies were present in dy/dx style definition of derivative. He was thus the first one to resolve the paradox of the infinitesimal procedures criticized by Berkeley.
The paragraph above is agreed to by all the historians I have read. Now a few editors have come along and rewritten history. The page ghosts of departed quantities no longer mentions Robinson. Instead, it claims that Weierstrass resolved Berkeley's paradoxes. This does not compare favorably with Jagged's efforts, to the extent that Jagged at least left the old material in while adding his new material. Some input would be appreciated. Tkuvho ( talk) 13:39, 25 May 2011 (UTC)
Facts in the matter is that Bishop George Berkeley's criticism was 100% correct. This was an embarrassment for mathematics for a long time. Weierstrass removed the embarrassment. What Robinson did was to somewhat restore the honor of the mathematicians that had thought in terms of infinitesimals by showing that it is possible, after all, to make a consistent logical model including infinitesimals. This undoubtedly casts new light on the history but it doesn't make the old calculations involving infinitesimals more correct. They are still 100% wrong. So in my opinion Weierstrass was the first one to solve the problem by simply removing the troublemakers. Robinson solved the problem in another way by reshaping the troublemakers and make them respectable. So they both solved the problem posed by Berkley but in different ways. Weierstrass solved it first. iNic ( talk) 17:03, 25 May 2011 (UTC)
(outdent) (@Tkuvho: Oy! Why is this linked to from every place except the talk page of the article, and if I am the one who made the controversial edits, why hasn't this tread been pointed out to me. Also I have no idea what Jaggedalia is supposed to mean, could you explain?) Anyways, it was I who removed Robinson from the article on Ghosts of departed quantities. I should explain, I noticed there was alot of activity at this page on my watchlist, so I went by to read what was going on. I decided to try to help, so I got out Boyer to refersh my memory. According to him the phrase was not about infinitesimal quantities, but rather Newton's ultimate ratios (aka limits of the form 0/0). Since the page was about this specific phrase, and the reference said it was not infinitesimals, and no other references were given to support statements. I tried to rewrite the article in as verifiable form as I could. The was no attempt to re-write history and I resent the accusation. I specifically supplied a reference to a math history textbook. How exactly is that writting history? Thenub314 ( talk) 18:22, 25 May 2011 (UTC) (PS: I also don't know what whiggish means, but I will leave that one alone. My blood pressure probably couldn't handle it.) PPS: Also I did explain this on the talk page immediately after making my edits.
One thing to keep in mind is that infinitesimals were still in common use as late as the 1890's, see e.g. [82]. So, as with many paradigm shifts, it took a generation or so for it to become universally accepted. I also would not say calculations were "100% wrong"; the real paradox is that the method of infinitesimals gave correct answers even though there wasn't a firm logical basis for it. People would not have kept using it if it wasn't useful.-- RDBury ( talk) 01:31, 26 May 2011 (UTC)
I think the best way to move forward is to simply merge the ghosts of departed quantities page into the page about The Analyst. The expression "ghosts of departed quantities" might deserve a section of its own at that page, but that's all. I don't think that this expression is of such importance, neither historical or otherwise, that it deserves a wikipedia page of its own. If you disagree please speak out now. In addition, to explain what the expression is all about from scratch, which is what we need to do if the expression has a page of its own, becomes a huge task. But placed in the correct context the expression is a very simple thing to explain. iNic ( talk) 17:01, 27 May 2011 (UTC)
The category Category:Mathematics articles with no comments was recently deleted; see the discussion here. Unfortunately this has left a lot of article talk pages with red links in the category: 8,587 precisely. The category Category:Mathematics articles with comments still exists, though with only 544 members.
So, is the comment mechanism actually deprecated? I've not come across any discussion on it though I've never seen the pages used or referred to. The only time I've had to look at them is to fix a talk page TOC problem caused by headers in a comments subpage. If it's deprecated both categories should be removed from Template:Maths rating which is inserting them, and Category:Mathematics articles with comments should probably also be deleted. Otherwise the deleted category should be reinstated, perhaps via deletion review.-- JohnBlackburne words deeds 18:22, 29 May 2011 (UTC)
According to this edit, Berkeley wasn't criticizing discarded error terms in his famous criticism of the calculus. A quick check at the French and other wikis reveals that they have not yet caught up with this novel insight. Seriously, we are going to be the laughingstock of the whole of internet if we let him get away with this. Tkuvho ( talk) 14:08, 29 May 2011 (UTC)
One of the finalist images at the current Picture of the Year contest is one of the Buddhabrot: File:Buddhabrot-W1000000-B100000-L20000-2000.jpg. A similar image File:Buddhabrot-deep.jpg was formerly a featured picture but was delisted due to low resolution. The English WP is not currently using the current candidate; the article already has a number of of good images. One concern I have with images such as these is that while they make pretty pictures, they may be of questionable mathematical significance and it is difficult to verify correctness. Also, it may be worthwhile to take a critical look at the article itself since it may be getting more attention in the immediate future.-- RDBury ( talk) 14:23, 30 May 2011 (UTC)
In case you missed the link in the section above, there is a straw poll at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mathematics/Straw poll regarding lists of mathematics articles which is scheduled to end during June 2. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 01:35, 26 May 2011 (UTC)
The straw poll at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mathematics/Straw poll regarding lists of mathematics articles has closed with a consensus to move the lists of mathematics articles to project space. I have implemented this consensus, and I have temporarily retargeted all redirects from mainspace to the new page locations in project space; these cross-namespace redirects will eventually be deleted, unless the project opts to set up some non-maintenance lists at the original article titles. In retrospect, although this idea was not raised before, I don't think anyone would object to these being in Portal space either, which might be the most natural fit if you want people to be browsing them. Cheers! bd2412 T 02:01, 3 June 2011 (UTC)
Is the move to project space the reason why Jitse's bot has not done the most recent update of the list of new articles at Wikipedia:WikiProject_Mathematics/Current_activity? "bd2412", have you communicated with Jitse Niesen about this? If not, then do so. Fast. Michael Hardy ( talk) 02:54, 3 June 2011 (UTC)
Arithmetic surface is a new article that could use some work. I've put a "no intro" tag on it. The only category it's in is Category:Arithmetic; probably at least one other should be there. Michael Hardy ( talk) 02:00, 31 May 2011 (UTC)
Editor Stochastikon-bernoulli ( talk · contribs) has recently created the following series of new articles:
(there may be more), all of which have few or no sources outside of the works of one Prof. Elart von Collani, and all of which contain links to the web site of Prof. Collani's company Stochastikon. The coincidence of user name and company name suggests at least a conflict of interest; there may be concerns about the notability of some of these topics or the narrowness of the sources; and this may be an attempt to promote Prof. Collani, his books and his company via Wikipedia articles. I have placed a note about these concerns on the editor's talk page. Any thoughts ? Gandalf61 ( talk) 08:26, 3 June 2011 (UTC)
The Logarithm article was recently promoted to Featured Article so congratulations to the folks that made that happen. It is our first FA in two years, a long time considering we once averaged an FA every 2 months.-- RDBury ( talk) 10:02, 3 June 2011 (UTC)
I've created a new article titled Integral of the secant function, mentioning that
As usual, further work should include at least these two things:
Michael Hardy ( talk) 02:11, 6 June 2011 (UTC)
I'd like to get a second or third opinion on whether it would be worthwhile to add links to Khan Academy to relevant articles. It's a non-profit which produces short educational videos delivered through YouTube. Many of them are math related, usually high school or middle school levels. I think Introduction to Functions makes a good example. The style is informal, some might say extemporaneous, but they might provide an answer for those who complain that you can't actually learn a subject from a WP article. I checked WP:ELNO and I think it meets the criteria, but some confirmation would be nice. A couple of articles (e.g. Integral) have already been done. If it's is deemed worthy then the next step would be to create a template for the site.-- RDBury ( talk) 09:42, 5 June 2011 (UTC)
Could someone perhaps have a look at this article? It looks fine, just that it cites a huge amount of publications from what seems to be the article creator. Perhaps justified, perhaps a bit of self-promotion, I don't know enough about this to judge. -- Crusio ( talk) 14:34, 6 June 2011 (UTC)
In Ellipse#Circumference, an anon has changed the formula for the circumference of an ellipse from to . Since there is no edit summary and since the old formula has been there for at least two years, I reverted the change. Can someone who knows make sure this is right? Thanks. Duoduoduo ( talk) 14:26, 9 June 2011 (UTC)
It seems to me that these cannot pertain to an equalizer. Is it just me? — Kallikanzarid talk 19:54, 9 June 2011 (UTC)
Four new articles, Circle packing in an isosceles right triangle, Circle packing in an equilateral triangle, Square packing in a square, Circle packing in a circle, basically lists of optimal packings of geometrical shapes, were recently created. My feeling is that these lists were borderline WP:IINFO when they were in Packing problem, the article from which they were taken. So creating separate articles for them raises notability issues as well as opening the door for articles on similar dubious subjects. Any thoughts? (I'm adding Notability tags for now.)-- RDBury ( talk) 10:16, 2 June 2011 (UTC)
There is a new discussion about notability of Boubaker polynomials, the article were deleted here and at many other projects due to lack of notability. I hope someone could help me about this. I'm not sure how should I evaluate the notability of this article and what notability criteria should be used for such articles. the page currently exist at Turkish, Chinese and Arabic Wikipedia and some users trying to create/restore it on other projects too. please take a look at sources at Wikiversity and Turkish Wikipedia, apparently there are more pages on the web referring to "Boubaker polynomials" than back in 2009. in short, I want to know does Boubaker polynomials meets English Wikipedia policy or not? ■ MMXX talk 18:18, 4 June 2011 (UTC)
After instructions message from ■ MMXX to ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/مستخدم:Abanima: [86]
-- Balakyo ( talk) 20:40, 6 June 2011 (UTC)
We need to stay focussed on whether the topic is notable. It doesn't matter what country a contribution comes from. People of any nationality are welcome to contribute to this wiki as long as they respect the policies here. Jowa fan ( talk) 04:07, 7 June 2011 (UTC)
While doing some miscellaneous edits on Matsumoto's theorem (group theory), I came across the term natural map, and linked to it, and found it to be a red link. So I redirected it to natural mapping, and then looked at that, and found that "The real function of natural mappings is to reduce the need for any information from a user’s memory to perform a task. This term is widely used in the areas of human-computer interaction (HCI) and interactive design.[1]". So I left the redirect intact but directed the link from "natural map" within the article to natural transformation.
So some questions arise: Should we move "natural mapping" to "natural mapping (somethingology)" and redirect "natural mapping" to something else, or create some new disambiguation page, or what? And what should I have linked to? Michael Hardy ( talk) 04:53, 11 June 2011 (UTC)
Update: I've made natural mapping into a disambiguation page after moving natural mapping to natural mapping (interface design). I fixed the links to natural mapping so that they point to the latter article. Nothing (in the article space) except redirects now links to natural mapping. Michael Hardy ( talk) 01:58, 12 June 2011 (UTC)
Numerical Analysis (book) is about the book by Burden and Faires. It's a complete orphan: no other articles link to it.
Now it is nominated for deletion. Opinions? Michael Hardy ( talk) 05:02, 11 June 2011 (UTC)
On a tangent to the recognized content section above, which focuses on Featured Articles, I was wondering if members of this project had considered the potential for Featured Lists? At the moment there are three FLs under this project's banner, but all of them are people and/or event oriented. To my knowledge, there are no Featured Lists that focus on mathematics. Looking through Category:List-Class mathematics articles, I believe that there is the potential for some fantastic ones that do focus on the subject itself. I also feel that some topics actually lend themselves better to a list format than an article one. For instance, a merger of Prime knot and List of prime knots (renamed Prime knots) might improve our overall coverage of the subject, as well as setting the ground work for a future push towards featured status.
Now that Today's Featured List is up and running, there would also be the potential to get a maths list on the main page, exposing the work to the millions that visit the page every day. As someone heavily involved with TFL, I can say with certainty that a list based on a mathematical concept would be looked upon very favourably there.
It's undeniable that Featured Lists do place a degree of emphasis on presentation. The main thing to worry about is writing a well-sourced lead that introduces the topic. Beyond that, I would be very happy to take responsibility for all the minutiae of reference/table/image formatting. I wouldn't be seeking a co-nomination for the work: I'm simply determined to play my part in diversifying our selection of FLs. Feel free to drop me a note on my talk page if you might be interested in taking up the offer.
I hope to see some of you at WP:FLC in the future. Warm regards, — W F C— 15:22, 14 June 2011 (UTC)
Addressing a more important point than what I addressed above: Lists within the scope of this particular WikiProject are among the best on Wikipedia, or for that matter within all of history. (Yeah—I know—you're going to say that's a hyperbolic exaggeration. But really. Wikipedia is truly unprecedented, and I don't think there's actually any exaggeration in this instance. 'nother words, I agree with the original sentiment here. Michael Hardy ( talk) 03:31, 17 June 2011 (UTC)
Hey there! I'm from WP Elements, and we want to start using Bplus-class for our articles, but without any idea how to introduce it. I noticed you use it, so could you help us to do it? Help is surely appreciated-- R8R Gtrs ( talk) 09:36, 16 June 2011 (UTC)
The Monty Hall problem article, one of our longest standing featured articles, has been delisted. From what I gather this was due to long-standing and apparently unresolvable editing disputes, see Wikipedia:Featured article review/Monty Hall problem/archive3 for the full discussion. I'm also a bit surprised that until now this hasn't appeared either here or on the article alerts page. (Correct me if I'm wrong, though I do try to keep an eye on both.) Any ideas on getting the article relisted?-- RDBury ( talk) 20:00, 16 June 2011 (UTC)
Currently, Equivalent norms redirects to norm (mathematics), which doesn't describe norm equivalence. Is there a better article for it to redirect to? — Kallikanzarid talk 23:00, 16 June 2011 (UTC)
The file File:Sine Cos Proofs.pdf has recently come up at WP:FFD. There may well not be a place for this file on WP; but it does seem rather a more useful self-contained take-away than the section of our current omnibus article Proofs_of_trigonometric_identities#Angle_sum_identities, which there might be a case for breaking into smaller self-contained chunks. Jheald ( talk) 21:57, 8 June 2011 (UTC)
Pickands–Balkema–de Haan theorem is a complete orphan: No other articles link to it. Work on it! Michael Hardy ( talk) 03:27, 17 June 2011 (UTC)
I found constructive ordinal to be a red link, so I've redirected it to ordinal notation and labeled it a "redirect with possibilities". Should we have an article with this title? Michael Hardy ( talk) 04:47, 19 June 2011 (UTC)
There is a nothingness and the empty set discussion at the Nothingness article. That article can use a lot of improvement as to both content and sources. PPdd ( talk) 15:01, 9 June 2011 (UTC)
LivingBot is adding a number of dubious tags to some article talk pages, such as this [88]. Does anyone know about this? I'm inclined to revert... Jakob.scholbach ( talk) 19:33, 20 June 2011 (UTC)
This kind of spam seems to have finally reached the level where Amazon can no longer ignore it. [89] So hopefully we will soon see an end of this nonsense. Hans Adler 08:41, 21 June 2011 (UTC)
I was prompted by some recent off-wiki email (asking me for advice on getting started with Wikipedia editing) to write an essay on Wikipedia editing for research scientists. It's in my user space for now but it seems reasonable to move it to Wikipedia essay namespace at some point. Any feedback would be welcome. — David Eppstein ( talk) 17:27, 21 June 2011 (UTC)
The new article Horn angle, is basically a DICDEF with inaccuracies (see the talk page). There is an obsolete term translated as Cornicular angle, or horn-like angle and Heath gives more than 3 pages of material on it (in small print) in his commentary on Euclid Book III Prop. 16. Mathworld also has a "Horn angle" article which has more modern references. I'd like to either change the article to a summary of Heath or change it to a redirect if no one thinks it's worthwhile.-- RDBury ( talk) 14:37, 23 June 2011 (UTC)
There is a new weekly section on the main page called "Today's featured list" and I have nominated List of winners of the Mathcounts competition to have a spot here. There has been some opposition to the nomination and it looks like the list could become a removal candidate very soon unless the quality of the list is improved. If you are interested in maintaining the list's featured status and seeing a summary of it up on the main page, your help in improving the article would be greatly appreciated. Neelix ( talk) 03:37, 25 June 2011 (UTC)
A new article titled Charles Paul Narcisse Moreau, created by user:r.e.b., is one of the more unusual biographical articles, in that identification of the person seems to be a moderately intractable problem, and the intractability itself seems somewhat well-documented. These three people seem to be known to have existed:
The question is: Are all three the same person? Considerable circumstantial evidence that these three are the same has been published.
In the unlikely event that somebody knows something, could they further edit the article accordingly? Michael Hardy ( talk) 23:50, 24 June 2011 (UTC)
The introduction of the article seems to say that the Ricci tensor is symmetric for all pseudo-Riemannian manifolds. In a book I'm reading at the moment, it says that an affine connection ∇ with zero torsion has symmetric Ricci tensor if and only if ∇ is locally equi-affine. Where we call an affine connection locally equi-affine if around each point x of M there is a parallel volume form, i.e. a non-vanishing n-form ω such that ∇ω = 0. Which one is correct, the article or the book? It seems to me that there are some missing hypotheses in the article's statement. — Fly by Night ( talk) 17:04, 25 June 2011 (UTC)
Discussion on the notability guidelines for specialized books, such as math or programming is going on at Wikipedia talk:Notability (books)#Criterion out of context. Some editors maintain that book that have not been covered in-depth in venues for a general audience, such as the New York Times, should be deleted from Wikipedia. However, recent AfD discussion on math and programming books ended up with such books being kept if they pass the less restrictive WP:GNG. I'm aware that every book in the Springer Graduate Texts in Mathematics, for instance, has probably been reviewed in some math journals, so passes GNG, but whether it passes NBOOK is open to interpretation. Please voice your opinion in that discussion. FuFoFuEd ( talk) 01:24, 27 June 2011 (UTC)
I was surprised to come across an article for Discrete Green's theorem. This isn't exactly a deep result; I suspect that it wasn't published much earlier only because noone thought it worthwhile. The "history" section of the article claims that the theorem was introduced in 2007. A MathSciNet search turns up something from 2005 with a reference list suggesting that the same authors published on this subject in 2003. I wouldn't be surprised to find that others independently had the same idea earlier.
My main concern with the article as it stands is that it reads too much like promotion of Finkelstein's work. There's also some potential conflict of interest with User:Amiruchka (who identifies himself as Amir Shachar) editing the page. In particular, it's unusual to have a link to a YouTube video in the lead paragraph. Does anyone know enough about the topic to improve this article? Jowa fan ( talk) 07:45, 27 June 2011 (UTC)
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How do we feel about this edit to vector field? Someone seems to be adding links to the article pentagram map to any article that is even vaguely connected with it (including some high profile articles like Non-Euclidean geometry, Projective plane, Golden ratio). A Google scholar search for "Pentagram map" (33 hits with the highest citation count being just 17) indicates that while there are some people who study this concept, it certainly isn't significant enough to be spammed across so many basic mathematics articles. Do we revert these changes? Sławomir Biały ( talk) 12:58, 29 June 2011 (UTC)
David, with respect, WP:BRD might apply eventually. But this was hardly an endless or unproductive discussion, as it has been open a matter of mere hours. To expect it to come to fruition without an opportunity for interested parties to respond (we are coming up on July 4th weekend) is, I think, preemptive. Best wishes. 7&6=thirteen ( ☎) 16:20, 29 June 2011 (UTC)
Hi everyone. I am the person who wrote most of the pentagram map wiki page, and I thought it might help if I made some remarks about it. The pentagram map is certainly a small subject inside mathematics. It is a topic that sits inside the intersection of dynamical systems and projective geometry. I would say that maybe 6 authors total have written articles on this topic, though the interest in the topic seems to be increasing. Perhaps twice that many people will be interested within a year. The reason I edited the wiki page now is that the few people working on the subject (myself included) felt that it would be nice to have an accurate and up-to-date article that grad students and researchers in nearby areas could benefit from. I believe that what happened was that 7&6=thirteen (who was quite helpful to me and quite supportive of my foray into wiki editing) liked my effort and thought that the page should be better tied into wikipedia as a whole. I definitely like his suggestions and ideas, though it looks like he made some links that a mathematician would probably not make.
It is hard to say exactly which links should be made. One algorithm might be to follow something like the AMS 2010 math subject classification and choose articles in closely allied areas. Certainly, there is no need to have links to it either from very fundamental pages or from very high-profile pages, and those should probably be erased. I suppose that it might be reasonable to have links to it from projective geometry and integrable systems, but if and only if those pages have links to other pages having the same specificity. Likewise, it seems plausible to have links from theorems about configurations in projective geometry, like Pascal's theorem, which involve both polygons and projective geometry. It might take me, or the others working on this small topic, or other mathematicians, some time and effort to figure out exactly which links should be made but I hope that over the months we can occasionally put in things that are both useful and unobtrusive.
One reply I'd like to make about the comments above is that it is not fair to compare the wiki article to the original article I wrote, calling the former a hyped up mess. The wiki article is much more dense because it summarizes 19 years of development beyond the original article. Nothing there is supposed to be hype, just a summary of all results currently on the topic. The original article was quite simple and straightforward because I didn't have much to say. Now that I and others have thought about the thing for a long time, there is much more to say and the picture is more intricate. I suppose that this could be said of any subject of math that evolves over time.
I'd like to apologize to people for my part in causing this controversy. I gave the page a complete overhaul without pausing to get critiques from more experienced wiki writers. That caused a number of other editors to offer both criticism and help and the thing seems to have gotten a bit out of control. I think that the pentagram map is a small but beautiful piece of mathematics and I'd like to see it get exactly its proper weight inside wikipedia. RichardEvanSchwartz ( talk) 01:01, 30 June 2011 (UTC)
I started the article free boundary problem and had a volunteer editor look over it. He suggested that I ask here for some more targeted feedback from the experts. I think I've included enough content that it should not be regarded as a stub. Also, it's linked to from other articles ( Stefan problem, Obstacle problem) so as to avoid orphanhood.
Any suggestions on the content or organization would be appreciated; I think it could use some of the categorization links and so forth. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Compsonheir ( talk • contribs) 16:41, 30 June 2011 (UTC)
Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mathematics/Archive/2011/Jul
Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mathematics/Archive/2011/Aug
Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mathematics/Archive/2011/Sep
Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mathematics/Archive/2011/Oct
Rychlik ( talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log), no doubt an otherwise well-intentioned editor, does appear to be adding material that is unduly self-promotional. He has already been warned of a potential COI, but perhaps further action is needed? Specifically of concern are the articles Marek Rychlik, Rychlik's theorem, and Chordal problem, all of which appear to assign undue significance to the editor's own research. I thought I should post here to solicit input on the best way to handle this constellation of articles. One possibility that seems reasonable to me is to delete Marek Rychlik and Rychlik's theorem, possibly merging some content from Rychlik's theorem to Chordal problem. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 14:47, 28 November 2010 (UTC)
Situation does look manageable. Would anyone inclined to intervene please note the key distinction: "potential COI" may be a hypothesis or it may be something that can be confirmed. But WP:COI relates fundamentally only to putting the encyclopedia's interests second, rather than first. Something like the discussion of whether equichordal point problem is a better title can actually be carried out compatibly with AGF. Charles Matthews ( talk) 13:26, 29 November 2010 (UTC)
I am not convinced that redirecting Marek Rychlik to Rychlik's theorem was a good solution. We do have notability guidelines, and in this regard Marek Rychlik clearly fulfilled the criteria. Sure, the article was poor, but if anything I'd expected Rychlik's theorem to be renamed to equichordal point problem. Nageh ( talk) 20:05, 6 December 2010 (UTC)
The other problem is that equichordal point problem is now a redirect to Rychlik's theorem. As I pointed out previously, I can find only a single source on Google that refers to this problem by "Rychlik's theorem". If anything, Rychlik's theorem should be redirected to the equichordal point problem article. Nageh ( talk) 12:38, 9 December 2010 (UTC)
I just found a paper on ZBMATH database (Wojtkowski, M.P., Two applications of Jacobi fields to the billiard ball problem, J. Differ. Geom. 40, No.1, 155-164 (1994)) which mentions Bialy's theorem and also Rychlik's theorem in the abstract. Now, two major questions arise: 1) is the user Sławomir Biały related to Rychlik in any way, if yes, did the relationship induce this discussion? 2) Independent of the first question, is one mentioning by another polish mathematician a proof for notability? I highly doubt that. DrPhosphorus ( talk) 19:39, 18 December 2010 (UTC)
I have requested a renaming of Rychlik's theorem to equichordal point problem, followed by deletion of the article name Rychlik's theorem. Discussion here. Cheers, and a happy new year! Nageh ( talk) 10:32, 31 December 2010 (UTC)
I'd like to solicit input on the recent breakage of Template:Su in the Firefox 2.0 compatible browsers (there is a thread at Template talk:Su). I've just been told off that the ~20,000 current users of this line of browsers is not enough market share to consider fixing the template. The template is totally broken for users of this line of browsers (see the image on that discussion page for details), and a solution is very desirable. Potentially the template should be retired from use in favor of using <math> instead. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 16:07, 1 January 2011 (UTC):
Hi, I was hoping to get some expert help. Operator (disambiguation) currently has over 100 incoming links, and we're having a tough time figuring out how to fix them. I'm suspicious that the disambig is missing a mathematics article or two. Could someone take a look at the mathematics articles in this list and give their opinion? Thanks, -- JaGa talk 19:06, 3 January 2011 (UTC)
Why does this project not use a project banner to identify articles that are within its purview? I put the banner on a somewhat new article's talk page while I was putting a value in |listas=
and when I previewed the page I got the message that all the mathematics articles are in a List.
Lists have to be maintained manually. Categories populate themselves. The article I was attempting to tag is not on your list even though it has been around since October, 2010.
I am not doing drive-by tagging. I am working strictly by hand because of the low level of the quality of the sort values. I merely wanted call your attention to an article you seem to have ignored.
Happy editing! JimCubb ( talk) 01:16, 5 January 2011 (UTC)
There is a project banner on the talk pages of most math articles, I think.
Perhaps Movable singularity is what he's talking about. Michael Hardy ( talk) 02:05, 5 January 2011 (UTC)
Bezdek is the one I meant. I did not see him on the list and I apologize for missing him. The talk page of his article gives no indication that this project knows the article exists. JimCubb ( talk) 02:21, 5 January 2011 (UTC)
I've created a List of topics named after Karl Weierstrass.
Tasks:
So get busy and have fun with it. Michael Hardy ( talk) 01:55, 5 January 2011 (UTC)
Movable singularity has been prodded.
Do what you can with it. Michael Hardy ( talk) 02:05, 5 January 2011 (UTC)
The article Movable singularity has been proposed for deletion because of the following concern:
While all contributions to Wikipedia are appreciated, content or articles may be deleted for any of several reasons.
You may prevent the proposed deletion by removing the {{proposed deletion/dated}}
notice, but please explain why in your
edit summary or on
the article's talk page.
Please consider improving the article to address the issues raised. Removing {{proposed deletion/dated}}
will stop the
proposed deletion process, but other
deletion processes exist. The
speedy deletion process can result in deletion without discussion, and
articles for deletion allows discussion to reach
consensus for deletion.
JeepdaySock (AKA,
Jeepday)
17:50, 4 January 2011 (UTC)
I see from their edit histories that Jeepday and JimCubb have been prodding any article that they cannot find references for. I have started a discussion about this at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Unreferenced articles#Appropriateness of PRODding articles. Ozob ( talk) 11:57, 5 January 2011 (UTC)
WP:OWN Jeepday ( talk) 01:00, 6 January 2011 (UTC)
Should one of the math categories be added to the article titled Möbius resistor? Which one(s)?
(BTW, Oleg's mathbot has stopped adding new items every day to the list of mathematics articles. Jitse's bot still seems to be working, so it's Oleg's bot's fault we're not seeing anything new on the current activities page.) Michael Hardy ( talk) 07:51, 6 January 2011 (UTC)
IPs 70.51.177.249 ( talk · contribs) and 70.54.228.146 ( talk · contribs) have been adding material which appears to me to be hoaxes, using actual (but absurd) papers by Patrick St-Amant as references. JRSpriggs ( talk) 11:55, 5 January 2011 (UTC)
Has anyone heard of this impressively named publication? I can't find any article about it in WP, nor about its publisher, Hikari Ltd.
I ask mainly because a certain Pierre St Anant seems to have published in it, and the work is referenced in the hyperoperation article. A couple of Canadian IPs have been adding references to St Anant's ideas (largely sourced to arXiv publications) to various articles, including continuum hypothesis and fundamental theorem of arithmetic. My strong suspicion is that these are not appropriate for inclusion, but I have not read them carefully enough to be sure. -- Trovatore ( talk) 02:40, 6 January 2011 (UTC)
So no one's heard of the journal, then? --
Trovatore (
talk)
20:05, 6 January 2011 (UTC)
I can see that this group is motivated, and I would like to offer a couple of suggestions that may decrease the loss of articles to prod, no mater how you feel about them, you need take them into account.
Cheers JeepdaySock (AKA, Jeepday) 12:00, 6 January 2011 (UTC)
I've created a new article called Weierstrass substitution.
Tasks ahead:
So get busy. Have fun. Michael Hardy ( talk) 18:48, 7 January 2011 (UTC)
I just patrolled a new article Highest Weight Category and verified all that I could. I've confirmed the reference and updated it with a link to an online version, but this is far beyond my expertise. Could somebody familiar with representation theory review the article and confirm it is valid? Thanks. - Hydroxonium ( talk) 22:48, 7 January 2011 (UTC)
The article is still an orphan: no other articles link to it. Michael Hardy ( talk) 18:13, 8 January 2011 (UTC)
I'm not a mathematician, although I have a science background. I sometimes do proof-reading of some scientific Wikipedia articles, but mainly from the perspectives of English and readability rather than for technical content.
Various articles have brought me to a few pages such as " Bred vectors" and " Lyapunov vectors". It seems slightly strange that their titles use the plural form "vectors" rather than the singular "vector". By contrast, the title of (for instance) " Eigenvector", being in the singular form, seems much more natural.
Does the Mathematics wikiproject have a preferred convention on plural vs. singular in such titles? Shouldn't the title usually be singular unless there is good over-riding reason to use the plural?
(In all the above, my use of the word "singular" is in the English language "opposite of plural" sense, rather than any mathematical sense "singular vectors" sense!)
Would there be any objection to renaming, in particular, "Bred vectors" to "Bred vector" and "Lyapunov vectors" to "Lyapunov vector"?
Feline Hymnic ( talk) 01:01, 8 January 2011 (UTC)
Great. Many thanks. (As I typed my request, I was trying to think of an example from Maths where the plural would be the best; I was sure there would be some but they eluded me. So thanks, too, for jogging my mind with "Maxwell's equations".) Feline Hymnic ( talk) 09:38, 8 January 2011 (UTC)
The articles linked to in {{ irrational numbers}} differ in the number of decimal places they show in the lead. Euler–Mascheroni constant shows 50 digit after the decimal point, Apéry's constant shows 45, Square root of 2 shows 65, Square root of 3 and Square root of 5 show 60 each, Golden ratio shows 10, Plastic number shows 17, etc. Should they be made consistent? I'd propose a not-too-large number of digits, e.g. 30. What do you guys think? -- A. di M. ( talk) 13:45, 6 January 2011 (UTC)
There is some confusion at these logic pages concerning the meaning of the term "first-order logic". There is a narrow sense of the term and a larger sense of the term. Thus, the page second-order logic adheres to the narrow sense, so that we find that "First-order logic uses only variables that range over individuals (elements of the domain of discourse); second-order logic has these variables as well as additional variables that range over sets of individuals." Meanwhile, the page first-order logic currently works with the larger sense, and moreover there is a bit of a back-and-forth going on, to which I have unfortunately contributed before realizing what the problem was. Tkuvho ( talk) 12:36, 9 January 2011 (UTC)
The redirect Frenet-Serret frame → Frenet-Serret formulas was recently replaced with a new article that consists of content that is crudely copy-pasted from the articles Frenet-Serret formulas and differential geometry of curves. As far as I can tell, apart from the brief lead, no new content was added in the process (and all of the content still remains at Frenet-Serret formulas and differential geometry of curves). Should we have this separate article or should this content forking be reverted? It seems to me that the already existing article Frenet-Serret formulas is intended to cover both the formulas and the frame. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 14:16, 9 January 2011 (UTC)
If you have an opinion, please comment here: Talk:Operator#Requested move. Paul August ☎ 21:14, 9 January 2011 (UTC)
Today, someone removed a large number of items from List of scientific journals in mathematics. I undid that edit. More eyes on the article and opinions on the talk page would be nice. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 20:49, 11 January 2011 (UTC)
Mathbot doesn't seem to have added any new mathematics articles since January 2. I assume that the articles showing up lately in the current activity have been added manually somehow. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 15:01, 13 January 2011 (UTC)
I was able to run Mathbot myself, and it seems to have worked fine. For those who don't know, there is a "multi-maintainer project" named wpmath on the toolserver, which has the mathbot code. I am hoping to eventually get Jitse's bot there as well. The goal of this is to put us in a position that someone else can take over the code smoothly if the current maintainers leave. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 21:47, 13 January 2011 (UTC)
It seems that maybe some people involved in this project do not regularly look at Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Current activity and see the daily update on new articles. Because of the recent bot problems we have ten days of new articles simultaneously. Here are those new articles:
Happy editing! Michael Hardy ( talk) 03:37, 14 January 2011 (UTC)
Tricomplex number has been prodded. Is it worth keeping? Michael Hardy ( talk) 20:48, 14 January 2011 (UTC)
I've added some references to the article and a link from hypercomplex number saying " Tricomplex numbers - a 3d vector space over the reals, one of a family of systems of commutative hypercomplex numbers in n-dimensions over the reals.". Still not very notable, but neither are multicomplex numbers. 89.241.233.7 ( talk) 23:52, 15 January 2011 (UTC)
An anonymous editor at transfinite induction is under the remarkable impression that there is no successor step in transfinite induction. Please help out. -- Trovatore ( talk) 22:13, 14 January 2011 (UTC)
Is this reliable? A certain editor is adding "facts" sourced to it, and in cube root, what was attributed to it about the history of the cube root of two was totally wrong. I'm asking here, before going to WP:RSN, as I'd like to see what other mathematicians have to say about it. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 18:19, 15 January 2011 (UTC)
Please see Talk:Entailment#Duplication of content. - dcljr ( talk) 19:55, 15 January 2011 (UTC)
Editor User:NewtonEin (as well as some anon ips) has been inserting material on Lapierre-Roy vectors and the Lapierre-Roy Law (such as in recent edits to Riemann zeta function). These two articles and related edits seem to be non-notable and OR. I'd be tempted to prod them, but I've never actually done this so I don't really know what it means. The first article appears to be renaming the concept of "infinite-dimensional vectors" while the second appears to be elementary estimates on values of the zeta function. Could anyone look at this? RobHar ( talk) 03:18, 16 January 2011 (UTC)
Is this a common misconception? You can comment at Talk:List of common misconceptions#0.999.... Tkuvho ( talk) 03:41, 16 January 2011 (UTC)
I've created a new article titled Advances in Applied Mathematics. As it stands, it needs work. Michael Hardy ( talk) 20:35, 16 January 2011 (UTC)
After weeks of nothing there are now three nominations at once. Follow the links to see the discussions:
-- RDBury ( talk) 14:41, 17 January 2011 (UTC)
post away. perhaps some day i'll find a better place to gather such a list.
also, another idea might be sort of a prize for clear and accessible articles. Kevin Baas talk 02:51, 18 January 2011 (UTC)
Personally i've grown tired of this. there is way to much adversity to change making itself plainly obvious, despite what some people say. i just posted one suggestion here and see all the resistance that resulted. WhatAmIDoing was right: it's pointless; all it's good for is raising one's blood pressure. and i'm not really in to that sort of thing. it's sad, really (unfortunate), but what are you going to do? i can certainly find more productive uses for my time than dealing with this kind of blood-boiling resistance, utter lack of sympathy, or even listening, and worst of all condenscion, and getting nowhere. Kevin Baas talk 19:45, 19 January 2011 (UTC)
Tkuvho really gets credit for that link. I did copyedit the lede some. I think that the main questions that the lede needs to answer are the following, along with their answers from the lede of Riemannian geometry
It is not always feasible to give a full answer in the lede, in which case we should still try to say something non-trivial (and at least nearly correct). For example, here are the answers from Kleene's T predicate:
The answer to #1 there is intentionally vague, but it's still explanatory. Especially in longer article, the lede also serves as a summary of the main points of the article. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 14:01, 19 January 2011 (UTC)
Just to note that is at least one attack at WQA basically at all the editors here (by Gregbard). Dougweller ( talk) 12:51, 19 January 2011 (UTC)
Some encyclopedic editors are reverting my addition of a sentence in the lead at exterior algebra providing a link to more elementary pages that should be read first. Are they being too encyclopedic? Tkuvho ( talk) 19:50, 19 January 2011 (UTC)
...for that I go to wolfram mathematica or planetmath or essentially anywhere else.
and it seems this state has been getting progressively worse throughout the years. as if there are a number of people who are actively making it worse.
something really needs to be done about making the articles coherent and accessible. badly.
Kevin Baas talk 17:36, 17 January 2011 (UTC)
The truth is that enWP's mathematics coverage is the go-to reference for those seriously studying the subject, i.e. graduate students. This is clear from the attitude on the MathOverflow site: search WP first, then ask us. In other words the articles this project curates are doing the work of a mathematical encyclopedia. It may be that we should look at criticisms that we are not performing other functions; but I for one am not prepared to accept such criticisms from User:Kevin Baas, whom I don't consider a reliable witness. Charles Matthews ( talk) 19:27, 17 January 2011 (UTC)
[22]. Bully yourself. You have been making assertions about the treatment of mathematics here for seven years, and I have yet to see you do any actual work towards improving it; you have certainly scrambled up the tensor topics, but forgive me if I don't count that as a plus. Charles Matthews ( talk) 20:27, 17 January 2011 (UTC)
(ec)
Maybe we should start collecting these discussions, in a FAQ-type listing. It might be a much more efficient method of communicating this group's apparent disinterest in addressing this ongoing problem.
Someone complains that the math-related articles are needlessly opaque several times a year, and as far as I can tell, every single complaint gets blown off. Typically, the closest we come to a solution is someone inviting the complainants to magically know enough about the subjects to fix basic problems (e.g., the absence of a paragraph about "why anyone cares about this concept"). In my experience, identifying specific, concrete problems in specific, named sentences in individual, linked articles earns you exactly the same kind of dismissive response that vaguer complaints produce. I've personally seen a complaint about a basic grammar problem get dismissed, as if editors who work on math articles shouldn't have to use the level of English that one expects from a typical 12 year old.
So Kevin, let me assure you that far from the first person to complain about this problem, but unfortunately the people who appear to be primarily responsible for creating the problem are perfectly satisfied with the status quo, so complaining here will accomplish nothing except raising your blood pressure. WhatamIdoing ( talk) 22:05, 17 January 2011 (UTC)
@WhatamIdoing: I, for one, have on many occasions addressed issues raised by users concerning the accessibility of math articles. Typically, these occur on talk pages of the corresponding articles, in which case they are much easier to address. I'd venture to say that most accessibility issues raised on this discussion page are rather vague and hence much harder to address appropriately. It is true that it would difficult for the one person raising the issue to fix everything him/herself, but with a complaint like "almost all math articles on wiki are incoherent and inaccessible", it's not like the ~20 regulars who hang out in this forum can fix everything either. Other times I've disregarded a request to improve accessibility are along the lines of "I have a college degree in engineering, and even I don't understand what the article Class formation is saying", and while that article could be improved and made more accessible, knowing college level math is by no means sufficient to have any idea what that article is about.
As for the discussion at hand, the OP's original comment was certainly not the best way to approach this issue. In fact, the only phrase the people in this forum are likely to somewhat agree with is that accessibility needs to be improved. I, for one, am pretty sure most of our articles are "coherent", and I'm only on wikipedia because I find planetmath and mathworld mostly unhelpful. I'm also fairly certain our articles have not been getting worse. (You could argue that maybe the number of good ones as a percentage of the whole is going down, but only because there's an increasing amount of articles, so that's not a very good measure). Finally, while there are people making articles actively worse, they are presumably not the people from whom the OP is asking for help, so there's no need to leave a lingering potential insult lying around. So, as I said, there is at most one thing out of six that the OP said initially that participants here could identify with. That's not a good score if you're trying to get people to help you. RobHar ( talk) 22:39, 17 January 2011 (UTC)
I agree with the OP that the maths articles do let WP down. I've a maths-physics background, and the maths articles fall below the physics articles in clarity, IMO. Some are good, but a lot are really bad in that they don't communicate the concepts to all audiences. They look like they are written by PhDs for PhDs. A good article can communicate on many levels, explaining the concepts at an elementary level and more advanced levels. -- cheers, Michael C. Price talk 10:52, 18 January 2011 (UTC)
I can understand why people think it makes sense to compare physics and mathematics, but in reality it can only lead to false comparisons. The basic language of physics involves electrons, atoms, forces, time, energy, etc. In other words, (for the most part) it involves concepts that are taught to high school students. Other than that, the term "quantum" is an element of pop culture, and the concepts of Lagrangian and Hamiltonian are a step away from energy. Hell, kids even use the term "force field"; not totally accurately mind you, but still. The basic language of mathematics involves functions, topological spaces, groups, invariants, manifolds, graphs, rings, vector spaces, R-modules, categories, etc. While some of these are introduced at a high school or undergraduate, many of them are graduate topics. This makes it inherently more difficult to provide down-to-earth explanations on many wiki math articles. Take for example one of the biggest mathematical proofs of the recent past: Wiles' proof of Fermat. Luckily, you can fairly easily say a bunch of things about Fermat's Last Theorem; however, you'd be hard pressed to give a down-to-earth explanation of what the modularity theorem even says. Anyway, that's a bit of my rant. RobHar ( talk) 16:02, 18 January 2011 (UTC)
Greetings Kevin, You have made an excellent observation and contribution to the discussion for this group. I have read your user page, and I am impressed by the time and thought you have put into NPOV. Please take a look at User:Gregbard/Mathematosis which is content that members of this group actively suppressed, and was moved from Wikipedia:MMSS to user space. It is no surprise to me that you have appropriately brought this important issue to the attention of the proper community, and have gotten a negative response from several of them. The prevailing attitude is represented by CBM (who is a wonderful and reasonable editor to discuss things with, however is still guilty of having this attitude that it isn't important at all for non-mathematicians to be able to understand mathematics articles in Wikipedia --a position he has stated in this discussion). Most of the active members couldn't care less if articles are only intelligible by themselves and their mathematician buddies. They are territorial and hostile to any interdisciplinary treatment of topics which might lend a great deal of clarity to non-mathematicians. As a note to the group, this poster Kevin has made a good faith report to this group for a need for improvement which the group has heretofore failed to achieve. His observation is valuable, as criticism is how we improve. Do not take this opportunity to dismiss him. Put away your arrogance, and adopt the humble position that he is speaking to an valid issue on behalf of the reading audience. Show some respect. Greg Bard ( talk) 21:17, 18 January 2011 (UTC)
I'm still awaiting outside input at exterior algebra. In light of some of the comments made here, I have completely rewritten the lead of the article. However, since the issues were never clearly identified (beyond a general lack of understanding), it is difficult to determine if I have hit the right mark. It does seem at the very least that those complaining loudly about its original inaccessibility should offer there feedback on the revision. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 15:30, 20 January 2011 (UTC)
I have been inspired by the above discussion to start an FAQ. It's currently visible at the top of this page. Anyone who wants to edit it is free to do so; it's at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mathematics/FAQ. Ozob ( talk) 01:35, 18 January 2011 (UTC)
The first answer in the FAQ likened the difficult of mathematics articles to those in "law and medicine".
User:WhatamIdoing has recently visited
WP:MED and
WP:LAW attempting to get them to say that their concepts can be made accessible; see
WT:MED#Advanced topics and
WT:LAW#On making technical articles accessible. By and large the folks at WP:MED were of the opinion that most of their material could be explained to the layman, though to me they didn't sound particularly enthusiastic. WhatamIdoing Anthonyhcole has used this as justification for removing "and medicine" from the FAQ answer, and I am sure he hopes to do the same for "law". I've replaced "medicine" with "medical science" since that seems to me to be closer to the actual consensus in that thread.
I'm starting this thread in the interest of centralizing discussion. I'll shortly be posting to the Law and Medicine WikiProjects directing them here. Ozob ( talk) 12:37, 20 January 2011 (UTC)
I am totally impressed with the huge improvements to the lead at Exterior algebra. I finally understand what the subject is, and why anyone should care about it. (It's the biggest tool for certain purposes! It provides complete, precise, unambiguous definitions instead of just vague descriptions! It's sometimes convenient! It has desirable properties! It's useful! It's compatible with some other things!)
In terms of practical feedback:
The subject is advanced so the material is naturally dense, and I read the lead slowly, trying to reactivate some rather rusty neurons. The occasional parenthetical comment (e.g., the degrees add (like multiplication of polynomials)) helped me connect the current subject to some basic but apparently rusty concepts (going from "The degrees add?!" to "Oh, he means the degrees add! How could I have forgotten!"). It's still not going to be accessible to someone at the pre-algebra level and that's okay. I think it's going to be accessible to someone who has studied vectors past the introduction-to-physics level.
The lead makes judicious use of occasional "needless verbosity" as a way of introducing unfamiliar terms. For example, it says The exterior product of two vectors u and v, denoted by u ∧ v, lives in a space called the exterior square, rather than The exterior product of two vectors u and v, denoted by u ∧ v, lives in the exterior square. The difference from the perspective of the non-expert is that the chosen construction says "Now you know what we call this bit, and that's all you need to know about that for now" rather than "Here's another bit of jargon to prove that you don't know what we're talking about!" I found this so effective that I plan to adopt this strategy for other technical subjects.
The newly added image helped me check my understanding of the first paragraph.
In the end, I felt like I understood the main point of every single sentence, at least to a first approximation—well enough, in fact, to confidently identify and fix a minor typo that the spilling chucker missed, without wondering if perhaps this was some strange new mathematical concept.
I'm enormously happy about the new third paragraph, which contains most of the "What's it useful for" and "What field is it studied in" answers. (The short answers to those two questions are "Lots of things" and "Several", and as a result, I know why this article is a high priority on this project's WP:1.0 assessments.)
This is such a wonderful bit of work. Thank you to all who helped, directly and indirectly. WhatamIdoing ( talk) 18:24, 21 January 2011 (UTC)
Ono et. al. have recently published a paper which is getting a lot of hype. If someone can work on Partition (number theory) in preparation for that would probably be good. The paper deals with congruences and a new closed-form formula (I've only skimmed it so far); we should, in particular, work on Partition (number theory)#Congruences if at all possible. At the moment that section directly contradicts itself.
CRGreathouse ( t | c) 00:15, 22 January 2011 (UTC)
Although I did Maths up to it being a subsidiary subject at first-year university level, I've forgotten most of it, although I do like to try to get a vague grasp of concepts as I come across them (see, for example, the above discussion about Lyapunov vectors). So I can heartily commend and congratulate that article for including a diagram which, more than thousands of words could do, gives the outside reader a rough idea of what's going on. Excellent. Any chance of a few more articles doing likewise? If diagrams are tricky, then use a real world example if possible: "Imagine this scene 'X' ... aspect 'Y' is described by mathematical concept 'Z'." (I realise this really may not be possible in various cases, but I'm sure it must be in some, as per Lyapunov vectors.) In short, could articles, where possible, attempt to teach a non-mathematician? Thanks. Feline Hymnic ( talk) 09:52, 8 January 2011 (UTC)
There are places where diagrams would help. But even when you can sketch a diagram in a few seconds on the back of an envelope, it may take two hours, or eight hours, to create something that can be uploaded. Michael Hardy ( talk) 16:57, 9 January 2011 (UTC)
Although I've tended to emphasise pictures, diagrams, etc. to help the outsider get a finger-hold on a concept, another really valuable way to do this is a "motivating example". For instance, many years ago I couldn't see any point to the vector cross product. "Why bother?", I thought. "Completely perpendicular to the usual vector plane? Crazy!", I thought. But in another isolated compartment of my poor little brain was already squirrelled away the right-hand rule for electro-magnetic induction. Then in one physics lesson about electromagnetism, the lecturer said, almost as a throw-away, "...and we can express this mathematically as a vector-cross product." And the light went on: "Yes, at last, I get it!". So, if reasonably possible, could articles have some sort of "motivating example" near the top? Feline Hymnic ( talk) 12:38, 22 January 2011 (UTC)
Midy's theorem is being enriched by unsourced material. Tkuvho ( talk) 04:05, 19 January 2011 (UTC)
Hadamard's maximal determinant problem is a quasi-orphan (in the article space, one "article" and one list link to it (and I shouldn't have to tell you which list)). Try to figure out which other articles should link to it, and add the links. Michael Hardy ( talk) 18:14, 22 January 2011 (UTC)
Tangent half-angle formula has long been a deficient article. It's not as bad as it was 30 minutes ago, but more work is needed.
The illustration would accompany a geometric proof fairly well, but it's badly titled, and also see my commented-out comment on it within the article.
I'm not sure the Weierstrass substitution should be mentioned other than very tersely. There's a main-article link for that. Michael Hardy ( talk) 02:45, 23 January 2011 (UTC)
In the last 3 days, User:David Eppstein created articles on the mathematical economists Andreu Mas-Colell and Graciela Chichilnisky (yesterday).
Chichilnisky's continuous social choice theory may interest topologists, especially; her work on international trade, development, and environmental economics has received international attention; further, she has received national attention in the USA because of a (now settled) sex-discrimination law-suit.
Also, another article started by David, the Shapley-Folkman lemma, received "Good Article" status today, thanks to the reviewing of User:Jakob.scholbach, who guided the needed revisions. Further editing, especially copy-editing, would be appreciated.
Best regards, Kiefer.Wolfowitz ( talk) 22:54, 19 January 2011 (UTC)
There is a new article on the algebraic/additive number theorist Henry Mann, who was also a statistician.
I nominated the 3 mathematical articles for DYK, and so I encourage mathematical-project editors to review the DYK facts. Thanks, Kiefer.Wolfowitz ( talk) 02:18, 24 January 2011 (UTC)
A user at Talk:Exterior algebra asked me to define what I mean by "Bourbakism". As this is an important issue I am starting a thread here. As pertaining to the style of the pages here, particularly the ledes, what I am referring to is the idea that the latest fad in the foundations of mathematics is also the foundation of human thought and therefore should be the foundation of education. In the sixties, set theory was fashionable as a foundation. This foundationalist mentality therefore led to the New Math debacle in education. Concepts such as "naturality", "universal constructions", "equivalence of categories" are certainly appropriate on some math pages, but not most. Thus, understanding the naturality and universality of the exterior algebra is important in its applications in de Rham theory and building the exterior differential complex, etc. However, such concepts are basically a Bourbakist infestation when it comes to explaining basic concepts such as exterior algebra, and should be relegated to the last section of the page. I appreciate the effort that went into the upgrading of the page exterior algebra recently, but at the same time misguided educational principles should be checked. The elaboration of the "categorical" material has been accompanied by the deletion of material on simple-minded topics such as rank, minor, and cross product which can serve to connect the topic to the reader's previous experience. However, if you are Bourbakist, connecting to previous experience counts little when one is dealing with alleged foundations of human thought. Tkuvho ( talk) 10:00, 23 January 2011 (UTC)
The discussion at Talk:Exterior algebra is quickly becoming tiresome and unproductive. A nutshell version is that Tkuvho feels that the lead of a mathematics article should not even attempt to summarize the more advanced parts of the article, because of accessibility concerns. Some outside comment is obviously needed. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 14:07, 23 January 2011 (UTC)
Considering that Bourbaki was founded in the 1930s, calling it a recent fad is a bit odd. And trying to tie in Bourbaki's stated wish to write an encyclopedic reference for contemporary mathematicians with the New Math is something of a slur; if you wish for more context read the introduction to Dieudonné's Infinitesimal Calculus; it was much more of a question of getting the French university examiners to consider whether undergraduate teaching should have some relevance to research topics. The excesses of American educators, post-Sputnik, are really only vaguely related. It is obviously the case that our treatments of graduate-level topics should reflect graduate-level textbooks. Those are a mixed bunch, but the "formalist" treatments will be in evidence in certain areas of higher algebraic content, and it is perfectly fine that our articles should reflect that to some extent. My impression is that the anti-algorithmic and "no pictures" prejudices of Bourbaki are now pretty much obsolete, so that heuristics on how you compute with the exterior algebra (say), and some geometrical interpretations, are appropriate. Also some history gives a chance to speak to why ideas were introduced in the first place, which usually helps. Charles Matthews ( talk) 15:47, 23 January 2011 (UTC)
Certainly the basic principle is that the choice of content should not be anyone's personal taste, but a reflection of a mainstream view. Charles Matthews ( talk) 17:34, 23 January 2011 (UTC)
I agree with posts I have seen elsewhere. I think the lead for Exterior algebra generally looks great. Thank you to all the editors who have worked on that text! --- My Core Competency is Competency ( talk) 18:30, 23 January 2011 (UTC)
User:Gauravmisra del mentioned on his userpage last month that he was having trouble with the wiki-syntax necessary to add his Remarkable Discovery to the article on subtraction without borrowing. He subsequently went ahead and added it (I guess he figured it out?), so that's fine, I guess.
Problem is, I'm concerned about his description of this as a Discovery, which evokes Original Research. But this really isn't my field. I'm sure I could follow his step-by-step instructions if I tried, but I wouldn't be able to recognize whether this is something new and original or old and familiar (and his mention of the psychological side effects of ordinary subtraction seem... unusual, to say the least). Anyone care to have a look? DS ( talk) 15:12, 24 January 2011 (UTC)
IMO the sentence about the connection almost complex structure has two errors:
I'm writing here because I don't think many people are watching that page :) — Kallikanzarid talk 18:49, 24 January 2011 (UTC)
Anyone willing to join me in making this article Good? I think prime numbers [c,sh]ould be a showpiece maths article, ranging from most elementary math's to jungles of unsolved conjectures and recent top-notch work. Everybody, please inscribe yourself here! Jakob.scholbach ( talk) 23:17, 26 January 2011 (UTC)
Is the Australian Mathematical Society ranking of mathematics journals a reliable source for list of mathematics journals? Opinions on that question are welcome at Talk:List_of_mathematics_journals#AustMS_journal_rankings. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 04:49, 28 January 2011 (UTC)
My suggestion is to adopt a guideline for math pages (particularly the more advanced ones) that they should include a specific pointer to the more elementary topics that need to be mastered in order to understand the more advanced page. The pointer should consist not merely in a mention of a page imbedded in a clause in a long sentence, but a specific mention that the linked page is more accessible. Here is an example. Riemannian manifolds and their curvature cannot even begin to be approached until the student has mastered the theorema egregium of Gauss and the idea that Gaussian curvature is an intrinsic invariant. Pages such as Riemannian manifold should make it clear that the reader has to understand surfaces first. A similar example: I believe the reason the contributor who expressed himself above cannot make any headway in exterior algebra is because the wedge product appears there in a completely "ex nihilo" fashion. By the time the article gets around to construct the exterior algebra in terms of the tensor algebra (!), we have already lost all beginners. The page exterior algebra is a great page, but it could be made more accessible to someone with basic background in linear algebra, but not much more. I tried to link it to more elementary pages in the spirit of my suggested guideline above, but encountered reverts on the grounds of being "unencyclopedic". We should adopt a guideline making it encyclopedic to try to help beginners. Tkuvho ( talk) 22:09, 19 January 2011 (UTC)
"The idea" is that a beginner who looks at, say, riemannian manifold, should not walk away baffled, intimidated, and non-plussed, having learned nothing. If we offer him some leads to lower-level articles, he will either look at those and learn something, or else say, OK, to understand Riemannian manifolds I need first to know what Gaussian curvature is. This is far less discouraging than walking away completely baffled, which seems to have been the experience of some of the beginners who expressed themselves above. Every college course has a list of prerequisites in the course catalog. I am not sure why some mild approximation in wiki should be viewed as such anathema. And I don't think this is "condescending" toward the beginner (see comment below), on the contrary, endless blather about "non-encyclopedic" is condescending. Tkuvho ( talk) 14:00, 20 January 2011 (UTC)
I think it is generally a bad idea to start of an article by saying: "you should know this, this, and that before attempting to read this." (Or any friendlier message with the same content.) It feels really condescending to me. Moreover, it encourages laziness on part of the editors, by just allowing them to put up some prerequisites and not push to obtain the uttermost accessibility that is possible for the subject. In particular, it encourages starting articles at a high entry level, instead of steadily increasing the difficulty level as the article proceeds. Another thing to keep in mind, is that there can exist vastly different roads to understanding a mathematical subject. A pattern I sometimes see in the thinking about accessibility of math pages on this project, is that it tends to focus on the path that a typical mathematics student would take in learning about the subject. This is not surprising since it is the path that many of contributors here followed/are following, but many users will actually have a different background, which often misses some of the mathematical foundations that a mathematics student would have, but might on the other hand might include a lot of hands experience of using similar structures. For example, students of theoretical physics will learn about Riemannian manifolds in a GR class without any solid knowledge Gaussian curvature or the theory of surfaces (that a mathematics student would have.) Similarly, when (even if) physics and engineering learn what a tensor of a vector bundle is, they usually have been working with examples of these structures for years. I think that a similar effect to providing a list of prerequisites, (without the possible condescending connotation) can be achieved by detailing in the lead what types of things a concept is generalizing and/or naming a few well-known (to people that do not already know about the subject) concrete examples. This typically are things that a reader should know about to understand the article. A reader that has never heard about any of these things, will generally get the clue that he has encountered an article for which he doesn't even properly understand the basic context. Although hopefully he will have a much better idea of the context then before. TimothyRias ( talk) 13:29, 20 January 2011 (UTC)
Here are some suggestions for the lead. I've itemized them for easier discussion.
-- Sławomir Biały ( talk) 23:40, 22 January 2011 (UTC)
1) Should this discussion be moved to another location? Maybe the talk page of WP:MOSMATH, since I think it is a good idea to record the result of this discussion somewhere, for example as a section of WP:MOSMATH. 2) I generally agree with the points above. Something that could be add is that, if use of jargon is unavoidable, it is generally a good idea to avoid using more than one new piece jargon in a sentence. This way it is possible for readers with a vague acquaintance of the subject, but who are fuzzy on the jargon to get some idea of the meaning of the jargon from the context. T R 08:59, 31 January 2011 (UTC)
Perturbation problem beyond all orders could use some work. Michael Hardy ( talk) 04:54, 30 January 2011 (UTC)
I know, I'm beating this horse over again going over the archives but there few issues and common themes that seem to repeat themselves. WP:NOTTEXTBOOK is often referenced (like in the FAQ above and essay reference) as the excuse for the difficulty of what it's hard to learn anything from WP:Math pages. I do not believe this fair that it's intended purpose. That was meant to leading questions followed by systematic problem solutions as examples. In that same section it states:
Also in right below that in that same section:
This is the problem with the current state of WP:Math and it's infamous for this, both inside and out of the wikipedia community.
I've done my part in the past few years to link jargon to appropriate pages, fix circular definitions across pages by providing an entrance for someone trying to find an in, and created a few images (all of which to been replaced by better ones it seems). I totally get that it's one it's one of the best resources for the intelligentsia and I don't want to diminish that but that isn't the goal of an encyclopedia. I recently was shocked when I popped in an old copy Encarta and compared the text of our math articles. The articles are brief but you can actual pick up the topic if you not an expert. I feel a little overwhelmed though and hope someone hears and understands the community's pain. --ZacBowling ( user| talk) 11:05, 30 January 2011 (UTC)
FWIW, I have always in interpreted the "academic language" section to be referring to articles like apple that are commonly discussed in non-academic settings. It would be possible to fancy up that article with a lot of terms from biology, for example by saying "endocarp" instead of "core". But the common term for the core of an apple is "core".
The intended audience for apple is much broader than the intended audience for Galois cohomology, and it would be silly to expect the latter to be accessible in the same way that the former should be. The common, everyday word for "homological algebra" is "homological algebra"; there is no other, more common, term to use.
The "research papers" section, which claims that readers should not need to follow wikilinks, has been at odds with actual practice for years, and should generally just be ignored. This is not just in math; see B flat major for another article that you couldn't read unless you knew many terms. The lede of that article is also full of specialized terminology, and is also perfectly appropriate. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 12:27, 30 January 2011 (UTC)
This section's heading looks like someone didn't pay much attention before posting. "Just facts and proofs"? There aren't very many proofs in Wikipedia math articles. Proofs are something we have very little of here. Michael Hardy ( talk) 17:57, 30 January 2011 (UTC)
I'm a software engineer myself with a focus on user experience so that is where my brain goes. (coincidentally I used to work a TI developing the software for graphing calculators). Here are a couple of ideas:
It's sad that WP:Math is the only Wikipedia area that makes me feel like I should be using Simple English Wikipedia. --ZacBowling ( user| talk) 01:56, 31 January 2011 (UTC)
I have some relevant thoughts on the original post of this thread. The fact is that there are a great many mathematics articles that are inaccessible, and I don't think anyone can credibly deny this. There are plenty of terrible mathematics articles, some of which no doubt I myself have inflicted on the world. I do think that improving the accessibility of mathematics articles is an important and worthy goal, and I think the best we can hope for in general discussions here is a systematic solution, such as bringing the MOSMATH in line with our current best practices. But project members often display a lack of concern for these issues, or at least a lack of sensitivity to them, and various often sinister reasons have been ascribed for this. But I would like to make some candid observations that I think help explain why things are this way.
Wikipedia's mathematics editors seem to be mostly academics of one stripe or another, and this also seems to be less true of other content areas. To some extent, this dictates how our coverage of mathematics topics develops. I have written articles for the following reasons, and I think that so have many other mathematics editors if I had to guess at their motives based on their behavior: (1) to understand the topic of a seminar I am involved with, (2) as a convenient reference for myself (and other researchers), (3) as a resource for my students (who may be undergraduate or graduate students), (4) to help learn a subject myself or out of sheer curiosity of a subject that I know little about. While I'm sure that the whole altruistic "free encyclopedia" thing may make us feel good about our contributions, it's much too rarefied to elicit any real work on the encyclopedia (for me, at any rate). Out of my own motivations (and I presume those of others), very little has to do with making the encyclopedia accessible to Joe on the street. The only time accessibility is a big personal concern is when I am writing for students, but in their case I assume a fairly specific background (especially when they are graduate students) that the wider population isn't likely to have.
Wikipedia's mathematics editors themselves are also products of the wider world of mathematics, which seems to lack expository source material aimed at Joe on the street. For us, articles published in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society are expository, although most of these articles are almost certainly not understandable to Joe. The rest of the sciences have serious expository outlets like Scientific American, the American Scientist, Nature, and Science, that attempt to explain cutting-edge developments in the sciences to laypeople. But mathematics has no such outlet: Journals in mathematics that specialize in exposition do not emphasize mathematics that is of substantial contemporary interest. One can attempt to rationalize this by saying that "It's the nature of the subject" and "It's much more difficult to make mathematics accessible than other content areas". Critics here dismiss these rationalizations as mere excuses, but I think it is significant that there are so few expository sources for most of mathematics. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 13:06, 31 January 2011 (UTC)
I clearly said that advanced mathematics generally lacks expository sources aimed at Joe on the street: that is, aimed at a completely non-mathematical audience. I wouldn't argue that there are expository sources aimed at mathematical audiences. The Princeton Mathematical Companion is pitched at about the same level as many of the "Notices" articles, and most of it is not accessible to Joe on the street. But I think this is a good example because it illustrates about the right level of expository style for several distinct groups of people in this discussion: those who wish to improve the accessibility of portions of our encyclopedia, those who feel that the compendious style of many of our articles is ok, and those that post here to complain that mathematics articles are inaccessible. There is obviously tension between these three groups, and getting them to agree on an acceptable style might be one way forward. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 12:42, 1 February 2011 (UTC)
Also, what is the Japanese Encyclopedia? I'm familiar with Ito's Encyclopedic dictionary of mathematics, though I would emphatically disagree that the exposition in that text would be comfortable to non-mathematicians. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 12:45, 1 February 2011 (UTC)
I have been working recently on List of mathematics journals. The list was pretty much unattended for a while, and recently some editors from the Academic Journals wikiproject asked us to clean it up. Journals aren't our core focus, but this list is certainly in the broad scope of the math project, as well as the scope of the journals project.
There is a notability "essay" WP:NJournals, which apparently has some weight at AFD discussions, which says that (as one possible criterion) if a journal has an impact factor and is indexed in Math Reviews and Zentralblatt MATH, then we can create an article on it. So I have pruned the redlinks on the list to journals that meet those criteria, and I am working on creating the articles. I made a journal article helper program that can help format the information about a journal into a reasonable stub. If you're interested, you can look up information on your favorite redlinked journal and make a stub article about it (this is easiest if you are at a computer with access to MathSciNet and Journal Citation Reports). — Carl ( CBM · talk) 15:17, 1 February 2011 (UTC)
Another pair of cellular automata animations have been nominated, see WP:Featured picture candidates/Non-intermediate phases of BML Traffic Model. See are related to the CA animations that were promoted to FP a week or so ago.-- RDBury ( talk) 16:01, 1 February 2011 (UTC)
The article titled Flat function is somewhat orphaned, i.e. very few other articles link to it. This sort of function plays an important role in the theory of test functions, used in developing generalized functions. It also is used to show why complex differentiability is so much stronger than real differentiability. There must be other things that ought to link to it. Michael Hardy ( talk) 20:06, 1 February 2011 (UTC)
I declined a WP:PROD on this article but am sending it to AFD on request from the original PRODer. Some input from those familiar with computer science and mathmatics would be helpful. The discussion can be viewed here. -- Ron Ritzman ( talk) 01:40, 3 February 2011 (UTC)
The Dehn plane article is up for deletion. While plausible searching the usual suspects Planet Math, Encyclopaedia of Mathematics don't yield and references.-- Salix ( talk): 05:28, 3 February 2011 (UTC)
User:Tkuvho continues to accuse me of Bourbakism. He feels that the lead of Exterior algebra, because it mentions the universal construction, is "engaging in Bourbakism" (whatever that means). Could someone else please comment on what he means? Is he right and I just don't see it? Or is he just trying to provoke me? If so, it's working and it needs to stop. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 12:33, 1 February 2011 (UTC)
Let's ask that everybody avoid personal attacks. It may be wise for some participants to take a few days off, for their own good and the project's. The participants have been very valuable members of WP and this project. Kiefer.Wolfowitz ( talk) 15:20, 1 February 2011 (UTC)
I think I'd reserve the term "Bourbakism" for articles that start immediately with the most general possible approach to a topic that doesn't warrant it. On several occasions Bourbaki use monoids where most people would be happy with groups, or when they first develop integration they do it for arbitrary locally compact spaces (which I'm quite happy with, but would be the wrong place to start on wikipedia). I completely disagree with saying that mentioning category theory or functor in the lead of an article is "Bourbakist" and more importantly I disagree that it is wrong. Exterior algebra isn't the article "Prime number", it's an article about a formal algebraic tool. A tool which is commonly used in a functorial way. Almost nobody actually takes the exterior algebra of a vector space (at the very least, people use it for a module over a ring, or a representation of a group). If there is an article whose problem is unnecessary use of jargon, then it's problem is "unnecessary use of jargon", not "Bourbakism". For example, using "set" in the first sentence of the article "natural number" is an unnecessary use of jargon. An infringement that would more merit the term "Bourbakism" would be some sort of high-brow axiomatic description such as "In mathematics, the natural numbers are the standard model of Peano arithmetic." RobHar ( talk) 17:48, 1 February 2011 (UTC)
Actually the knack is to take out excess "mathematics made difficult" formalism, while not being "anti-Hilbert" (retaining the idea that mathematical concepts are axiomatic and "sharp-edged", not vague). And being entirely accurate in what is said, unless flagged up with language such as "roughly speaking". Charles Matthews ( talk) 20:34, 1 February 2011 (UTC)
The above discussion gave me an idea — let us have a new bot which looks at the lead of an article and assigns it a number which is the smallest natural number greater than the numbers assigned to the articles to which it is linked. If it is not possible to calculate such a number due to a closed loop in the links, then it would report that fact and give a list of the links in the loop. This tool could be used to try to break circular definitions and reduce the depth of searching which readers have to do to understand the lead. JRSpriggs ( talk) 13:24, 3 February 2011 (UTC)
The article on affine Grassmanians AGr(n;k), i.e. the k-dimensional affine linear subspaces of an n-dimensional vector space need some additions. For example, it says that as a homogeneous space it can be realised as
At first it didn't even say what O(n−k) was, never mind link to the article. (It's the orthogonal group and E is the Euclidean group.) I think this expression needs explaining. I'm half way to understanding it, but not completely. You start with a k-dimensional subspace passing through the origin, say S0. You can move that onto any other k-dimensional affine subspace, say A0, by a Euclidean transformation; so we start with E(n). But different Euclidean transformations take S0 to A0; look at the image of the origin when you take S0 to A0. That's why we quotient out E(k); we get a map A0 → A0 given by different Euclidean transformations taking S0 to A0. This is where I start to get stuck. I can see that the O(n−k) term comes from the different choices of original subspace instead of S0. But that's just the ordinary Grassmannian Gr(n;k) and not O(n−k). Could some one possibly explain to me where O(n−k) and then add the explanation to the article itself? — Fly by Night ( talk) 16:27, 4 February 2011 (UTC)
There seems to be a big flaw in this article. The space of lines in P3 is a projective concept. Yet Plücker coordinates are defined in terms of a Euclidean structure defined on R3, e.g. the construction uses a scaler product. Cross products and scaler products depend upon the choice of Euclidean structure and are not projectively invariant. Is it just me, or does that seem a little alarming? — Fly by Night ( talk) 02:09, 5 February 2011 (UTC)
You should think of R3 is an affine coordinate patch of P3 (that is, it is just P3 minus the plane at infinity). Io describe lines in P3, it's enough to describe those in R3, and then add in the ones at infinity (e.g., take the projective closure).
That said, I'm not defending the approach taken by the article, though, which I find to be quite awkward. I think a better way to define the Plucker coordinates is to think of the space of lines in P3 as Gr(2,4). Planes through the origin in R4 are defined by simple two-forms in , which are uniquely defined up to scale, so there is a one-to-one correspondence of Gr(2,4) with the set of simple two-forms in (this is the Klein quadric). The coefficients of a 2-form in a basis then define the Plucker coordinates. The article should probably discuss this approach more explicitly. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 13:00, 5 February 2011 (UTC)
Input needed at Talk:Applied mathematics, where Michael P. Barnett ( talk · contribs) has proposed various re-writes of the lead paragraph of the article. My own view is that his writing style is poor, his proposed leads are rambling and do not summarise the article, and he makes several unsourced claims; in short he is proposing to replace the current brief and clear lead paragraph with a POV mini-essay. But that's just my opinion - views of other editors would be useful. Gandalf61 ( talk) 10:30, 5 February 2011 (UTC)
The situation regarding the articles titled ABC triangulation XYZ, for various values of ABC and XYZ, seems less than satisfactory. In particular:
How much difference is there between the topics of these articles? Should some be merged? How should they link among each other? Should we have a disambiguation page titled triangulation (mathematics) that would link to these and also to triangulated category and Delaunay triangulation and upper triangular matrix (apparently "triangulation" sometimes means putting a matrix into that form)? Michael Hardy ( talk) 22:25, 6 February 2011 (UTC)
![]() | "WikiProject Report" would like to focus on WikiProject Mathematics for an upcoming edition of The Signpost. This is an excellent opportunity to draw attention to your efforts and attract new members to the project. Would you be willing to participate in an interview? If so, you can find the interview questions here. Just add your response below each question and feel free to skip any questions that you don't feel comfortable answering. If you have any questions, you can leave a note on my talk page. Have a great day. – SMasters ( talk) 04:06, 7 February 2011 (UTC) |
Two animations related to maze generating algorithms have been nominated for FP. See Wikipedia:Featured picture candidates/Maze Generation 2.-- RDBury ( talk) 08:20, 7 February 2011 (UTC)
The brand-new article Groupoid algebra has been nominated for deletion. -- Lambiam 19:30, 7 February 2011 (UTC)
Greetings! This month, we have a large number of links to the disambiguation page, Adjoint representation - 61 links, to be exact. We at the Wikipedia:Disambiguation pages with links project would appreciate any help you could give us in fixing these ambiguous links. Cheers! bd2412 T 00:41, 8 February 2011 (UTC)
Project members might want to keep an eye on links that feed into gyrovector space. Someone has been trying to do quite a bit of WP:UNDUE promotion of this article, which perhaps includes some legitimate mathematics, but also appears to include some crackpot ideas. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 13:32, 8 February 2011 (UTC)
I have nominated logarithm for peer review. Please talk here. Thank you all, Jakob.scholbach ( talk) 21:41, 9 February 2011 (UTC)
The new article De Groot Fourier Transform has some very strange statements. E.g.,
I find myself doubting that "groot" is actually used as a parameter. The only reference in the article doesn't seem to talk about an analog of the Fourier transform at all.
I have the feeling that this is an elaborate hoax, but this is not a field that I'm familiar with. Can someone else take a look? Ozob ( talk) 02:55, 12 February 2011 (UTC)
WP has improved its math articles greatly since just 3 years ago, when reading an article on a topic one did not already know involved nested (and sometimes circular) link chasing for definitions (links that refer to articles with more links, and so on). I propose that editors try to put a WP:HAT on each article that does not define all its terms, with something like, "This article might be easier to read if you read article A first", in the case that terms come up that can best be understood by reading prerequisite article A, instead of the reader having to chase links for definitions. This might be something like a bottomless pit leading into philosophy of math, but it might also back link to an article the reader is already familiar with, breaking the "infinite" regression back. Remember what Hawking said about what the flat-earth-on-the-back-of-a-turtle-woman in the audience said to Bertrand Russell when he asked her upon what did the turtle upon which the earth rested rest, "its turtles all the way down" [26]. PPdd ( talk) 05:32, 12 February 2011 (UTC)
Another related proposal regards "suggested prerequisite for more easy comprehension", which is subtly different from a "more general treatment" hat. PPdd ( talk) 15:17, 12 February 2011 (UTC)
I keep having trouble with
inkscape—could somebody please help me out with this image:
? I want the black rectangle be replaced by a z and the extraneous red phi removed. Thanks!
Jakob.scholbach (
talk)
14:48, 12 February 2011 (UTC)
This has likely been covered before on talk, but I propose a general suggestion to add a "Definitions" section at the bottom, for terms defined in the article, for ease of reference. An opposition to this proposal might be that a user can do a search in the article, but this likely produces numerous results (the first of which should be the definition, if a definition has been made in the article. PPdd ( talk) 15:59, 12 February 2011 (UTC)
Very often the definition of the concept that the article is about is in the first sentence or otherwise near the beginning of the article. Michael Hardy ( talk) 18:26, 12 February 2011 (UTC)
There is a proposal to rename the category Recursion theory to Computability theory that hasn't received any response yet. Please comment there if you have any thoughts on the matter.-- RDBury ( talk) 08:19, 13 February 2011 (UTC)
Comments on Talk:Fundamental solution indicate a need to explain the relationship with Green's function. This is one of those interfaces between traditional language and contemporary mathematical language that has been discussed here. That would be part of the issue only, though. Charles Matthews ( talk) 12:24, 15 February 2011 (UTC)
Following the promotion of rhodocene to FA status, some discussion has started again at Wikipedia talk:Make technical articles understandable. That guideline is written in a way that does allow for some technical articles, although it was written to encourage all articles to be as accessible as possible. There have been some useful conversations here recently about accessibility, and people who contributed to those may be interested in following the discussion on the guideline page. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 13:00, 15 February 2011 (UTC)
Hey all. In looking through the discussion at Wikipedia talk:Make technical articles understandable mentioned by Carl in the previous section, in particular some comments of User:Sławomir Biały on the "target audience" of an article, I had a crazy idea: we could add a field to the Maths rating template banner we put on talk pages that holds the "target audience" of the article. It certainly seems like the target audience of an article is something that it is important to establish. Editors who have spent a long time on certain articles end up having to justify the work they've done to editors who have just shown up and are unhappy with the level of exposition. And that's fine, but it would help if the "seasoned" editors of the article had some way of pointing to an established consensus of what the "level" of the article is. I think there are several other ways this would help. The types of "levels" could be something like "Basic", "High school", "Undergraduate", "Advanced undergraduate", and "Graduate" (where the last should be used sparingly, and the specific terms used could be made more international or otherwise clarified). The approach of "one level down" that Carl has been talking about at Wikipedia talk:Make technical articles understandable would provide a guideline for how to assess the "target audience" of a given article. For some other articles, one would also want to use the subject's popularity to "lower" the level. Thoughts? RobHar ( talk) 14:46, 16 February 2011 (UTC)
The Mathematics WikiProject aims for this article to be accessible to a general readership. If this article is too technical for its intended audience, please feel free to edit it; see our advice for writing mathematics articles for tips. |
The Mathematics WikiProject aims for this article to be accessible to a reader whose has completed the beginnings of an undergraduate degree. If this article is too technical for its intended audience, please feel free to edit it; see our advice for writing mathematics articles for tips. |
If this article is too technical for its intended audience, please feel free to edit it; see our advice for writing mathematics articles for tips. |
I'd appreciate if people citing math papers in WP articles could make an effort to include non-paywall links to copies of the papers when such are available. The papers are often on the authors' personal websites or preprint sites like arxiv, and at other times can be found through citeseer or by googling the title, but sometimes they can be a bit obscure. I try to add such links when I come across them, but that's just a drop in the bucket. Thanks. 71.141.88.54 ( talk) 01:27, 17 February 2011 (UTC)
Also, if there's not a good non-walled copy of the paper but there is a JSTOR scan, we should include that, since lots of public libraries subscribe to JSTOR while usually only academic libraries will subscribe to Springerlink and the like. JSTOR improves accessibility over journal publisher sites in that regard. 71.141.88.54 ( talk) 06:53, 17 February 2011 (UTC)
{{
cite doi}}
. This thread has made me consider also adding a link to the end something like [
preprint], when such is available.
Qwfp (
talk)
10:29, 17 February 2011 (UTC)
{{
arxiv}}
". Note that this will link to the abstract page rather than directly to the pdf. This gives readers the choice what format they want. (usually both PS and PDF are available). Also note that only DOI links, will send you directly to the journal page, MR, JSTOR, PubMed, bibcode, etc. will provide a link to the article's entry in the respective database/repository.
T
R
11:30, 17 February 2011 (UTC)
Continuing the accessibility trend of late, there is a conversation visible on my talk page [30] about Poincaré conjecture. Since this is one of the Millennium Prize problems, it really should be as readable as possible up top. I made a minimal change to the lede to point out the fact, which is well known to confuse students, that the 3-sphere is the surface bounding the 4-dimensional unit ball (rather than, say, the 3-dimensional solid from grade school geometry). My change was reverted. Maybe someone else can find a better wording? — Carl ( CBM · talk) 12:31, 17 February 2011 (UTC)
A couple of editors are attempting to rewrite the lede at Linear algebra. I reverted the first try here (as I didn't think it was an improvement) other edits have been made since. Other views welcome. (I'm traveling all day today and unable to give much attention to this.) Paul August ☎ 11:24, 19 February 2011 (UTC)
Am I the only person on Wikipedia who is actually monitoring Lists of integrals? The page is viewed 1900 times a day and supposedly has 49 watchers. Just today, substantial vandalism was left untouched for more than 13 hours. Xanthoxyl < 02:46, 20 February 2011 (UTC)
On my user page you'll see an easy way to tell how many people are watching. But I may not be watching all the pages that I'm watching. (Apologies to Yogi Berra.) Maybe Xanthoxyl is the only person monitoring that page. Being the only person watching a page has happened to me sometimes. Michael Hardy ( talk) 07:35, 20 February 2011 (UTC)
Hi
As a result of my nominating a page (Dehn plane) for deletion. Consensus was that the name was incorrect as it could not be sourced and the deletion discussion is here Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Dehn_plane.
My move, based on the deletion discussion, was discussed here Talk:The_Dehn_plane#Bold_page_move
Several moves later it was left at Non-Legendrian geometry.
Now a single editor has gone against consensus and changed it back to a badly titled " The Dehn plane"
Firstly "The" should not be used, secondly consensus was against using Dehn plane and thirdly it seems as though some editors are deciding that their way is the right way even though it is against consensus.
I fully appreciate being bold, but something has to be done about this. There is no proof given so far that shows a convincing argument for using Dehn plane in any apart of the title. It has so far only produced one neologism from one source.
Chaosdruid ( talk) 21:24, 20 February 2011 (UTC)
At best the title of this new article is confusing since it's not about Curves in the mathematical sense. I thought flexible strips used in drafting were called splines, from which the mathematical term was derived; please confirm or correct me on this. It seems like we should have an article on them, whatever they're called. We also have a rudimentary article on Elastica theory which covers a mathematical model of these things.-- RDBury ( talk) 01:24, 22 February 2011 (UTC)
I recall something about "absurdity constants" (not absurdity "constraints") in relations to Suppes' Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science, Church's thesis, and Curry's paradox, but that is all I remember. Can anyone help with this for the absurdity article? PPdd ( talk) 05:39, 12 February 2011 (UTC)
Hi
I have just added the maths project banner to Talk:Rake (angle)
I think it is within your scope but would appreciate someone checking that !
Thanks Chaosdruid ( talk) 02:26, 22 February 2011 (UTC)
Existential theory of the reals is an orphaned article: nothing links to it (except the list of mathematics articles). Some links to it could be created and it would bear expansion.
It's in three categories (maybe others should be added?): Category:Real algebraic geometry, Category:Mathematical logic, Category:Computational complexity theory. Michael Hardy ( talk) 16:54, 23 February 2011 (UTC)
Directing it to "elementary" rather than "existential" doesn't seem to make sense, since that's an essentially different problem. It's about sentences that begin only with existential quantifiers, and one can imagine statements like the one about NP-completeness changing if one allowed universal quantifiers. Michael Hardy ( talk) 00:48, 25 February 2011 (UTC)
The article singular value decomposition is up for A-class review. It needs both reviewers and editors. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 14:14, 24 February 2011 (UTC)
The page Dehn plane contains a discussion of an example of a plane where the parallel postulate fails. The example satisfies Legendre's theorem to the effect that the sum of the angles in a triangle is π. The page has now been moved back to non-Legendrian geometry, even though the geometry discussed here is eminently Legendrian. This is the kind of committee decision we are getting famous for. Tkuvho ( talk) 12:42, 21 February 2011 (UTC)
The new article Sum of squares (disambiguation) includes a number of maths topics and hence might be worth checking. Melcombe ( talk) 17:27, 25 February 2011 (UTC)
I just needed a beautiful theorem which lots of people know but is not written down anywhere (asfaik) in an accessible way including elementary examples. Suppose a probability space is invariant under a compact group of transformations on . Suppose for simplicity that only the trivial subgroup leaves all elements of the space fixed (otherwise we must divide it out). Assume smoothness. Then the space is essentially the product of two independent probability spaces: one space carrying the maximal invariant, the other being the group itself with Haar measure. There is a neat elementary example in the Monty Hall problem.
The result is also much used in ergodic theory, it's called the ergodic decomposition.
Question: what to call it, what to link it to? I'd like to start writing the article but I'm a mathematical statistician, not an analyst or ergodic theorist or whatever.
There are connections to sufficiency, to invariance (in statistics), to experimental design, and so on. Everywhere where symmetry can be used to simplify statistical models or statistical reasoning. Multivariate normal distribution and multivariate analysis.
References:
R. Wijsman (1990), Invariant measure on groups and their use in statistics
P. Diaconis (1988), Group representations and their applications in statistics and probability
Richard Gill ( talk) 15:54, 22 February 2011 (UTC)
The above article is up for AfD here. I've had my say but there is some new discussion basically asking for more expert opinions, so please have your say if you can bring some mathematical expertise to the issue.-- RDBury ( talk) 21:49, 26 February 2011 (UTC)
R. Catesby Taliaferro is a stubby new article, doubtless imperfect. Do what you can. Michael Hardy ( talk) 00:49, 27 February 2011 (UTC)
After constant editing conflicts for years, a discussion archive probably running several volumes as printed books and 2 failed mediations the article has ended up in arbitration now.
Maybe it is of interest for some of the editors here or they even want to provide an assessment/opinion.
Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Monty Hall problem
-- Kmhkmh ( talk) 22:06, 20 February 2011 (UTC)
Categorical bridge has been prodded. Michael Hardy ( talk) 04:33, 21 February 2011 (UTC)
Would someone please monitor. I'm at 3RR, and I can't say the edits I'm reverting are vandalism, just completely, and obviously, inappropriate. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 16:05, 27 February 2011 (UTC)
There is a discussion underway at Wt:MTAA that concerns this project. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 17:46, 28 February 2011 (UTC)
The new article Anti geometric mean and anti harmonic mean has been proposed for deletion for a lack of sources. This article needs rescuing. These two means are legitimate: one of them is the same as the contraharmonic mean. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 14:02, 28 February 2011 (UTC)
I've fixed the punctuation in the article's title. Michael Hardy ( talk) 23:21, 1 March 2011 (UTC)
Someone has been adding sections on and links to something called multilinear subspace learning to a variety of articles on linear algebra and multilinear algebra. I have removed one such section from the tensor article since it obviously didn't belong where it was. I'm wondering whether the rest of the added content is worth keeping though. There seem to have been only a handful of papers] published (in fairly obscure places) on this topic, most of them in the past few years and mostly by the same group of authors. What should we do about this, if anything? Sławomir Biały ( talk) 11:53, 1 March 2011 (UTC)
Jurvetson2 ( talk · contribs) has created articles 33550336 and 8589869056. As far as I can see, the only interesting property of these numbers is that they are perfect numbers, so I don't think they meet the criteria for notability of specific individual numbers at WP:NUMBER. Speedy deletion was proposed for one article, but declined. I have noted my concerns on Jurvetson2's talk page. Should we take these articles to AfD ? Gandalf61 ( talk) 09:32, 1 March 2011 (UTC)
I've just saved the Kappa-Poincaré page from speedy deletion for the time being, but it definitely needs to be changed into something else, either be deleted (Wikipedia's search does seem to find all the k- K- and κ- variations already) or converted into a disambiguation page or a redirect. I'm not conversant in math issues, so I need to ask a question: Is there some particular reason that both the K-Poincaré algebra and K-Poincaré_group articles shouldn't be merged into subsections of the Poincaré group article followed by the creation of redirects for the various k- kappa- κ- -algebra -group variant names to that article? Alternatively, how about an article for k-Poincaré with the -algebra and -group versions as subsections. Because I don't understand the math or the significance of the math, I'm clueless but I'm sure one of you do. Best regards, TRANSPORTERMAN ( TALK) 16:38, 1 March 2011 (UTC)
The article titled chain rule currently says:
Does this last form really fail to "specify where each of these derivatives is to be evaluated"? It seems to me that the first form above clutters things in such a way as to interfere with understanding, and that the second, read correctly, doesn't really fail to do anything that should be done.
Opinions? Michael Hardy ( talk) 23:04, 1 March 2011 (UTC)
Just out of interest why is chain rule marked as "mid priority"? T R 09:20, 2 March 2011 (UTC)
There appear to be a series of disputes with Optimering ( talk · contribs). One is listed at Talk:Algorithm. Another is at WP:COIN#Optimering and is mostly about an edit war at Luus–Jaakola. The assumption is that the user is the person whose work the user keeps citing, thus making WP:SELFCITE relevant. As Optimering has announced a preference to deal only with people who are also mathematical experts, I was hoping that some of you would please look at these disputes and see if you can help resolve them. WhatamIdoing ( talk) 17:02, 28 February 2011 (UTC)
I just created a new article titled G. J. Toomer. Quite a large number of articles link to it, but it's very stubby. Do what you can to improve it. Michael Hardy ( talk) 00:22, 4 March 2011 (UTC)
Hello, I saw on the discussion page of C*-algebra that this WikiProject supports the page. Is there anyone here who knows of references to support the statements found in the "Some history: B*-algebras and C*-algebras" section (that I have recently added 'fact' tags to)? Any help would be appreciated. 121.216.130.64 ( talk) 11:45, 28 February 2011 (UTC)
Should Archimedean property and non-Archimedean ordered field get merged? Michael Hardy ( talk) 21:42, 5 March 2011 (UTC)
This article needs scrutiny:
"no free lunch theorems... 'state[s] that any two optimization algorithms are equivalent when their performance is averaged across all possible problems.'" (The probability measure on all possible problems would be an interesting object, I assume.)
There is a related article, No free lunch in search and optimization, which cites an article by the well-known computer scientist Wegener, which probably can be salvaged. Kiefer.Wolfowitz ( Discussion) 14:04, 5 March 2011 (UTC)
I'm not sure it's the right board to post it on, but the article axiom caught my eye. AFAIK the notion of axiom being self-evident truth is very outdated: even when talking about logical axioms as described in the article, we cannot treat them as 'self-evident truths', if only because there are several logics (e.g. classical, intuitionist) that use different axioms, so calling them self-evident seems moot.
Is there anything that can be done to improve the article? I'm a complete layman in logic, so I didn't edit it myself. — Kallikanzarid talk —Preceding undated comment added 13:13, 6 March 2011 (UTC).
The "traditional" sense of the word makes sense in certain contexts other than mathematics. For example, in epistemology. To say it's outdated is to limit one's world-view to mathematics and forget that other subjects exist. Michael Hardy ( talk) 19:26, 6 March 2011 (UTC)
Our article titled Basel problem currently begins like this:
Should we change "number theory" to "analysis", or to something else, or should we just delete it? Or let it stand? Michael Hardy ( talk) 19:24, 6 March 2011 (UTC)
I've changed it to read thus:
Michael Hardy ( talk) 03:49, 10 March 2011 (UTC)
Recent changes were made to citations templates (such as {{
citation}}, {{
cite journal}}, {{
cite web}}...). In addition to what was previously supported (bibcode, doi, jstor, isbn, ...), templates now support arXiv, ASIN, JFM, LCCN, MR, OL, OSTI, RFC, SSRN and Zbl. Before, you needed to place |id=
(or worse {{
arxiv|0123.4567}}
|url=
http://arxiv.org/abs/0123.4567
), now you can simply use |arxiv=0123.4567
, likewise for |id=
and {{
JSTOR|0123456789}}
|url=
http://www.jstor.org/stable/0123456789
→ |jstor=0123456789
.
The full list of supported identifiers is given here (with dummy values):
Obviously not all citations needs all parameters, but this streamlines the most popular ones and gives both better metadata and better appearances when printed. Headbomb { talk / contribs / physics / books} 03:05, 8 March 2011 (UTC)
{{
cite book}}
: Check |isbn=
value: checksum (
help); Invalid |ref=harv
(
help); Unknown parameter |address=
ignored (|location=
suggested) (
help)|isbn=0123456789
translate into a raw "
ISBN
0123456789", which is linked via the software rather than being linked through the template. So this means you can use |isbn=0123456789,
ISBN
0987654321 Parameter error in {{
ISBN}}: checksum,
ISBN
1029384756 Parameter error in {{
ISBN}}: checksum
and it will be converted to Bob's Book.
ISBN [[Special:BookSources/0123456789,
ISBN
0987654321 Parameter error in {{
ISBN}}: checksum,
ISBN
1029384756 Parameter error in {{
ISBN}}: checksum|0123456789, '"`UNIQ--templatestyles-0000003E-QINU`"'[[ISBN (identifier)|ISBN]] [[Special:BookSources/0987654321 |0987654321]]<span class="error" style="font-size:100%"> Parameter error in {{[[Template:ISBN|ISBN]]}}: checksum</span>, '"`UNIQ--templatestyles-0000003F-QINU`"'[[ISBN (identifier)|ISBN]] [[Special:BookSources/1029384756 |1029384756]]<span class="error" style="font-size:100%"> Parameter error in {{[[Template:ISBN|ISBN]]}}: checksum</span>]]. {{
cite book}}
: Check |isbn=
value: invalid character (
help); templatestyles stripmarker in |isbn=
at position 13 (
help).
Headbomb {
talk /
contribs /
physics /
books}
18:41, 8 March 2011 (UTC){{
cite book}}
: Invalid |ref=harv
(
help); Text "|isbn=9781852238923,
ISBN
185233892X
" ignored (
help){{
cite book}}
: Check |isbn=
value: invalid character (
help); Invalid |ref=harv
(
help); Unknown parameter |address=
ignored (|location=
suggested) (
help); templatestyles stripmarker in |isbn=
at position 16 (
help) —
David Eppstein (
talk)
20:57, 8 March 2011 (UTC)This pretends to be a piece of theory of Lorentzian manifolds, but… it is a theory of doubtful notability. Incnis Mrsi ( talk) 09:18, 9 March 2011 (UTC)
I've created Ptolemy's table of chords, in its present form an imperfect article. Work on it! Michael Hardy ( talk) 23:12, 10 March 2011 (UTC)
Mathematics WikiProject members, please, this is being discussed at:
Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Names of small numbers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Names_of_small_numbers#Names_of_small_numbers
Thank you. Pandelver ( talk) 00:05, 12 March 2011 (UTC)
There's a math-related arbcom case in which someone has proposed something along the lines that discussing math on talk pages without references or (lord forbid) pointing out an error in a WP:RS is a blockable offense (after warning, of course). Linky here. Tijfo098 ( talk) 07:22, 12 March 2011 (UTC)
You are invited to comment on the content dispute regarding the stubbing of the Mathematics in medieval Islam article Thank You - Aquib ( talk) 04:11, 14 March 2011 (UTC)
Please see Talk:Numerical_approximations_of_π#Requested_move. Cheers, Ben ( talk) 11:52, 16 March 2011 (UTC).
The usage of {{ pi}} is under discussion, see Template talk: pi . 65.95.13.139 ( talk) 13:40, 18 March 2011 (UTC)
Another editor is insisting on adding their bit on calculating quarter squares to Multiplication algorithm and I'm failing to get them to desist, latest round at Talk:Multiplication_algorithm#Construction_of_tables. ANyone like to have a look at it thanks? Dmcq ( talk) 13:11, 20 March 2011 (UTC)
There are many used notations for cardinal numbers and cardinality. In all (advanced) mathematical articles which use them, we need to clarify whether the axiom of choice is assumed, and whether the von Neumann cardinal assignment and/or the assumption that cn(cn(X))=cn(X) (i.e. that "the" cardinal number of a set has the same cardinality as the set) is made. The "Union" of cardinal numbers requires some assumption similar to the von Neumann cardinal assignment, and the Sum or Product of an infinite set of cardinal numbers requires some version of the Axiom of Choice to define.
I would like to have a centralized discussion on this, putting pointers on all the articles which refer to "cardinality". I was also thinking that merging initial ordinal with aleph number might be a good start. The constructions are the same, but the assumptions are different. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 23:20, 20 March 2011 (UTC)
I would not merge those two, no. I think aleph number is an appropriate title for a brief, and not extremely mathematical, article of fairly limited scope, namely just to tell people what these funny , , thingies that they may have seen somewhere are. For deeper information, readers should be directed to articles like cardinality. -- Trovatore ( talk) 00:00, 21 March 2011 (UTC)
@Arthur: Personally, I am not very worried about the (potential) conflict of interest. The articles we are talking about are on completely established subjects, and the books by H. and J. Rubin are mainstream, not fringe sources in any way. There are plenty of other editors who watch the articles and can edit them to add other references. Your identity is known, and you are a long-time contributor to the project. Given those facts I think you should not be too worried about editing the articles, and I will say that again if anyone raises the issue. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 00:29, 21 March 2011 (UTC)
I was thinking about puttting in a link to interval (mathematics) for things like (−π, π] because people keep 'correcting' it to two round brackets. However there is a little problem in that one then gets three right square brackets or else one has to put in a space or the right bracket is black as in (−π, π]. Any ideas on a good way of getting it looking right thanks? Dmcq ( talk)
We had this discussion a while ago (in 2003 or so?) and one of the things that got decided was that the brackets in asymmetric intervals should be enclosed within "nowiki" tags. Has that been neglected lately? Michael Hardy ( talk) 17:22, 14 March 2011 (UTC)
I've seen bots "correct" semi-open intervals and similar mathematical notations. I'm aware of the nowiki solution, but seem to recall that this doesn't always discourage the more vigilant bots. A template solution seems best. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 12:35, 15 March 2011 (UTC)
I have formatted the argument (complex analysis) article using math type formatting for any inline mathematics throughout. I also set up a {{ mvar}} template to do individual variables easily. Any comments gratefully received. Dmcq ( talk) 15:14, 21 March 2011 (UTC)
The article Florentin Smarandache has been nominated for deletion for a 2nd time ( AfD here); members of this project may be interested in commenting. Mlm42 ( talk) 18:35, 17 March 2011 (UTC)
Opine here. Jakob.scholbach ( talk) 17:59, 21 March 2011 (UTC)
On the suggestion of one of the editors interested in the arbitration on Monty Hall problem, I started a little essay on mathematical notation in probability theory and its applications. First draft is at essay on probability notation; you can talk about it at: probability notation essay-talk. Comments are welcome! Especially if you can tell me that this is all superfluous because it's been done, and done better, before. Richard Gill ( talk) 18:21, 21 March 2011 (UTC)
I've put an "orphan" tag on Duffin–Schaeffer conjecture, so get busy and think of a few (dozen) articles that should link to it. Michael Hardy ( talk) 02:49, 22 March 2011 (UTC)
A new article on the Criss-cross algorithm for linear optimization has been nominated for Did You Know?:
Corrections and comments are especially welcome. Best regards, Kiefer.Wolfowitz ( Discussion) 03:48, 22 March 2011 (UTC)
I was looking at Normal number and there seems to have been an edit by a well-meaning anonymous user which broke the markup. I would revert his edits, but I don't know enough about the subject to know if he was correcting an error in the article and made a mistake. Could someone with some more math skills than I take at look at the last two edits? Thanks.
DavidSol ( talk) 01:34, 22 March 2011 (UTC)
Pick's theorem seems pretty applicable to your project. You might want to examine it and tag it if appropriate. Cliff ( talk) 05:50, 22 March 2011 (UTC)
The arbitration of the Monty Hall problem is nearing its decision phase.
Two proposals for the arbitration committee's decision concern Wikipedia policy on mathematical articles, especially original research versus secondary sources. Both proposals endorse editors' use of "arithmetic operations". This language could be of great concern to this project, and deserves your attention. Sincerely, Kiefer.Wolfowitz ( Discussion) 23:47, 13 March 2011 (UTC)
I think that the OR rule together with the Copyright law make coverage of mathematics (or any other subject) impossible. You have to think (commit 'original research') to do mathematics. The only alternative is to blindly copy from 'reliable' sources which violates copyright. Of course, such copying and the verification that the source is indeed reliable also require thought (OR). So the rule against OR is an absurdity which should be repealed.
The reason we have a rule against OR is to try to avoid disputes about what is correct reasoning by appealing to an outside source. Notice that in mathematics, this is usually only necessary when one or more of the disputing parties is a crank or troll. However, refusing to allow an edit on grounds that it is OR is ultimately just an excuse for rejecting what we think is false without having to get the agreement of a crank or troll. JRSpriggs ( talk) 03:05, 14 March 2011 (UTC)
I (K.W.) suggest the following changes:
I would suggest that we strive for consensus language here, and then ask our leaders to communicate consensus suggestions to the ArbCom page. Kiefer.Wolfowitz ( Discussion) 11:34, 14 March 2011 (UTC)
If you guys can get together a variant form of words quickly, and post it on the proposed decision talkpage, it can be put in as an alternative.
Providing examples is not a problem - slotting in different variables to a sourced method is not OR, nor is it really deriving from first principles. Glossing should not be a problem if you have some referencing to show the general applicability of the gloss. I do have concerns with the example Kiefer gave on his talkpage [32], but I'd have more problems with the old version that the new, assuming that somewhere in the sources cited are the two equations, the definition of limits, and the information about strictness in relation to Minkowski sum. It is the old example which seems to have lots of derivations without referencing. -- Elen of the Roads ( talk) 14:20, 14 March 2011 (UTC)
I've only had a chance to skim most of the Arbcom case, but it seems like the main issue is the detailed derivations from first principles. The language used should more closely reflect the actual problem, rather than casting an overly broad net against anything that could possibly be construed as original research. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 16:10, 14 March 2011 (UTC)
I don't have much to say about the MHP apart from thanking the people who have commented on the arbcom page. I did want to say something related. Lately, after discussion at WT:TECHNICAL and WT:NOR, and looking at WP:NOT, I have been thinking about the underlying issues that lead to these disagreements. I'm only thinking about articles at the advanced undergrad level and beyond here; articles on basic topics are less problematic because there are plenty of low-level references. But there are few references on advanced topics that are accessible to an untrained reader.
Three points:
I think that we do a reasonable job at balancing these things in our articles, both overall and in mathematics. My main point is that if we realize that Wikipedia's goals are sometimes in conflict with each other, it can help us find a middle ground. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 13:43, 14 March 2011 (UTC)
In response to comments made by editors from this WikiProject, Arbitrator Elen of the Roads has proposed an alternative wording of the principle, which caused concern here, for other arbitrators to consider and vote upon. You can comment on the proposed principles at Wikipedia_talk:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Monty_Hall_problem/Proposed_decision. Geometry guy 23:42, 14 March 2011 (UTC)
Regardless of the OR statement of principle that ArbCom may or may not adopt, I am concerned by what the examples of what they are claiming is OR in their statement of facts -- specifically the three claimed examples cited at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Monty_Hall_problem/Proposed_decision#Article_has_been_subject_of_original_research Article has been subject of original research.
As far as I can see (more detail on the decision talk page here, here, and here), none of these three examples properly constitute original research.
It seems to me that this is no small issue, because the examples Arbcom cite are going to be the most direct operational indication of what they consider to be OR, and how they mean whatever principles they adopt to be interpreted.
I'd welcome second and further opinions on these examples, and whether we think they are OR or not, because the Arbcom members are refusing to engage on the merits of these links; yet are still happily voting for the proposition. Jheald ( talk) 09:55, 15 March 2011 (UTC)
Even some ArbCom members refused to vote on using its exact current wording in their principles (which they are still struggling to formulate in that respect). So, clearly WP:CALC is deficient. I suggest you guys take this opportunity to improve the wording in the policy, so you won't have to put out this kind of fire in the future. All the best, Tijfo098 ( talk) 18:27, 16 March 2011 (UTC)
There is a new proposed wording. It works for me. Does anyone else have any thoughts about it? Sławomir Biały ( talk) 14:11, 17 March 2011 (UTC)
The decision has been publicized. Kiefer.Wolfowitz ( Discussion) 00:44, 25 March 2011 (UTC)
Just to let you know, I have updated my mathJax user script to recent version 1.1 of MathJax. Notable change is the support for webfonts via CDN (i.e., no local font installation requirements). Details at the user script documentation page. Feedback welcome. Nageh ( talk) 21:37, 23 March 2011 (UTC)
... is John Milnor, who has been awarded the Abel Prize. The article is OK as such, but could obviously be expanded quite a bit. Charles Matthews ( talk) 09:43, 25 March 2011 (UTC)
There seems to be a bit of hostility to the newly-listed article Drinker's paradox on the article's discussion page. Various editors are grumbling about deletion, original research, etc. I thought perhaps someone in the project should investigate. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 12:16, 25 March 2011 (UTC)
Apparently someone rediscovered the trapezoidal rule and managed to get it published. See Tai's method. Just an article about the trapezoidal rule under another name? Or an article about how something weird like that can happen? Either way, is the article in some way worth keeping? Michael Hardy ( talk) 03:49, 26 March 2011 (UTC)
The 'Math and logic' symbols in the editor include a load of special symbols. Is it okay to use all these in maths articles? For instance can I say ℝ rather than in inline maths? And by the way I don't believe I should bold that as in ℝ, would that be right too? Dmcq ( talk) 12:56, 26 March 2011 (UTC)
"Inline" as opposed to "displayed" use of TeX within Wikipedia has always been problematic. Things like the following can happen:
Obviously the e should be at the same level as the surrounding text and the x3 should be in superscript, but that's not what happens. Also on some browsers, the part in math tags looks comically gigantic. You can also get siuations like this:
The right parenthesis is on the next line! It also happens with periods, commas, etc. "Displayed" TeX, on the other hand, generally looks quite good:
So I generally prefer non-TeX notation in an "inline" setting. Michael Hardy ( talk) 00:54, 27 March 2011 (UTC)
Over at Talk:N-dimensional space we're having a traditional merging discussion. The issue is that these articles (and probably others) all contain redundant material: Space (mathematics), Vector space, Dimension, Dimension (vector space), Basis (linear algebra), Euclidean space, Manifold (mathematics), N-dimensional space. So I thought I'd bring it up here.
My opinion: Each kind of space (vector, Euclidean, manifold, etc.) obviously deserves its own article. Additionally the Space (mathematics) and Dimension articles seem useful as catalogues/overviews. But Dimension (vector space) could be merged into Basis (linear algebra) and/or Vector space, and N-dimensional space could be merged into Space (mathematics) and/or Dimension.
Any comments? Mgnbar ( talk) 16:39, 26 March 2011 (UTC)
Special case is currently a stub article that could use a lot of work, both within the article and in other articles that should link to it. Get busy. Michael Hardy ( talk) 00:45, 27 March 2011 (UTC)
Hi! I use Wikipedia very often and thought for sure that a policy of yours was to add in a "page history" page that showed any changes to an article and by whom for that page?
I ask because your page on Summation had early in its write-up an image of an example of Induction ( http://upload.wikimedia.org/math/5/d/1/5d1ba66a7aca2c258985399ff22410ef.png ) ... odd that that very image wasn't there just a few days ago for another image that was the exact same equation but in different form.
I looked for the history of why and who changed that image because its odd I been coincidently writing a paper on the example of Induction used of the original image and linking this very page for that image and sending that paper to leading Set Theory specialists and other university piers and that image was very helpfull in dealing with the issues the paper regarded. Now suddenly someone changed the image to a different example of Induction and I find the timing very peculiar. It doesn't change anything about my paper except for it to be easier to understand for anyone needing to see the example of Induction I was using from here but is now changed. I only linked to the page on Summation.
Anyways, how did that image change on the Summation page without anyone ever knowing it happened or why in the pages history?? — Preceding unsigned comment added by G2thef ( talk • contribs)
In looking over some project work I did for an undergrduate computing degree I noted that the academic supervising me had come up with what he called a 'slew' transform.
I've put a rough note in my userspace at Wikiversity (because of concerns about verifability here) The link is : http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/User:ShakespeareFan00/Slew_transform
I'd appreciate someone from the WikiProject that understand 3D transformation stuff, to help provide a better citation , or indeed a creative commons licensed proof that will show what's stated is correct.
A 'slew' transform is a transform where 'distances' parrallel to an axes before a 'slew' are preserved, as opposed to a 'shear' where they are not.
I'm also trying to understand how to abstractly define a 'grid'. ( The best definition I can think of for 2D is that a 'grid' is
a regular arrangement of points and lines that fills a plane.
For a 'cubic' style of grid, this regular arrangement can be more formally considered as a (Lattice Graph?) formed by the Cartesian product of 2 path graphs, representing lines perpendicular to each other. However, I'm thinking I need to put in some kind of constraint on where the grid points can be placed, and I'm not entirly sure how I specfiy that constraint in an abstract math way...
A 'polar' style of grid is however more complex, being the Cartesian product of a number of path graphs(?) with some kind of cycle graph , ( aka a Prism Graph?). Again some kind of constraint would need to be defined on where grid points can be placed..
And finally Has this sort of thing been done before in a textbook a math noob can understand? Sfan00 IMG ( talk) 22:36, 27 March 2011 (UTC)
The context of the slew transform by the way in the original project was based on being able to convert a 'cubic' lattice to be transformed into a 'heaxagonal' or 'parallelogrammic lattice' one (in 2 dimensions).
Can you suggest a better way to describe what a slew transform appears to be doing, because I'd like to be able to explain it clearly to other people? Sfan00 IMG ( talk) 09:52, 28 March 2011 (UTC)
While this unreferenced article looks cool, I can't find anything in google books to support it. WP:OR? Tijfo098 ( talk) 05:21, 25 March 2011 (UTC)
I guess most of these are perfectly okay but is there some that even someone familiar with Charles Saunders Pierce isn't familiar with or thinks is unnecessary? Dmcq ( talk) 18:50, 25 March 2011 (UTC)
Logical graph is a nebulous article that could use work. I think the term existential graph has been used more recently, and perhaps even by Pierce. Tijfo098 ( talk) 04:09, 30 March 2011 (UTC)
There is a deletion discussion under the auspices of our project that could benefit from its input. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 00:21, 31 March 2011 (UTC)
Is this a notable article? Jakob.scholbach ( talk) 21:19, 27 March 2011 (UTC)
An editor is insisting in marking the lead of Fourth dimension as dubious in "In mathematics, the fourth dimension, or a four-dimensional ("4D") space,[dubious – discuss] is an abstract concept derived by generalizing the rules of three-dimensional space". They say a four dimensional space could be any sort of space not necessarily Euclidean whereas others have said it referes in this instance to an extension of Euclidean 3-space. I would like to remove the dubious tag or otherwise resolve this. This is a bit similar I guess to the N-dimensional space business mentioned in a section above but as far as I can see there has been no real follow up to that, also I think they are a bit different in that N-dimensional space is actually used for many other things like configuration spaces whereas four-dimensional space is rather specific. Talk is at Talk:Fourth dimension#Title?. Dmcq ( talk) 11:00, 31 March 2011 (UTC)
I have no idea what these two are about exactly, but these two articles seems to be about the same thing. Opinions on what should be done? Headbomb { talk / contribs / physics / books} 19:16, 31 March 2011 (UTC)
Our page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:0.999.../FAQ lists a number of frequently asked questions about 0.999... One of the answers to these questions deals with the "number" 0.000...01 (with an implied infinity of zeros before the last digit). The answer asserts, correctly, that this number is meaningless as a real decimal. I added a brief parenthetical comment here to the effect that one can make sense of such a number in a proper extension of R, providing a link to a page where this is discussed. The parenthetical remark was apparently too much for the guardians of purity at 0.999... and was reverted, most recently here. I would appreciate some input. Tkuvho ( talk) 20:24, 31 March 2011 (UTC)
I have just been reading a mathematics article about the Halting Problem (Turing et al) and found it to be very difficult to read. A lot of text books on subjects particularly in the field of science and maths have been written in this style and it leaves the reader frustrated and confused. Surely an encyclopedic article should be accessible to the widest audience possible? I think some simplification of the language with perhaps more steps and examples would help to get across to the reader some of the concepts involved. Readers are generally not stupid people (else why would they be there) but the knowledge should be communicated better. Language, next to knowledge, is the most important asset an encyclopedia can have.
Sam- Helsinki, Finland —Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.231.106.209 ( talk) 08:21, 1 April 2011 (UTC)
The style/tone could also use some work there, e.g. Minsky exhorts the reader to be suspicious—although a machine may be finite, and finite automata "have a number of theoretical limitations": It reads like one of those controversial, he-says-she-says, social science articles. Tijfo098 ( talk) 21:26, 1 April 2011 (UTC)
In view of the date, please have a look at this article and confirm my suspicions. JohnCD ( talk) 19:07, 1 April 2011 (UTC)
One of the more elaborate hoaxes. Created on the appropriate calendar date for such. Michael Hardy ( talk) 22:40, 1 April 2011 (UTC)
Can anyone think of a reason not to merge these? Tijfo098 ( talk) 22:36, 1 April 2011 (UTC)
Frobenius determinant theorem is a near-orphaned article. So if the internal-link-muse speaks to you, figure out which articles should link to it and add the links. Michael Hardy ( talk) 22:37, 1 April 2011 (UTC)
Does the Futurama theorem merit its own article ? A merger proposal is being discussed at Talk:Futurama theorem. Gandalf61 ( talk) 15:15, 2 April 2011 (UTC)
The group of Jacques Tits is important in mathematics, and it might be a suitable article for this project to improve to Featured Status in time for next year's April Fool's Day. Kiefer.Wolfowitz ( Discussion) 17:44, 2 April 2011 (UTC)
There were a bunch of really obvious copy-editing issues that I've just taken care of. Michael Hardy ( talk) 19:26, 2 April 2011 (UTC)
Opinions of Simon Davis (mathematician)? It's been prodded. It says he applies the theory of perfect numbers to physics. I wouldn't have guessed those would be connected, but maybe I'm just naive. Michael Hardy ( talk) 17:14, 2 April 2011 (UTC)
It would seem that we currently have no article about Ivar Ekeland, although nine other articles link to it. Michael Hardy ( talk) 02:53, 3 April 2011 (UTC)
{{
cite journal}}
: Invalid |ref=harv
(
help)Tkuvho has now created the article and some others have contributed to it. Michael Hardy ( talk) 19:35, 3 April 2011 (UTC)
The article Pi is about the mathematical constant. There is a question about whether the lead image should be relevant to the topic of the article, or should be an image of the Greek letter. Please comment at Talk:Pi#Pi "Unrolled" animation. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 19:41, 3 April 2011 (UTC)
The usage of Π is under discussion, see Talk:Pi. 65.93.12.101 ( talk) 01:27, 4 April 2011 (UTC)
Many of you will enjoy reading about John Rainwater, who led the functional-analysis seminar at the University of Washington over a 5-decade career. His research achievements and long-relationship with UW are remarkable especially given his graduate-student record, which included plagiarism and planting an explosive device for his professor. Sincerely, Kiefer.Wolfowitz ( Discussion) 09:51, 2 April 2011 (UTC)
Note two related articles on other functional analysts, Robert Phelps and Peter Orno. Kiefer.Wolfowitz ( Discussion) 02:34, 5 April 2011 (UTC)
There's a request to move Fourth dimension to Four-dimensional space at Talk:Fourth dimension#Requested move Dmcq ( talk) 00:52, 5 April 2011 (UTC)
We seem to have three articles on the same subject:
Does anyone know why? Are there any objective reasons to have three articles on this relatively elementary topic? — Carl ( CBM · talk) 00:49, 29 March 2011 (UTC)
Actually, that article is well-written, so perhaps there is a way to keep it available to the public on WikiMedia servers. I don't now much about that, but I think Wikiversity would accept that page as-is. Although Wikiversity doesn't get the same google juice as Wikipedia, we could link it from Boolean algebra; I'm not sure what are the standards for that. Perhaps someone here has experience in that area? Tijfo098 ( talk) 12:21, 29 March 2011 (UTC)
FWIW, there is a book chapter in Padmanabhan & Rudeanu [38] (full ref given in Boolean algebra (structure)), so I have created Axiomatization of Boolean algebras as a redirect, but it's conceivable that it could become a list-type sub-article at some point. I don't have interest in developing it myself though. Tijfo098 ( talk) 21:45, 1 April 2011 (UTC)
I'm not sure I understand what the purported proof systems article could contain that's not already in propositional calculus. Can someone enlighten me on that? Tijfo098 ( talk) 21:57, 1 April 2011 (UTC)
There's a proposal to merge that as well at BATF. Tijfo098 ( talk) 20:09, 6 April 2011 (UTC)
A. H. Lightstone is on sale here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/A._H._Lightstone Tkuvho ( talk) 15:20, 31 March 2011 (UTC)
I've proposed a merger of these articles at Talk:Subrandom numbers. It's not a merger that I myself feel competent enough to carry out, though. Are there any volunteers here? Sławomir Biały ( talk) 11:51, 7 April 2011 (UTC)
Could a mathematician take a look at this new article by a new contributor - it seems a bit odd to me but I don't know much about this subject.-- Physics is all gnomes ( talk) 13:31, 7 April 2011 (UTC)
Now proposed for deletion at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Exact Prime Counting Method. -- The Anome ( talk) 14:26, 7 April 2011 (UTC)
I have nominated Monty Hall problem for a featured article review here. Please join the discussion on whether this article meets featured article criteria. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. If substantial concerns are not addressed during the review period, the article will be moved to the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Delist" the article's featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. Tijfo098 ( talk) 22:58, 7 April 2011 (UTC)
A somewhat odd and certainly under-referenced article. I looked it up after this thread, which is certainly enough to show the interest of this concept as basic geometry. (Of which I wasn't aware.) The corresponding Cut locus (Riemannian manifold) is better, but still looks neglected. Charles Matthews ( talk) 15:54, 8 April 2011 (UTC)
Artin's conjecture on primitive roots and Artin's constant substantially overlap with each other. Each has a hatnote linking to the other. Should they get merged? Michael Hardy ( talk) 03:19, 9 April 2011 (UTC)
I wanted to let you know I submitted a recommendation to delete an unused and probably uneeded redirect relating to template:Maths rating. You can see the request here. -- Kumioko ( talk) 19:53, 10 April 2011 (UTC)
Inappropriate language is being used at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:0.999.../Arguments Tkuvho ( talk) 11:25, 11 April 2011 (UTC)
Taylor series, a top importance article, has been nominated for good article status (see WP:GACR for good article criteria). The review is here. We need reviewers and probably also editors. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 18:18, 11 April 2011 (UTC)
Hi all,
I stumbled upon
Fuzzy matrix theory, and it looked slightly odd and fringey. The sole source is
this which looks rather like cargo-cult maths to me; so I've sent it to
AfD. All expert inputs would be welcomed on the
AfD page... alternatively, if it could be rescued somehow, that's cool too.
bobrayner (
talk)
21:48, 11 April 2011 (UTC)
Until my revision the article Center (group theory) stated that
That may be true, but it sounds as if A4 had a nontrivial center, which is not true, as can be seen in the Cayley table on the right. So maybe it should read
If someone knows that's true he may add it to the article. Until now the sentence is <!---hidden--->. Lipedia ( talk) 09:42, 13 April 2011 (UTC)
Help. Trying to wikify Wright Camera ( | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) but, it needs some math expertise. Thanks, Chzz ► 05:58, 14 April 2011 (UTC)
The article Taylor's theorem has a largish proliferation of proofs. (It used to have three, and has recently had as many as five. Now it's down to four. At least I've recently simplified two of those considerably.) I can see the usefulness of having some simple proofs that illustrate the basic relevant techniques (like the Cauchy mean value theorem, and restricting to a line segment in the case of several variables). However, there is some discussion of including complete proofs of basically all the results in the article. To me this seems rather contrary to the well-established consensus here, but I'd appreciate some outside input. Thanks, Sławomir Biały ( talk) 22:47, 11 April 2011 (UTC)
Circle (topology) currently redirects to circle group. Some knot-theory articles mentioning circles probably should link to circle (topology) but not to circle group. I've made circle (topology) into a "redirect with possibilities". So how about those possibilities? Should, or will, someone do something? Michael Hardy ( talk) 03:11, 14 April 2011 (UTC)
I just found that circle action was a red link from quaternionic projective space, but nothing else linked there. So I redirected it to circle group. Michael Hardy ( talk) 14:33, 14 April 2011 (UTC)
For now I've redirected circle (topology) to n-sphere, while leaving the "redirect with possibilities" tag intact. Michael Hardy ( talk) 02:03, 15 April 2011 (UTC)
What about creating something like WikiProject Prime numbers. I know there is already the sub project Wikipedia:WikiProject Numbers, but I (and I think some other editors as well) are especially interested in prime numbers. The project could serve as a centralized point of discussion for editors interested in prime numbers, but not working on other number related articles. The scope of this project would include all of the articles about the classes of prime numbers listed in List of prime numbers. It could also include articles where the number class includes a subsequence of prime numbers that do not have an own article (like for example Leyland number). Toshio Yamaguchi ( talk) 16:05, 14 April 2011 (UTC)
At Talk:0.999... inexperienced editors sometimes leave comments that are not directly related to improving the page. For this reason, a separate "arguments" page was created where such discussions can continue. Comments not directly related to improving the page are supposed to be moved to the "arguments" page. Recently, a couple of editors started a new trend of summarily deleting comments that are not to their liking. Furthermore, one of them threatened to "report" any further reinstatement of the deleted material. This would not appear to be consistent with minimal standards of politeness we expect at wiki. Tkuvho ( talk) 04:42, 15 April 2011 (UTC)
Euler on infinite series has been prodded for deletion. 64.229.100.45 ( talk) 04:58, 15 April 2011 (UTC)
I'm actually coming back to this as a result of some discussion at Talk:The Prisoner of Benda (where the ridiculous suggestion that minor copyedits to a proof were "original research"). In the past, we've had many discussions on inclusion of proofs in articles, and now there is even the dedicated subpage Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Proofs. A basic editing principle that I have always adhered to is that it's better just to say why a result is true than to give a detailed derivation of it. This often means communicating the main ideas of the proof, without going into details. (In some sense, to "talk about the proof" rather than give it.) I find that this produces more seamless prose suited to an encyclopedia article. I've always thought that somewhere this was codified in a guideline or essay. It's certainly a point that I bring up in most discussions about proofs in mathematics articles. But it doesn't seem to be in either WP:MSM or WP:WPM/Proofs. Is this idea, or something like it, something we agree on? Should it be added to WP:WPM/Proofs? Sławomir Biały ( talk) 11:47, 13 April 2011 (UTC)
{{démonstration| * Si on prend un élément <math>x_n</math> dans chaque <math>F_n</math>, la suite <math>(x_n)</math> est de [[suite de Cauchy|Cauchy]]. En effet, pour un <math>\varepsilon>0</math> fixé, il existe un rang <math>N</math> tel que le diamètre de <math>F_N</math> soit majoré par <math>\varepsilon</math>, et en particulier <math>d(x_n,x_m)\le\varepsilon</math> pour tous <math>m, n\ge N</math>. Cette suite est donc convergente car <math>E</math> est complet. * De plus, sa limite <math>x</math> appartient à chaque <math>F_n</math>. En effet, pour tout <math>n\in\mathbb{N}</math>, la suite <math>(x_m)_{m\ge n}</math> est à valeurs dans <math>F_n</math> (puisque <math>m\ge n\Rightarrow x_m\in F_m\subset F_n</math>) donc sa limite <math>x</math> aussi (puisque <math>F_n</math> est fermé). On a donc prouvé que l'intersection des <math>F_n</math> est non vide. * Enfin, elle est réduite à un point puisque son diamètre est nul (car majoré par tous les diamètres des <math>F_n</math>, dont l'inf est 0).}}
The editor at Talk:The Prisoner of Benda has become increasingly aggressive in his stance that summarizing published proofs and making slight copyedits to them is original research. I would appreciate it if someone uninvolved could have a look. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 13:13, 14 April 2011 (UTC)
I think this ridiculous episode makes it glaringly obvious that we need clarity on whether summarizing proofs, or rewriting proofs in our own words without substantively altering them, or changing notation, is considered to be original research. It is painfully clear to me that, in the case of discussion, no original research has been committed at any time, in any version of the article under discussion. It has already been (convincingly, to my mind, by Kmhkmh), suggested that Andrevan has been misrepresenting the spirit, if not the letter, of WP:OR by insisting on an overly rigid interpretation of it. Also, a lot of this is explained by the fact that Andrevan is of the opinion that WP:V means that a lay-person should be able to verify the content of an article, without requiring any special subject knowledge. This is an untenable position for any encyclopedia that covers a wide range of serious topics, in my opinion. But there it is. Perhaps we need to formalize some clarity about that as well. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 00:14, 15 April 2011 (UTC)
May be a little off-topic here, but I don't know where else to ask. Can someone figure out what's the deal with Birkhäuser Verlag vs. the Springer math & science book series, which is still published under that imprint? We might need to create a dab for Birkhäuser. Tijfo098 ( talk) 06:51, 17 April 2011 (UTC)
Blackburne, of A. H. Lightstone fame, is now attempting to delete a brief quotation at Adequality on the grounds that it is a copyright violation. Help! Tkuvho ( talk) 12:24, 17 April 2011 (UTC)
There is a deletion discussion for this article which is getting a lot of attention. This is related to Fibonacci number which is #7 on our list of most frequently viewed (really more like #1 if you take out physics and statistics articles).-- RDBury ( talk) 18:10, 17 April 2011 (UTC)
Can someone improve Heinz-Dieter Ebbinghaus before it's nominated for deletion? Tijfo098 ( talk) 09:12, 18 April 2011 (UTC)
Maybe someone here has an opinion whether clause in logic only means a disjunction. Tijfo098 ( talk) 16:14, 18 April 2011 (UTC)
The DYK nomination for the new article on Ivar Ekeland, which Tkuvho started (and which I expanded) should get a lot of DYK hits.
5x expanded by Kiefer.Wolfowitz ( talk). Self nom at 10:55, 12 April 2011 (UTC)
There's a number of links to non-Newtonian calculus being stuck in to various articles by User Talk:Smithpith ( contribs). He has warnings in the talk page but we should figure out exactly what link should be kept if any I think. Dmcq ( talk) 20:02, 18 April 2011 (UTC)
From Michael Grossman: I thought those links were pertinent. If I was wrong, I'm sorry. I have no intention of violating Wikipedia's rules. Smithpith ( talk) 22:58, 18 April 2011 (UTC)
I created an infobox for articles about integer sequences a while ago (see Template:Infobox integer sequence for the template and Special:WhatLinksHere/Template:Infobox integer sequence for articles, where it is currently being used). I would like to include an image in every case, where the infobox is in use. For this purpose, it would be nice to have some input on which ways of visualizing integer sequences could be used for creating images for use in the infobox. My preference is in favor of ideas that can be easily realized using simple image editing software. Also I am aware of the visualization methods used by OEIS. Finally, the image should be interesting, without being distracting, even if only two or three terms of the sequence are known. Any additional input is welcome. Thanks. Toshio Yamaguchi ( talk) 23:07, 18 April 2011 (UTC)
....currently redirects to errors and residuals in statistics. That obviously doesn't make sense. So:
Michael Hardy ( talk) 19:31, 19 April 2011 (UTC)
I propose to move the controversial page Non-Newtonian calculus to a more appropriate title Modifications of the calculus. It can be decided later what to do about multiplicative calculus. The term "non-Newtonian" is a neologism coined by the author of the book that has not been widely accepted. The term makes it appear as if this approach is a significant modification of the calculus, somehow going against the Newtonian approach. Meanwhile, the main idea of this approach seems to amount to apply log to a product before differentiating. Whatever the possible applications of this method may be in engineering, the title should reflect the contents more precisely. Also in any future AfD the participants will have a more accurate picture of the intrinsic merit of the approach. Tkuvho ( talk) 10:09, 21 April 2011 (UTC)
The article has been nominated for deletion: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Non-Newtonian calculus (2nd nomination). Please direct your comments there. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 14:38, 21 April 2011 (UTC)
I've created List of numeral systems and would appreciate help making it somewhat complete. -- Bea o 17:36, 21 April 2011 (UTC)
The BBC has a collection of audio programs related to mathematics at [44]. Many of these are episodes of the radio series "In Our Time". Just mentioning it for general interest but I'm also thinking it would be a worthwhile project to make sure we have a link to each program in the "External links" section of the corresponding WP article.-- RDBury ( talk) 17:38, 20 April 2011 (UTC)
I'm looking for reactions to the idea at File talk:Pi-unrolled-720.gif#Radians. In a nutshell, the idea is to make a relatively minor change to that animation changing the radius from 1/2 to 1 and the circumference from π to 2π (I don't really know whether this would be controversial, but at least to me the reasons for it are pretty sound and in line with the mathematical tendency to deal with circles of radius one). The intro (where it lines up the circles) would probably best be changed to somehow visually emphasize the radius a bit more than the diameter. Whether the new image replaces the old one or just gets used places like Radian and Turn (geometry) is to be determined. If people like the idea, we can presumably get help from Wikipedia:Graphic Lab/Illustration workshop and/or Wikipedia:Graphic Lab/Photography workshop (I would have thought the former, but I guess the people at the latter are more accustomed to working with raster images). Kingdon ( talk) 01:33, 23 April 2011 (UTC)
I expect most of us who have math articles on our watchlists see this from time to time -- an article contains the word provably, used correctly, and someone, usually an IP, changes it to probably.
I was just idly wondering if anyone else has an opinion on this. Is it a specific person who just likes to do this for fun, maybe figuring it's a subtle change that might escape notice? Or, is it that a lot of people just don't know the word provably and fix the "typo" in good faith?
Either way, it seems likely that some such changes go uncaught. Just thought I'd mention it so that the next time one of us sees the word probably in a math article, we might give half a second's thought to whether it's really supposed to be provably. (Or, I suppose, the reverse is also possible, but I don't recall an example of that.) -- Trovatore ( talk) 04:56, 23 April 2011 (UTC)
I've created a new article titled Haynsworth inertia additivity formula.
That article and Sylvester's law of inertia treat of this particular concept of "inertia". Is this so called because of a conceptual connection with physical inertia? If so, those article ought to explain the connetion.
To do:
Michael Hardy ( talk) 18:07, 23 April 2011 (UTC)
Should we have a list of matrix topics or list of matrix theory topics? Michael Hardy ( talk) 18:15, 23 April 2011 (UTC)
But navboxes seem to be for navigating, whereas lists are (partly? largely?) for browsing. Michael Hardy ( talk) 00:29, 24 April 2011 (UTC)
Branching random walk is a stubby new article. Work on it. Michael Hardy ( talk) 21:03, 22 April 2011 (UTC)
For MF, search among the primary writers of featured articles on English WP.
Malleus Fatuorum and I discussed hyphens previously, with good humor, also. See
the MOS, also.
Kiefer.Wolfowitz (
Discussion)
23:42, 22 April 2011 (UTC)
Regarding the article on Hadamard's lemma. It is presented as a first order application of Taylor's theorem; which is fine. But then it assumes that the function is real valued. I'm sure that it works for functions from C to C. Moreover, I'm sure that the statement can be generalised in terms of other fields. Does the statement holds for functions from a field K to a field K? If not, then what are the necessary conditions? What is the most general form of the lemma? All we need is for a function from K to K to be continuous, and for its first order derivative to be continuous. I've listen to talks about p-adic differentiation and integration (i.e. where the field K is a finite field with a prime number of elements); surely the article can be extended. What do we think? — Fly by Night ( talk) 21:40, 22 April 2011 (UTC)
In the article titled quasisymmetric map, this is given as the definition:
What does mean? Does it mean ? Clearly the article needs work. Michael Hardy ( talk) 15:11, 26 April 2011 (UTC)
The Template:Cubes has been proposed for deletion: {{ cubes}} Please see the discussion regarding its deletion.
Also, consider expanding and improving the Cubes navbox, which was recently created and newly expanded: In particular, crystallography may have many cubic articles. (It was never meant for mathematicians, who are served by the fine navboxes on polytopes, etc., but for civilians.)
Thanks! Kiefer.Wolfowitz ( Discussion) 17:14, 22 April 2011 (UTC)
The article Shapley–Folkman lemma has been nominated for A-class review. Your comments are most welcome. Best regards, Kiefer. Wolfowitz 22:58, 27 April 2011 (UTC)
The article Peter Scholze is at AfD: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Peter Scholze. What do we think of this? (Initially I had missed that he was a Clay fellow, but this could tip the discussion the other way.) Sławomir Biały ( talk) 13:14, 28 April 2011 (UTC)
Another IMO related AfD discussion is here: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Iurie Boreico. This one seems more clear-cut. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 19:46, 28 April 2011 (UTC)
Can someone knowledgeable in commutative algebra add the details about Rees' contribution form some math source (and not a newspaper obit of someone else)? I've added the semigroup theory stuff I knew of. Tijfo098 ( talk) 02:01, 29 April 2011 (UTC)
Also the page of his (former) student Michael P. Drazin could enjoy more than a sentence. Tijfo098 ( talk) 02:05, 29 April 2011 (UTC)
New article looks like it was done as an extra credit project. Well done for what it is but not really encyclopedic in style. Copy to WikiBooks?-- RDBury ( talk) 04:12, 29 April 2011 (UTC)
Does anyone have some details on Volterra's role in developing multiplicative calculus and to what extent this was influential? The impact of this subject seems to be not much greater than non-Newtonian calculus (see deletion page). Unless we can justify it as a historical page, it may be next. Tkuvho ( talk) 04:58, 24 April 2011 (UTC)
Since the arbitration committee ruling, Monty Hall problem has become a much more cooperative place. Alas, it has also become a place where there are very few editors. If you walked away from the article because of the battleground it became, you might want to consider revisiting it. Guy Macon ( talk) 12:52, 25 April 2011 (UTC)
To Tkuvho: Rather than put the Monty Hall problem specifically into the list of misconceptions, you should figure out what general misconception about probability or statistics is responsible for the popular misunderstanding of MH and put that into the list. Then MH could be linked to as an example. That would make the entry much more useful and important. JRSpriggs ( talk) 13:49, 29 April 2011 (UTC)
Do we need Category:Non-Newtonian calculus ? Tkuvho ( talk) 08:14, 29 April 2011 (UTC)
Loosely connected to the recent Signpost Interview, I was thinking about the project's aims etc. Taking the article assessment as a first (rough) indicator for where we are, I was looking at the most important, but worst articles. This is the list ("<500" means that the article is among the 500 most viewed math articles, vital articles are also bold).
After the Signpost interview the other day, I was curious where WP:MATH will be going etc. Given this list, I'm wondering whether we might want to identify particular target articles etc. For example, I'm personally most concerned/astonished about the group "branches of maths". I did not check each individual article above for its quality, but most are really crappy (or at least short). Another criterion might be "importance to the general public" (i.e., the <500 ones). Most of them are either basic notions or probability/statistics. What do you guys think about all this? I.e., 1) what aims do we have and 2) how do we get there? Jakob.scholbach ( talk) 19:31, 24 April 2011 (UTC)
I agree with what Sławomir is saying about the vital articles list. But as far as I can tell, the list is not used for anything important. A much more important list is at m:List of articles every Wikipedia should have. This seems to be used by those starting Wikipedias in other languages. The current list is:
Logic and probability appear not under mathematics but under philosophy. Algorithm appears under computers. This list seems okay considering its size, but I think there are improvements we can make. If it were up to me, I would:
Before I propose this change, I'd like some feedback. What would you like to see changed on this list? (Note that the size of the list is fixed; you can't add something without removing something else.) Ozob ( talk) 00:34, 27 April 2011 (UTC)
Isn't it a bit pretentious to tell other WPs what they should have?-- Kmhkmh ( talk) 12:15, 27 April 2011 (UTC)
(unindent) I don't consider this question foolish, just difficult. Moreover, I think coming up with the best list of vital topics etc. is not what's most important. It seems that most (all?) people around agree at least that the topics listed above under "Branches/theories" are crucial (in order to use a word that is not "vital", "top importance" etc.). Yet, many of them are in poor state. For example, look at real analysis. I would love to initiate a drive that turns these articles (one by one, obviously) into decent articles. Does not need to be good, but maybe B-ish would be nice. Do(n't) you share this wish? Jakob.scholbach ( talk) 20:28, 28 April 2011 (UTC)
The preface at Wikipedia:Vital articles/Expanded (level 4) implies to me that the Wikipedia:Vital articles have a function that others naysay (I don't like hyphens), underlying some cooperative effort across wikipedia editions. Unlike the level 3 list, this list is nowhere near being worked on across the various wikis for other languages.
I don't now have time to read more or to comment.-- P64 ( talk) 22:48, 27 April 2011 (UTC)
Going back to the list at the top of this section: we can see here that most of the ratings are some years old. Although many of the articles aren't in perfect condition, I think the majority have moved beyond start-class. How are the ratings used? Is there any value in going through this list and updating ratings where appropriate? Jowa fan ( talk) 07:03, 28 April 2011 (UTC)
For example,
Is there any such tool here at Wikipedia? -- P64 ( talk) 15:05, 30 April 2011 (UTC)
Does anyone here think "we" is used improperly at powerset construction? The books cited use pretty much the same tone. Tijfo098 ( talk) 23:25, 29 April 2011 (UTC)
This sort of "we" is often better rephrased. But a while ago various strange people were construing it literally as referring to the author of the article, and saying that makes it an expression of personal views, to be tagged as an "essay-like" article. That is absurd. Michael Hardy ( talk) 04:24, 30 April 2011 (UTC)
Is there a wiki policy that editors should try to help rather than prod? See generality of algebra. Tkuvho ( talk) 20:23, 30 April 2011 (UTC)
What is our opinion of this edit? Michael Hardy ( talk) 17:09, 20 April 2011 (UTC)
<big>
for his examples.) There will always be readers with deviating font- and screen settings. I crafted {{
math}} (and by extension {{
pi}}), to suit the majority of readers that have default screen and font setting... on multiple platforms. It is those readers we have to accommodate. And while your example may not be the prettiest to look at, it isn't unreadable either. That makes your objection purely one of personal preference, and we simply cannot cater for all personal preferences. (You can however specify your own font for math and pi in your personal CSS.) —
Edokter (
talk) —
22:11, 20 April 2011 (UTC)π
and leave the rendering up to the user's browser.Somehow this discussion has moved on to the merits of serif versus sans. The more immediate problem is whether the ratio of the circumference to the diameter should be represented by the ordinary string of letters "pi" (as some are arguing) or by the Greek symbol. (I don't personally care whether it has serifs). Sławomir Biały ( talk) 22:52, 20 April 2011 (UTC)
I suggest we make a list of all the math articles with pi or π in the title and then submit a formal multipart move request. Kauffner ( talk) 23:34, 20 April 2011 (UTC)
I don't think the screen reader argument mentioned above is a good one: we should be very careful about demanding our article content satisfy some limitations of certain pieces of software. Lots of examples come to mind with that thought, but in the case of the screen reader the solution should be to fix the screen reader so it pronounces π correctly, not change all of our articles so the screen reader pronounces things as expected. Personally I value consistency; in mathematics we overwhelmingly use the symbol π to refer to the constant and in Wikipedia our articles largely use the same symbol. I would prefer to be consistent and use only π (with obvious redirects from the spelling pi), including for the article title of the pi article (a brief note about the usage of pi is of course acceptable). I have no opinion on the choice of font. Cheers, Ben ( talk) 03:09, 21 April 2011 (UTC).
So, some of the affected articles have been moved back to the versions with π in the title. I can't seem to move Liu Hui's pi algorithm back to Liu Hui's π algorithm, Chronology of computation of pi back to Chronology of computation of π, or List of formulae involving pi back to List of formulae involving π. This requires administrative powers, apparently. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 12:48, 22 April 2011 (UTC)
I have proposed that the remaining articles be moved back at Talk:Liu Hui's pi algorithm#Requested move. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 07:13, 27 April 2011 (UTC)
I propose that we clarify the math MOS to explicitly point out that the symbol π should not be spelled out 'pi' in running text when it is being used to refer to the mathematical constant. I think most people already expected that was the case, but recently there have been articles where the symbol was replaced by the spelled out 'pi'. Article titles are more complicated, and I prefer to handle them on a case by case basis, but in running text we routinely use lots of Greek letters without spelling them out. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 12:45, 21 April 2011 (UTC)
If you look at the cover photos of "The joy of π" [50] and "π: a biography" [51] they obviously both use π. The Borweins do use pi in book titles, but if you look in the Amazon Preview of the table of contets of "Pi: A Source Book" [52] (it is a collection of math articles), there are 2 articles that use pi in their titles; 3 that use π and 1 about Roger Apéry's proof that ζ(3) is irrational, that uses the greek letter ζ. If you look in the contents of "Pi and the AGM", [53] the Borweins themselves use π in the individual chapter titles, which might be taken as more akin wikipedia's constituent articles. There is also "π unleashed", [54] "π Algorithmen, Computer, Arithmetik", [55] and several movies like "π" [56] and on the other hand "pi Geschichte und Algorithmen einer Zahl" (tr. "pi History and algorithms of the number") [57] which (like Pi and the AGM) also uses π in its chapter titles. I get the impression that book and journal article titles are somewhat inconsistent and that Kauffner is cherry-picking sources, while chapter titles of math books use π more consistently. So I think that we should restore the earlier title and text. Opening an RM or talkpage discussion about article titles is much more acceptable than trying to impose a fait accompli. As for what dictionaries do: WP:NOTDICT. Similarly for other non-math sources. 69.111.194.167 ( talk) 19:45, 21 April 2011 (UTC)
I haven't seen the Van Nostrand encyclopedia but other such books of theirs I've seen haven't been very impressive. The premier "math encyclopedia" whose quality we should IMO be striving towards is the The Princeton Companion to Mathematics. Its π article is called "π" (ironically alphabetized as if it were spelled "pi".)
All in all, things were fine the way they were and there was no reason to mess with them. If you want to open an RM discussion, that's fine, but once again, I think it is proper to undo all the moves first, rather than presenting a fait accompli. (edited) 69.111.194.167 ( talk) 05:23, 22 April 2011 (UTC)
I notice "π: Algorithmen, Computer, Arithmetik" is also inconsistent. Its cover says π, its title page says pi, and its copyright page says "[Pi] π [Medienkombination]" ("Media combination" since the book comes with a CD-ROM). "π: a biography" says π on the cover, Pi on the copyright page, and [Pi] in the online LOC record. [59] "π Unleashed" appears to be a translation of "π: Algorithmen, Computer, Arithmetik". Its copyright page on Amazon appears to give the German title but not the English one. The LOC record says "Pi-unleashed" with a hyphen. Overall this LOC and copyright info doesn't seem that authoritative. "The Number π" says π on the cover, [pi] on the copyright page, and mentions on the copyright page that it's a translation of a French book "Autour du nombre π" which says π on the cover, [60] doesn't have a preview with a scan of the copyright page, but says [pi] in the LOC. [61] I also notice that two of three books on π-calculus (a computer science topic, not related to the number π=3.14159...) that I found in the LOC say [pi] or [symbol for pi]. [62] Anyway, Beckmann's and Blatner's books are obviously not unique. Could you please stop wasting our time with this stuff? 69.111.194.167 ( talk) 06:44, 22 April 2011 (UTC)
To summarize and hopefully finish this conversation, only one editor ever objected to π in running text, and he did so only briefly, and he has not argued for that position in 10 (oops --- ten) days. Is it fair to say that we have a consensus for altering Math MoS as proposed by Carl? (N.B. This is a different issue from π in titles, still being argued below.) Mgnbar ( talk) 16:43, 1 May 2011 (UTC)
Something to work on:
Gauss is currently a disambiguation page. A very large number of pages link to it. Either (1) those links should get disambiguated or (2) the page should be moved to Gauss (disambiguation) and Gauss redirected to Carl Friedrich Gauss. Michael Hardy ( talk) 16:32, 30 April 2011 (UTC)
I don't think it's Wikipedia's business to solve that philosophical issue, but perhaps someone with more experience in side-stepping that should probably comment at the FAC for logarithm, which has been open for who knows how long, and seems to attract all sorts of nitpickers. Tijfo098 ( talk) 22:04, 1 May 2011 (UTC)
There seemed to be a consensus above that for articles in the scope of this project, there is nothing wrong with "π" in the title and that this should not be replaced by "pi". There was even talk about updating MATHMOS to reflect this. This consensus is currently not reflected byanother requested move discussion, which is going on at Talk:Liu Hui's π algorithm#Requested move. To me this indicates that more (focused) discussion is needed, either in the relevant section above or in the new requested move discussion.
Also, I was going to move List of topics related to pi back to its correct title, but because of the title blacklist only an admin can do it. Hans Adler 08:19, 1 May 2011 (UTC)
Please see also Talk:Leibniz_formula_for_pi#Requested_move. Cheers, Ben ( talk) 08:13, 4 May 2011 (UTC).
Someone also opposed the FAC for logarithm on this. I'm curious if there's an easy way to fix that. I think Wikimedia use dvipng, which can probably be tweaked to make smaller pix by default. Tijfo098 ( talk) 22:27, 1 May 2011 (UTC)
As we have been incessantly discussing since February 2003, there are lots of problems with using TeX in an inline setting on Wikipedia (whereas in a "displayed" setting it seems to work well). One of those is improper alignment, thus:
Another is this:
The period at the end of a sentence appears on the next line. The same thing happens with commas. (Of course, this varies with the window geometry.)
Michael Hardy ( talk) 03:53, 3 May 2011 (UTC)
I recently came across User:Nageh/mathJax which is a wikipedia extension for using the MathJax javascript library for displaying LaTeX expressions. It uses the raw Latex input rather than the Texvc images. All rendering is done via javascript and it does take a couple of seconds to render a page, but this time is comparable to the time it takes to download all the png images. It does require downloading a font pack and setting a user preference to use.
I've been using this for about a month now and I'm very happy with the results, there are a few snag but the overall rending is good. I find it less jarring than the Texvc. It probably not ready for primetime yet but some more people trying it to spot any bugs. -- Salix ( talk): 22:36, 3 May 2011 (UTC)
I just declined an AfC from an anon IP wanting to recreate Boubaker polynomials, which appears to have been persistently popping up and being deleted over the last few years. On closer inspection the content came from User:Rirunmot/User:Rirunmot/subpage6, which in turn must have saved from an old version of the deleted article (hence the cleanup tags), and I suspect the AfC was submitted by User:Rirunmot himself. He's apparently been working on several versions of it in his user space recently. Anyway, I have no idea whether the new version of the article is better or if the subject has recently become notable, I just thought there might might be people here who would want to keep an eye on it. — Joseph Roe Tk• Cb, 13:13, 3 May 2011 (UTC)
Your note about link to Chebyshev polynomials could be understood, but specialists say Polynomials are generally linked to each other, and ther are rules for differentiating (i. e; Chebyshev polynomials are linked to Luckas polinomials by a simple mutiplying act, nevertheless they exist separately) ). Please have a look on the references and give your opinion Rirunmot ( talk) 15:04, 3 May 2011 (UTC)
I want to point out that User:Rirunmot recruited me to chime in on my talk page. I was one of the few people arguing to keep the article in the third nomination, but I wasn't exactly crying when the article was deleted because I am outright disgusted by the use of the page on this topic as a platform for self-promotion. Yes, I personally believe that it's technically well above the notability threshold. In my opinion, it doesn't matter that the only scholars to write about these polynomials are the original author and his friends. In my opinion, it doesn't matter that they're only a small trivial variant of the Chebyshev polynomials. What does concern me here is the use of Wikipedia as a platform for self-promotion. It seems to me that there is a clear conflict of interest here. I'd rather us semiprotect the article and ban any of the offending users from editing it. Then if some more impartial editor wants to re-create it, fine. But I'll say, even though I technically think it's notable, this whole thing has left a bad taste in my mouth and I know I'm not going to put in any effort to re-creating this page. Cazort ( talk) 16:00, 3 May 2011 (UTC)
I notice that several references link to Project Euclid. A bit like how many reference link to Mathematical Reviews. I think we should give Project Euclid its own identifier (and its own article as well) so references can be tidied up like the others.
For example, a citation with a link to Mathematical Reviews like
{{cite journal |last1=Gottwald|first1=Siegfried |year=2008 |title=Mathematical fuzzy logics |url=http://www.ams.org/mathscinet-getitem?mr=2413003 |journal=[[Bulletin of Symbolic Logic]] |volume=14 |issue=2 |pages=210–239 |doi=10.2178/bsl/1208442828 }}
gets cleaned up to
{{cite journal |last1=Gottwald|first1=Siegfried |year=2008 |title=Mathematical fuzzy logics |journal=[[Bulletin of Symbolic Logic]] |volume=14 |issue=2 |pages=210–239 |doi=10.2178/bsl/1208442828 |mr=2413003 }}
I think that it would be a good thing to clean up
{{cite journal |last1=Gottwald|first1=Siegfried |year=2008 |title=Mathematical fuzzy logics |url=http://projecteuclid.org/euclid.bsl/1208442828 |journal=[[Bulletin of Symbolic Logic]] |volume=14 |issue=2 |pages=210–239 |doi=10.2178/bsl/1208442828 }}
to something like
{{cite journal |last1=Gottwald|first1=Siegfried |year=2008 |title=Mathematical fuzzy logics |journal=[[Bulletin of Symbolic Logic]] |volume=14 |issue=2 |pages=210–239 |doi=10.2178/bsl/1208442828 |euclid=euclid.bsl/1208442828 |mr=2413003 }}
Which would look something like
or similar.
I've also made {{ Project Euclid}}, similar to {{ MR}} and {{ doi}}. Appearance can be tweaked since I've no idea how a link to Project Euclid should be presented. Headbomb { talk / contribs / physics / books} 16:59, 11 April 2011 (UTC)
|id=
field of a citation template. But I'm not sure I see the point when the doi goes to exactly the same place. —
David Eppstein (
talk)
21:52, 11 April 2011 (UTC)Any feedback on how to present the link though? Like which of pe: euclid.bsl/1208442828 (as the doi) vs. PE euclid.bsl/1208442828 (as most other identifier, but is PE understood to mean Projet Euclid as MR is understood to mean Mathematical Reviews?) vs Project Euclid: euclid.bsl/1208442828 vs... is best? Headbomb { talk / contribs / physics / books} 14:36, 14 April 2011 (UTC)
Hi! This is a useful template.
{{
cite journal}}
: Cite has empty unknown parameters: |1=
, |2=
, |3=
, and |4=
(
help); Invalid |ref=harv
(
help); Unknown parameter |month=
ignored (
help)I would prefer the deletion of the (redundant) prefix "euclid." from the identifier. It would be useful to provide documentation and examples on its use; also, the documentation has 3 levels of parentheses, where I believe 2 are intended. Kiefer. Wolfowitz 13:10, 2 May 2011 (UTC)
From the three pages: Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Boubaker_polynomials, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Boubaker polynomials (2nd nomination), and Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Boubaker polynomials (3rd nomination) it seems that two facts are admitted by everyone :
Now the matter is neither the correctness; nor the mathematical value, these are problems of specialist as discussed in the accessible and verifiable academic refernces i.e. Meixner-Type Results for Riordan Arrays and Associated Integer Sequences, Chapter 6: The Boubaker polynomials (by Paul Barry, Aoife Hennessy and Modelling Nonlinear Bivariate Dependence Using the Boubaker polynomials (by E. Gargouri-Ellouze, N. Sher Akbar, S. Nadeem)... The real matter is about notability, which is quite admitted by the 3680 hits there [64]adn 163 there Scholar Publications along with the academic and encyclopedic publications. So please give your opinion on this particular question: Notable or Not-Notable. Thanks Rirunmot ( talk) 19:03, 3 May 2011 (UTC)
Is there any reason not to lump Rirunmot with all the blocked users in Category:Wikipedia sockpuppets of Mmbmmmbm? — David Eppstein ( talk) 06:47, 4 May 2011 (UTC)
In the phase-type representation section, where τ is mysteriously chosen to be (0,1,0,0); am I right to assume that that is the initial condition? In other words, does the system start in state two? The end of the article needs a lot of explanation. It starts off nicely, but then there's jumps to using some scary looking formulas, lots of technical language, and zero explanation. There is a link to another article, but that doesn't help at all. — Fly by Night ( talk) 15:19, 5 May 2011 (UTC)
Someone spammed my department's list with a link to the article on Hilbert's eighth problem. The claims on the page seem dubious and there are no sources to speak of, but I'm only just dipping my toes into Wikipedia and don't feel comfortable deleting a ton of stuff. Could someone pass definitive judgement? -- Dylan Moreland ( talk) 03:37, 6 May 2011 (UTC)
Please help verify an existence claim for Indian derivatives in the 12th century. Tkuvho ( talk) 10:55, 6 May 2011 (UTC)
The articles on Hilbert space and Inner product space use:
The first is easy enough to fix (If one agrees that they should be the same symbol for consistency of notation between related articles, which I think they should be) but the Math MOS only states:
which I read to mean it's OK to change for consistency *within* an article, but not strictly OK to change one to the other for the sake of consistency *between* articles. Thoughts? Thanks. BrideOfKripkenstein ( talk) 21:01, 6 May 2011 (UTC)
A new account (not, I think, a new editor) is trying to make whole number something other than a disambig page. My opinion is that there is no content justifying an article. Please comment at talk:whole number. --- Trovatore ( talk) 23:58, 6 May 2011 (UTC)
Having fought for two years on the Monty Hall problem, almost getting banned from wikipedia for OR and COI, I am looking for a new brawl, and am getting stuck into the two envelopes problem. Have been accused of gross arrogance and incivility within one day (practice makes perfect! I didn't want to waste time with ritual dances but went straight to the nitty gritty). There is a big problem with that page, that a lot of people have been writing up their own common sense solutions (both sensical and nonsensical) but almost no one actually reads the sources. I just wrote up two mainsteam solutions to two main variants of the two envelopes problem, both "out of my head", ie without reliable sources. (Very evil, very un-wikipedian). After all, I have been talking about these problems with professional friends for close on fourty years now, and setting them as exam questions, talking about them with students, without ever actually carefully reading published literature on the problems.
Maybe some of you folk here can get access to some of those papers in journals where you have to pay a big tax to the publishing company before you can actually read the pdf. That would be useful.
Looks like the two children problem is equally much a mess.
Of course I could be completely wrong that what I think are the solutions to the two main variants of the two envelopes problem are indeed the solutions, or for that matter, are correct at all... Richard Gill ( talk) 08:14, 3 May 2011 (UTC)
Thanks Yoenit ! The link you provided here allows concentring debates of serious contributors (efforts and time) on the simple question: Sourced or not? -- Rirunmot ( talk) 09:35, 4 May 2011 (UTC)
I have opened a sockpuppet investigation at Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Mmbmmmbm. Ozob ( talk) 11:44, 4 May 2011 (UTC)
How to become a famous mathematician
Seriously, maybe this trick ought to be explained in the appropriate article on wikipedia. Then the article on Boubaker polynomials can simply refer to that article and to the article on Chebyshev polynomials. Similarly the article on Chebyshev polynomials can refer to this trick-article and mention Boubaker polynomials as an example. Richard Gill ( talk) 16:22, 8 May 2011 (UTC)
PS the topic is clearly ignotable rather than notable (cf infamous, igNoble, ignominious, ignorable) Richard Gill ( talk) 06:08, 9 May 2011 (UTC)
See Wikipedia:Featured picture candidates/Quantum Harmonic Oscillator.-- RDBury ( talk) 23:34, 8 May 2011 (UTC)
See
Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Karl-Theodor Sturm,
Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Emil Hilb,
Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Stephan Luckhaus,
Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Ernst Hairer,
Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/K. David Elworthy,
Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Xue-Mei Li,
Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Abhinav Kumar, and
Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Alison Miller, and please weigh in. Several of these could use more mathematical expertise. —
David Eppstein (
talk)
15:15, 7 May 2011 (UTC)
The second one week, see Wikipedia:Featured picture candidates/Simple harmonic oscillator. It is May after all.-- RDBury ( talk) 22:25, 9 May 2011 (UTC)
I'm used to treating MacTutor History of Mathematics Archives (i.e., http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/) as a pretty reliable source for history of mathematics, especially of the biographical kind. But is it? If so, how do we justify that? The context is that William Connolley at Talk:History of calculus asked if it's just some blokes' web page. I am tempted to say, based on our article, that it has won many prestigious awards for online content. But how do historians of mathematics rate it? Sławomir Biały ( talk) 12:51, 4 May 2011 (UTC)
MathWorld's problems are usually omissions rather than errors, but for instance its Lattice article is hopelessly confused. (It seems to be trying to imply that all partial orders are lattices and that all lattices are distributive and modular). And Cubic Lattice links to and is linked from the wrong kind of lattice. My general preference is to link to MathWorld as an external link, and to check the MathWorld article to make sure there aren't important aspects of the problem or important references that we're omitting here, but not to actually use it as a source. On the other hand, I've never encountered any problems with MacTutor, and RDBury's description of the OEIS process makes it sound clearly within what we accept as reliable. — David Eppstein ( talk) 04:36, 5 May 2011 (UTC)
Well I'm not math historian, but so far I found MacTutor relatively reliable on the topics I've used it for. It is indeed an expert website that has won some rewards and was also reviewed/described in math or science journals. It is definitely not just a website hosted by some bloke, to very least it would be a self published by notable experts (both principal editors/maintainer are math profs at one of UK's top rates universities (St. Andrews), where the project is hosted rather than on some private webspace/account). Most of their articles are carefully sourced and so far I've discovered only minor errors as you might find them in reliable/reputable literature as well (typos, small mistakes with non european dates, small errors in graphics). In particular as far as historic subjects are concerned I'd consider them much more reliable as MathWorld, which however I still consider as a reliable source for WP.
It is might be wortwhile to note however, that both editors are not trained (math) historians afaik. So they primarily compile material (available in English) written by others. In cases where an larger historic context knowledge might be required (in particular being able to read original sources in foreign and ancient languages) that can lead to errors. This might matter in individual biographies for (historic) non European mathematicians and related math topics. But then again this problem exists for many math sources we consider as reliable as well (any historic information in regular math textbooks, normal mathematician writing on historic subjects, etc.).-- Kmhkmh ( talk) 11:32, 5 May 2011 (UTC)
Well going to the thread it seems to me we all agree that student papers hosted on MacTutor are not to be treated as reliable sources, that however the regular MacTutor entries can be treated as such.-- Kmhkmh ( talk) 10:35, 10 May 2011 (UTC)
I've created a new article titled Patrick Billingsley. Billingsley died recently at the age of 85.
The article is imperfect. Work on it! Michael Hardy ( talk) 17:14, 10 May 2011 (UTC)
At Lamé function, we find this:
and then:
But it doesn't say specifically what the change of variable is. Can some add that information? Michael Hardy ( talk) 15:42, 8 May 2011 (UTC)
Our page titled Lists of mathematics topics (notice that it's plural: lists) is a magnificent thing, unprecedented in all of intellectual history, just as Wikipedia is. It is a former featured list. We should work on returning it to that status. As I recall, all that was needed was references. Michael Hardy ( talk) 20:13, 10 May 2011 (UTC)
See Talk:Leibniz formula for pi#Requested move. Hans Adler 15:22, 12 May 2011 (UTC)
“ | Probably the hardest part of writing a mathematical article (actually, any article) is the difficulty of addressing the level of mathematical knowledge on the part of the reader. For example, when writing about a field, do we assume that the reader already knows group theory? A general approach is to start simple, then move toward more abstract and general statements as the article proceeds. The suggestions below are intended to help us achieve this. | ” |
The above passage is part of the project page. An editor inserted the following comment, which I now move here. — Tamfang ( talk) 18:41, 13 May 2011 (UTC)
I do not think, that such transclusions (e.g. explaining groups in an article about fields) improves an article.It may be useful to distinguish clearly between motivation and definition. Stephan Spahn ( talk) 14:36, 13 May 2011 (UTC)
The article Musean hypernumber is mostly the contribution of editor Koeplinger. A quick google scholar search reveals mainly a text "Modular parts of a function" by K Carmody - Applied Mathematics and Computation, 1990 cited by... one (1). Tkuvho ( talk) 14:40, 9 May 2011 (UTC)
I have noticed a recent trend to replace ordinary html formatted equations in articles with the {{ math}} template. I noticed that our WP:MOSMATH barely mentions the use of this template (although some editors seem to act as though it is mandatory). Strangely, it does appear in Help:Formula as the only option for properly typesetting mathematics formulas. It seems like there should at least be some degree of accord between the recommendations of these two pages. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 12:55, 13 May 2011 (UTC)
I generally agree with Jacob Scholbach that, in general, plain HTML/wikitext is fine, without the additional use of Template:Math. If you edit the help page, you should also edit the original at meta:Help:Displaying_a_formula. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 12:45, 15 May 2011 (UTC)
Low-dimensional chaos has been prodded for deletion. 65.95.13.213 ( talk) 04:58, 17 May 2011 (UTC)
Whole number (number theory) has been prodded for deletion. 65.95.13.213 ( talk) 04:20, 18 May 2011 (UTC)
A thread on mathoverflow compiled names of mathematical ideas named after places. I've listed them here: User:Michael Hardy/Named after places
Could this evolve into a Wikipedia article? Michael Hardy ( talk) 15:27, 14 May 2011 (UTC)
WP:MOSMATH tells people to write
<math>\sin x \,\!</math>
where I would have written
<math>\sin x \,</math>
.The purpose of the spacing at the end is to force png rendering. It doesn't actually add space between sin x and whatever follows it on the line, if anything, since nothing follows sin x inside the math tags. Why is the \! there? Doesn't this just complicate the thing pointlessly? I've seen this in lots of articles and wondered why it was there; by hindsight maybe I should have suspected it was in MOSMATH. Michael Hardy ( talk) 14:14, 20 May 2011 (UTC)
User:David Eppstein removed a (new) reference from cellular automata, questioning its notability. The other editor then questioned the notability of the David Eppstein article and has made a lot of comments about Eppstein, as editor and real-world person.
I have written some articles with David, so others should monitor this situation.
Sincerely, Kiefer. Wolfowitz 22:08, 18 May 2011 (UTC)
It's been several days since Current activity has been updated; is there reason why the bot might not be working?-- RDBury ( talk) 04:14, 21 May 2011 (UTC)
We currently have two articles about the general topic of tiling: Tesselation and Honeycomb (geometry). The honeycomb article is rather short, while the tesselation article is, in my opinion, a horrible mess. The article almost completely lacks inline citations. Furthermore there is way too much trivia and a lot of totally inappropriate or unhelpful images. All of this stuff should be rewritten as one single article, either under the title Tiling or Tesselation. Honeycomb should be a seperate section in that new article, because it seems to be an often used term. Some sources:
In the context of aperiodic tilings, I have mostly seen the term Tiling do describe these arrangements (for example, Chaim Goodman-Strauss who is quite active in current research on aperiodic tilings never uses the terms Tesselation or Honeycomb and refers to all arrangements (even to the higher-dimensional ones) as Tiling).
I welcome comments on whether things should be merged and where and what would be the most reasonable title for the article. Thanks. Toshio Yamaguchi ( talk) 16:04, 21 May 2011 (UTC)
Mathbot has recently been blocked from editing List of mathematics articles (actually the {{ nobots}} template was added to these lists). There is a discussion about this at User talk:Oleg Alexandrov. Apparently the reason is that Mathbot adds disambiguation links to these lists. Mathbot is essential to the proper working of the Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Current activity page, which many mathematics editors rely on. What do we think about this? Sławomir Biały ( talk) 11:29, 9 May 2011 (UTC)
I am sure we can work something out if everyone makes an effort to be nonconfrontational. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 15:17, 9 May 2011 (UTC)
I see that some lists were moved to project space after Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of mathematics articles (J-L) and move discussion (now) recorded at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mathematics/List of mathematics articles (A-C) Presumably not all of them?? Tijfo098 ( talk) 09:37, 10 May 2011 (UTC)
I don't like the idea of putting it in the project space. Especially if other article-space pages could not link to it. The list is mainly for browsing, and at most secondarily for navigating. Michael Hardy ( talk) 20:08, 10 May 2011 (UTC)
Okay, I went ahead and took care of this:
Now all you need to do is direct the maintenance bot to use these indiscriminate lists for its maintenance tasks. I will be glad to improve the organization of the alternate lists remaining in mainspace. I noticed that most of them are about twice as long as the recommended article length, which may make page loading difficult for people with older computers and on older computer networks (particularly our most vulnerable users in third world countries). I'd be glad to attend to that while otherwise restructuring these lists into a user-friendly format. Cheers! bd2412 T 23:48, 10 May 2011 (UTC)
This is getting very repetitive. I'm getting a very strong sense of WP:IDIDNTHEARTHAT from BD2412. Regardless of that, is there some way that the bot could be persuaded to link only to the "(disambiguation)" form of a mathdab page rather than whatever other form might also exist and regardless of which one is primary? That would seem to appease the disambiguators while still allowing the lists to function properly. — David Eppstein ( talk) 04:11, 11 May 2011 (UTC)
Here is an idea. Perhaps we could put a Wikipedia:Editnotice on each of the list of mathematics articles pages. It could say something like:
![]() | This list is automatically generated.
Changes to this list may be overwritten by
User:Mathbot. To change something on this page, leave a note at
User talk:Mathbot. |
That would stop most people from editing the lists. But it wouldn't prevent manual maintenance and it wouldn't require maintaining two lists. Ozob ( talk) 12:20, 11 May 2011 (UTC)
Re a comment by David Eppstein: if we link to redirects instead of linking to the pages themselves, it makes the "related changes" tool not work for those pages, because "related changes" only looks at links, it does not bypass redirects. This is one reason the lists need to link directly to the desired pages. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 17:54, 11 May 2011 (UTC)
My current opinion, by the way, is that the people who go around changing dab links need to find a way to whitelist these lists. In the end: If they are editing manually, it is trivial to just skip these lists. If they are using a script, it is trivial to tell the script to skip them. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 17:56, 11 May 2011 (UTC)
I pointed this out on a user talk page, but I don't know if it has been pointed out there. A key reason that these lists need to link directly to disambiguation pages is that the "related changes" tool does not bypass redirects. So this link [75] shows no changes, even though I did edit the disambiguation page that is indirectly linked from User:CBM/Sandbox. This link [76] does show the changes. We have no control over the "related changes" tool to make it bypass redirects. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 11:35, 12 May 2011 (UTC)
“ | To link to a disambiguation page (rather than to a page whose topic is a specific meaning), link to the title that includes the text "(disambiguation)", even if that's a redirect – for example, link to the redirect America (disambiguation) rather than the target page at "America". | ” |
You know, I think we would have found a solution that satisfies everyone long ago except for this vigorous opposition from Carl. I would gladly contribute to update Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Current activity, for instance, but I'm sure Carl has a reason this cannot be done. The disambig problem can be fixed, if only you were willing to work with us instead of against us. -- JaGa talk 16:04, 13 May 2011 (UTC)
It would really be helpful to get a straight answer to this question, since different people seem to be suggesting that these lists have different strictures. If it is not necessary to include all redirects to disambig pages on these lists (and it would seem that it is not, based on the fact that they are not there already), then moving the disambig pages is a solution that can be effected through the disambig project without troubling this project any further. If redirects must be included as well, then I think we have a bigger problem with the lists themselves indiscriminately including links. For example, must a redirect to a theorem from a common misspelling of its name be included in the list? bd2412 T 00:13, 15 May 2011 (UTC)
In light of the broad discussion of this issue, and the many proposals made by various participants, I have initiated a straw poll at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mathematics/Straw poll regarding lists of mathematics articles. Please make your preferred resolution known there. Cheers! bd2412 T 18:46, 23 May 2011 (UTC)
Our article titled Miquel's theorem tells us that:
etc.
At the very least, it should say
possibly with a link to the article about ??????? Miquel.
Is there nothing in one of our style manuals that says this sort of omission is an error? There should be something. Michael Hardy ( talk) 16:51, 20 May 2011 (UTC)
Very often one should not put the statement of the theorem in the initial sentence, since the statement of the theorem can require a lot of prefatory stuff.
seems OK to me.
I do think "In geometry" should usually come first, lest the non-mathematician reader fail to realize that it's not about politics, chemistry, mythology, etc. In the early history of the article titled schismatic temperament, I had to read into the second paragraph before I found out that it was not about a psychiatric condition, but rather about musical scales.
But if the article is called Fundamental theorem of geometry, then that context-setting initial phrase is superfluous.
And one should never write "In category theory" or "In representation theory" or anything like that, that will mystify the lay reader who's never heard of those things (a reasonable reader could think that "representation theory" is about politics). Michael Hardy ( talk) 23:03, 20 May 2011 (UTC)
At Standard part function, [PA redacted - WMC: summary: there is a dispute]. The editor does not seem to realize that the standard part was part of Robinson's solution of the paradox of the infinitesimal definition of the derivative by Leibniz, as criticized by Berkeley in 1734. Berkeley's criticism of infinitesimals as inconsistent entities was widely accepted until the 1960s. Certainly neither Weierstrass nor Cantor thought of the limit approach as resolving the paradox of the infinitesimal definition, contrary to what ill-informed editor seems to think. Claiming that the limit approach was a resolution of the paradox amounts to an unsourced, whiggish rewriting of history. The editor in question is pursueing a similar misguided agenda at ghosts of departed quantities, even after having admitted at a talkpage that he is not fully knowledgeable about the infinitesimal approach to the calculus. Tkuvho ( talk) 22:02, 21 May 2011 (UTC)
You have been escalating the situation unnecessarily. Especially calling William M. Connolley by his first name and then, when he objected to that and directed you to his subpage where he explains why, you outright refused to read it and addressed him as "William" again. Very bad idea. I also had to refactor a section title which was a personal attack, and the title of this section isn't much better, either.
As far as I can see there is some very normal disagreement between the two of you of the kind that should normally result in improvements to the articles that satisfy everybody. I don't understand why that shouldn't be possible. Hans Adler 01:15, 22 May 2011 (UTC)
Can't say I much appreciate the section title here, so I've retitled it. Also, I would have expected T to have the bare minimum of courtesy required to have informed me of this discussion. As to the substance: T appears to have appointed himself the expert, and disses everyone else's expertise should they have the temerity to disagree with him. The person with the "agenda" (since he chooses to use that term) is T: and his agenda would appear to be non-standard analysis William M. Connolley ( talk) 20:19, 23 May 2011 (UTC)
There is a discussion about WP:Notability/PROF (for mathematicians), now that the article on Mikhail Katz (a student of Gromov's) is up for deletion. Kiefer. Wolfowitz 00:57, 23 May 2011 (UTC)
As an aside, I would encourage as many people as have the time to review the article and the deletion discussion. These kind of discussions set presidents, and it's important for the mathematical community on Wikipedia to have a say. So far the AfD is being discussed by non-reference desk and non-wikiproject editors. We really do need more people from the maths project to give some input. We should be involved in possible mathematical president-making discussions. — Fly by Night ( talk) 17:23, 23 May 2011 (UTC)
Semiregular 4-polytope was prodded for deletion. 65.95.13.213 ( talk) 06:00, 24 May 2011 (UTC)
I've raised this issue before, but we have a large number (in the hundreds) of articles on specific polytopes and more are being added all the time. I looked at one of the more dubious ones, Bipentellated 8-simplex, and found no reliable references and it seems to be largely original research. Most of these seem to be the work of a single editor and judging from the red links {e.g. Pentistericated 8-simplex) present on the page it looks like the final tally for these articles could be in the thousands. I find it difficult to believe that the majority of these articles meet the GNG so perhaps there should be a review to decide on a few dozen articles that are worth keeping.-- RDBury ( talk) 16:42, 30 April 2011 (UTC)
Another popular "word" in all of this business is "bicantellated", which also gets zero Google books and Google scholar hits. The naming conventions in these articles, and the overall program, seems to be inspired by the "uniform polychora project" of Norman Johnson (mathematician) and George Olshevsky, but this project no longer seems to exist. I can't seem to find any published materials from the project that these articles can be sourced to. However, I also feel that a lot of work has gone into making these articles, and that we should make every effort to preserve this content. Even if it is original research, it seems like worthwhile and possibly useful original research. So I think that rather than deleting, all of these articles should be transwikied to WikiBooks. (I assume they allow original research.)
If there is consensus that either deletion or transwiki is appropriate, then I think the next order of business would be to make a list of all of these articles. There are various subcategories and subsubcategories of Category:Polytopes that are populated primarily with these sorts of articles. Does anyone (*cough* Carl *cough*) have a script that will unwrap a few levels of a category into a list? We can then go through this list and strike the ones that are either obviously OK, or ones for which there are good references. The remaining ones can be transwikied or deleted by the appropriate process. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 13:37, 1 May 2011 (UTC)
Maybe we can borrow from Wikipedia:Notability (numbers)#Notability of specific individual numbers? If a polytope has three or more unrelated and distinctive properties (e.g. its skeleton is a Cayley graph, it has a record-high genus for its number of faces, stuff like that, not "it is the teratopentellation of the dodecadodecahedron"), if it has obvious cultural significance, or if it is treated individually and nontrivially in published works such as Wells Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Geometry, then we can include it, otherwise not. — David Eppstein ( talk) 01:40, 3 May 2011 (UTC)
Here's an analogy. The multiplicative inverse is an important operation on numbers, important enough to have its own article. And many small integers are important enough to have their own articles. But we do not have articles on the multiplicative inverses of very many integers — many fewer than the articles on integers. So, truncation is important, and simplices are important, but that doesn't mean we need a separate article on seven dimensional truncated simplices. There just isn't that much to say about them that is different from six dimensional truncated simplices or whatever. The parts that are different (the f-vectors, for instance) can probably just be summarized in a table. I can't think of any justification for having an article on this particular polytope and not having an article on the number 1/21. And I am perfectly happy not having an article on the number 1/21 — there's not much to say about it that wouldn't be in the article 21 (number) — but I think that Truncated 7-simplex is even less worthy. And that's one of the less baroque ones. — David Eppstein ( talk) 06:34, 4 May 2011 (UTC)
If we're going to start deleting/moving, let's start from the bottom and plan comprehensively! Here's a bunch of categories on polyhedra alone: Some are "finite sets" and some are open-ended sets. Should all 75 of the uniform compounds, compiled from a single paper be included? Should all 92 Johnson solids have their own articles, again, compiled from a single paper that enumerated them. Should all 53 nonregular star uniform polyhedra be included?
At this stage I would leave the three dimensional ones its more the higher dimensional polytopes which are in question.
From these the definite keeps are the various lists
Also of greater significance seem to be those mentioned in Template:Polytopes which are the "Fundamental convex regular and uniform polytopes in dimensions 2–10"
The various honeycombs seem to be of some significance including:
Beyond that I don't know enough about the subject to know which ones deserve special pleading.-- Salix ( talk): 06:45, 6 May 2011 (UTC)
What about merging rather than deleting? For example merge the content of Bipentellated 8-simplex into 8-simplex, rather than simply deleting it. In order to prevent the article from becoming too long, tables such as Bipentellated 8-simplex#Related polytopes could be made collapsible. Of course citations directly describing these polytopes would be needed such that no original research is required to extract the presented information. For example, there should be a source that calls the Bipentellated 8-simplex by this name, otherwise the most common name used by the sources should be used I think. As I don't have access to most of the references used in the Polytope articles, unfortunately I could not help with that. Toshio Yamaguchi ( talk) 14:48, 7 May 2011 (UTC)
Hello,
I am working with the Account Creation Improvement Project (my latest report is here). Now I need your help to find some easy things for newcomers to do.
To guide the new users into working on the articles, we have created a step-by-step process that starts right after the new user has provided a username and a password. Here is the first step. If you click on "mathematics", for instance, you go to a page where you are asked to state your skills. And based on your choice there, you go to a page that combines these two choices. Here is what it looks like if you choose copyediting.
Right now, that list of articles that needs copyediting in the field of mathematics, has been created manually by a rather small set of users. That is not a scalable solution. Especially considering that these articles could very well be edited by the time we have created all the lists.
That's why my question to you in WikiProject mathematics is if you could create four templates for each of the four skillsets: Copyediting, Research & Writing, Fact checking, and Organizing - and keep them updated? We could then transclude those templates in the account creation process.
This is probably one of the most efficient things you can do in this project. Yes, really! There are roughly 5-7000 new users - each day. Around 30% of them start to edit. So if only a sixth of them sees the mathematics templates, that's around 250 potential new editors in your field - each day. Possibly more. And they want and need something easy to do. Some of them will continue to edit if they think that the tasks are fun and they are welcomed into the project.
So, what do you say about those templates?
I will gladly answer any questions you may have about this question or the project. Best wishes// Hannibal ( talk) 16:42, 20 May 2011 (UTC)
AfD for Elementary_Calculus:_An_Infinitesimal_Approach. Please comment here.-- Kmhkmh ( talk) 21:15, 24 May 2011 (UTC)
Doesn't need to be here
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---|
Yet another tiresome AfD: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elementary_Calculus:_An_Infinitesimal_Approach Tkuvho ( talk) 00:55, 22 May 2011 (UTC) Tagging of articles?Tkhuvho has been writing a paper today on Gromov's famous book, and it's already being slapped with cn and unreferenced tags, by what looks to be the same group of editors. If there is a problem with Tkuvho's contributions (and I don't believe there is), then it should be discussed here, rather than by such edits, which I hope don't start to constitute harassment. Kiefer. Wolfowitz 20:41, 23 May 2011 (UTC)
I don't see anything here that can't be resolved on the talk page of the relevant article (although the tone there is less civil than it could be). How many more
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Klein bottle says:
I'd like to Wikilink "boundary", but I'm not sure what article we want.
The obvious choice seems to be Boundary (topology), but I'm not sure. (Also see the disamb page Boundary.)
Does anybody know for certain on this?
-- 186.221.141.36 ( talk) 21:58, 23 May 2011 (UTC)
Could we go back to assuming good faith, and all that stuff? This project is not alone in facing notability issues that are on the margin, and other contentious matters that can generate lengthy debate. But there is a fairly good consensus about what we should be doing, in general. Charles Matthews ( talk) 12:32, 24 May 2011 (UTC)
Help at Larry Guth would be appreciated. Tkuvho ( talk) 04:17, 25 May 2011 (UTC)
This RfC discussion could use a another viewpoint or two. At issue is the use of notation such as -- RDBury ( talk) 19:00, 9 May 2011 (UTC)
The AfD discussion Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Relation reduction as been relisted to get more participation.-- RDBury ( talk) 02:30, 26 May 2011 (UTC)
There is currently what looks to me like a mess of duplicated content between the five pages cycle (mathematics), cyclic permutation, cycle notation, transposition (mathematics) and cycles and fixed points. I'm not sure where to begin dealing with this, but I think it could use some attention. Suggestions welcome. Jowa fan ( talk) 08:47, 25 May 2011 (UTC)
The page Tangent vector currently is a disambiguation page with two entries; both of these entries discuss tangent vectors but neither one is an article about tangent vectors as such. It is not clear to me whether tangent vector really has two distinct meanings, or whether it is a single concept with one meaning but with applications in multiple areas of mathematics. If the latter is true, then this should be an article, possibly listing the relevant fields in which tangent vectors are used, rather than being tagged as a disambiguation page. -- R'n'B ( call me Russ) 12:06, 27 May 2011 (UTC)
Currently Elementary Calculus (with a capital "C") and elementary calculus (with a lower-case "c") both redirect to Elementary Calculus: An Infinitesimal Approach, the article about Jerome Keisler's book. Lots of pages link to the lower-case version. I think possibly the lower-case version should become a disambiguation page, with the capital version redirecting to it, and then the ones that should link to the book's title should link there directly. Michael Hardy ( talk) 17:28, 27 May 2011 (UTC)
OK, I've
Still to be done:
....and now I've edited the one at logarithm so that instead of
it says
Maybe the others should link to the book........ Michael Hardy ( talk) 02:39, 28 May 2011 (UTC) ...and remember: book titles are italicized. Michael Hardy ( talk) 02:42, 28 May 2011 (UTC)
Done. Michael Hardy ( talk) 02:50, 28 May 2011 (UTC)
At ghosts of departed quantities, a few editors are attempting a whiggish rewriting of the history of the calculus. George Berkeley criticized both the infinitesimal and fluxional procedures of the calculus, which he claimed amounted to the same thing. Weierstrass and his followers in the 1870s did 3 things: (1) they largely accepted Berkeley's critique of infinitesimal procedures; (2) they sought to eliminate infinitesimals; and (3) they developed infinitesimal-free foundations for analysis, namely foundations based on the real numbers and epsilontics. Then in the 1960s, Robinson came along and restored infinitesimals to respectability, in particular removing whatever logical inconsistencies were present in dy/dx style definition of derivative. He was thus the first one to resolve the paradox of the infinitesimal procedures criticized by Berkeley.
The paragraph above is agreed to by all the historians I have read. Now a few editors have come along and rewritten history. The page ghosts of departed quantities no longer mentions Robinson. Instead, it claims that Weierstrass resolved Berkeley's paradoxes. This does not compare favorably with Jagged's efforts, to the extent that Jagged at least left the old material in while adding his new material. Some input would be appreciated. Tkuvho ( talk) 13:39, 25 May 2011 (UTC)
Facts in the matter is that Bishop George Berkeley's criticism was 100% correct. This was an embarrassment for mathematics for a long time. Weierstrass removed the embarrassment. What Robinson did was to somewhat restore the honor of the mathematicians that had thought in terms of infinitesimals by showing that it is possible, after all, to make a consistent logical model including infinitesimals. This undoubtedly casts new light on the history but it doesn't make the old calculations involving infinitesimals more correct. They are still 100% wrong. So in my opinion Weierstrass was the first one to solve the problem by simply removing the troublemakers. Robinson solved the problem in another way by reshaping the troublemakers and make them respectable. So they both solved the problem posed by Berkley but in different ways. Weierstrass solved it first. iNic ( talk) 17:03, 25 May 2011 (UTC)
(outdent) (@Tkuvho: Oy! Why is this linked to from every place except the talk page of the article, and if I am the one who made the controversial edits, why hasn't this tread been pointed out to me. Also I have no idea what Jaggedalia is supposed to mean, could you explain?) Anyways, it was I who removed Robinson from the article on Ghosts of departed quantities. I should explain, I noticed there was alot of activity at this page on my watchlist, so I went by to read what was going on. I decided to try to help, so I got out Boyer to refersh my memory. According to him the phrase was not about infinitesimal quantities, but rather Newton's ultimate ratios (aka limits of the form 0/0). Since the page was about this specific phrase, and the reference said it was not infinitesimals, and no other references were given to support statements. I tried to rewrite the article in as verifiable form as I could. The was no attempt to re-write history and I resent the accusation. I specifically supplied a reference to a math history textbook. How exactly is that writting history? Thenub314 ( talk) 18:22, 25 May 2011 (UTC) (PS: I also don't know what whiggish means, but I will leave that one alone. My blood pressure probably couldn't handle it.) PPS: Also I did explain this on the talk page immediately after making my edits.
One thing to keep in mind is that infinitesimals were still in common use as late as the 1890's, see e.g. [82]. So, as with many paradigm shifts, it took a generation or so for it to become universally accepted. I also would not say calculations were "100% wrong"; the real paradox is that the method of infinitesimals gave correct answers even though there wasn't a firm logical basis for it. People would not have kept using it if it wasn't useful.-- RDBury ( talk) 01:31, 26 May 2011 (UTC)
I think the best way to move forward is to simply merge the ghosts of departed quantities page into the page about The Analyst. The expression "ghosts of departed quantities" might deserve a section of its own at that page, but that's all. I don't think that this expression is of such importance, neither historical or otherwise, that it deserves a wikipedia page of its own. If you disagree please speak out now. In addition, to explain what the expression is all about from scratch, which is what we need to do if the expression has a page of its own, becomes a huge task. But placed in the correct context the expression is a very simple thing to explain. iNic ( talk) 17:01, 27 May 2011 (UTC)
The category Category:Mathematics articles with no comments was recently deleted; see the discussion here. Unfortunately this has left a lot of article talk pages with red links in the category: 8,587 precisely. The category Category:Mathematics articles with comments still exists, though with only 544 members.
So, is the comment mechanism actually deprecated? I've not come across any discussion on it though I've never seen the pages used or referred to. The only time I've had to look at them is to fix a talk page TOC problem caused by headers in a comments subpage. If it's deprecated both categories should be removed from Template:Maths rating which is inserting them, and Category:Mathematics articles with comments should probably also be deleted. Otherwise the deleted category should be reinstated, perhaps via deletion review.-- JohnBlackburne words deeds 18:22, 29 May 2011 (UTC)
According to this edit, Berkeley wasn't criticizing discarded error terms in his famous criticism of the calculus. A quick check at the French and other wikis reveals that they have not yet caught up with this novel insight. Seriously, we are going to be the laughingstock of the whole of internet if we let him get away with this. Tkuvho ( talk) 14:08, 29 May 2011 (UTC)
One of the finalist images at the current Picture of the Year contest is one of the Buddhabrot: File:Buddhabrot-W1000000-B100000-L20000-2000.jpg. A similar image File:Buddhabrot-deep.jpg was formerly a featured picture but was delisted due to low resolution. The English WP is not currently using the current candidate; the article already has a number of of good images. One concern I have with images such as these is that while they make pretty pictures, they may be of questionable mathematical significance and it is difficult to verify correctness. Also, it may be worthwhile to take a critical look at the article itself since it may be getting more attention in the immediate future.-- RDBury ( talk) 14:23, 30 May 2011 (UTC)
In case you missed the link in the section above, there is a straw poll at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mathematics/Straw poll regarding lists of mathematics articles which is scheduled to end during June 2. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 01:35, 26 May 2011 (UTC)
The straw poll at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mathematics/Straw poll regarding lists of mathematics articles has closed with a consensus to move the lists of mathematics articles to project space. I have implemented this consensus, and I have temporarily retargeted all redirects from mainspace to the new page locations in project space; these cross-namespace redirects will eventually be deleted, unless the project opts to set up some non-maintenance lists at the original article titles. In retrospect, although this idea was not raised before, I don't think anyone would object to these being in Portal space either, which might be the most natural fit if you want people to be browsing them. Cheers! bd2412 T 02:01, 3 June 2011 (UTC)
Is the move to project space the reason why Jitse's bot has not done the most recent update of the list of new articles at Wikipedia:WikiProject_Mathematics/Current_activity? "bd2412", have you communicated with Jitse Niesen about this? If not, then do so. Fast. Michael Hardy ( talk) 02:54, 3 June 2011 (UTC)
Arithmetic surface is a new article that could use some work. I've put a "no intro" tag on it. The only category it's in is Category:Arithmetic; probably at least one other should be there. Michael Hardy ( talk) 02:00, 31 May 2011 (UTC)
Editor Stochastikon-bernoulli ( talk · contribs) has recently created the following series of new articles:
(there may be more), all of which have few or no sources outside of the works of one Prof. Elart von Collani, and all of which contain links to the web site of Prof. Collani's company Stochastikon. The coincidence of user name and company name suggests at least a conflict of interest; there may be concerns about the notability of some of these topics or the narrowness of the sources; and this may be an attempt to promote Prof. Collani, his books and his company via Wikipedia articles. I have placed a note about these concerns on the editor's talk page. Any thoughts ? Gandalf61 ( talk) 08:26, 3 June 2011 (UTC)
The Logarithm article was recently promoted to Featured Article so congratulations to the folks that made that happen. It is our first FA in two years, a long time considering we once averaged an FA every 2 months.-- RDBury ( talk) 10:02, 3 June 2011 (UTC)
I've created a new article titled Integral of the secant function, mentioning that
As usual, further work should include at least these two things:
Michael Hardy ( talk) 02:11, 6 June 2011 (UTC)
I'd like to get a second or third opinion on whether it would be worthwhile to add links to Khan Academy to relevant articles. It's a non-profit which produces short educational videos delivered through YouTube. Many of them are math related, usually high school or middle school levels. I think Introduction to Functions makes a good example. The style is informal, some might say extemporaneous, but they might provide an answer for those who complain that you can't actually learn a subject from a WP article. I checked WP:ELNO and I think it meets the criteria, but some confirmation would be nice. A couple of articles (e.g. Integral) have already been done. If it's is deemed worthy then the next step would be to create a template for the site.-- RDBury ( talk) 09:42, 5 June 2011 (UTC)
Could someone perhaps have a look at this article? It looks fine, just that it cites a huge amount of publications from what seems to be the article creator. Perhaps justified, perhaps a bit of self-promotion, I don't know enough about this to judge. -- Crusio ( talk) 14:34, 6 June 2011 (UTC)
In Ellipse#Circumference, an anon has changed the formula for the circumference of an ellipse from to . Since there is no edit summary and since the old formula has been there for at least two years, I reverted the change. Can someone who knows make sure this is right? Thanks. Duoduoduo ( talk) 14:26, 9 June 2011 (UTC)
It seems to me that these cannot pertain to an equalizer. Is it just me? — Kallikanzarid talk 19:54, 9 June 2011 (UTC)
Four new articles, Circle packing in an isosceles right triangle, Circle packing in an equilateral triangle, Square packing in a square, Circle packing in a circle, basically lists of optimal packings of geometrical shapes, were recently created. My feeling is that these lists were borderline WP:IINFO when they were in Packing problem, the article from which they were taken. So creating separate articles for them raises notability issues as well as opening the door for articles on similar dubious subjects. Any thoughts? (I'm adding Notability tags for now.)-- RDBury ( talk) 10:16, 2 June 2011 (UTC)
There is a new discussion about notability of Boubaker polynomials, the article were deleted here and at many other projects due to lack of notability. I hope someone could help me about this. I'm not sure how should I evaluate the notability of this article and what notability criteria should be used for such articles. the page currently exist at Turkish, Chinese and Arabic Wikipedia and some users trying to create/restore it on other projects too. please take a look at sources at Wikiversity and Turkish Wikipedia, apparently there are more pages on the web referring to "Boubaker polynomials" than back in 2009. in short, I want to know does Boubaker polynomials meets English Wikipedia policy or not? ■ MMXX talk 18:18, 4 June 2011 (UTC)
After instructions message from ■ MMXX to ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/مستخدم:Abanima: [86]
-- Balakyo ( talk) 20:40, 6 June 2011 (UTC)
We need to stay focussed on whether the topic is notable. It doesn't matter what country a contribution comes from. People of any nationality are welcome to contribute to this wiki as long as they respect the policies here. Jowa fan ( talk) 04:07, 7 June 2011 (UTC)
While doing some miscellaneous edits on Matsumoto's theorem (group theory), I came across the term natural map, and linked to it, and found it to be a red link. So I redirected it to natural mapping, and then looked at that, and found that "The real function of natural mappings is to reduce the need for any information from a user’s memory to perform a task. This term is widely used in the areas of human-computer interaction (HCI) and interactive design.[1]". So I left the redirect intact but directed the link from "natural map" within the article to natural transformation.
So some questions arise: Should we move "natural mapping" to "natural mapping (somethingology)" and redirect "natural mapping" to something else, or create some new disambiguation page, or what? And what should I have linked to? Michael Hardy ( talk) 04:53, 11 June 2011 (UTC)
Update: I've made natural mapping into a disambiguation page after moving natural mapping to natural mapping (interface design). I fixed the links to natural mapping so that they point to the latter article. Nothing (in the article space) except redirects now links to natural mapping. Michael Hardy ( talk) 01:58, 12 June 2011 (UTC)
Numerical Analysis (book) is about the book by Burden and Faires. It's a complete orphan: no other articles link to it.
Now it is nominated for deletion. Opinions? Michael Hardy ( talk) 05:02, 11 June 2011 (UTC)
On a tangent to the recognized content section above, which focuses on Featured Articles, I was wondering if members of this project had considered the potential for Featured Lists? At the moment there are three FLs under this project's banner, but all of them are people and/or event oriented. To my knowledge, there are no Featured Lists that focus on mathematics. Looking through Category:List-Class mathematics articles, I believe that there is the potential for some fantastic ones that do focus on the subject itself. I also feel that some topics actually lend themselves better to a list format than an article one. For instance, a merger of Prime knot and List of prime knots (renamed Prime knots) might improve our overall coverage of the subject, as well as setting the ground work for a future push towards featured status.
Now that Today's Featured List is up and running, there would also be the potential to get a maths list on the main page, exposing the work to the millions that visit the page every day. As someone heavily involved with TFL, I can say with certainty that a list based on a mathematical concept would be looked upon very favourably there.
It's undeniable that Featured Lists do place a degree of emphasis on presentation. The main thing to worry about is writing a well-sourced lead that introduces the topic. Beyond that, I would be very happy to take responsibility for all the minutiae of reference/table/image formatting. I wouldn't be seeking a co-nomination for the work: I'm simply determined to play my part in diversifying our selection of FLs. Feel free to drop me a note on my talk page if you might be interested in taking up the offer.
I hope to see some of you at WP:FLC in the future. Warm regards, — W F C— 15:22, 14 June 2011 (UTC)
Addressing a more important point than what I addressed above: Lists within the scope of this particular WikiProject are among the best on Wikipedia, or for that matter within all of history. (Yeah—I know—you're going to say that's a hyperbolic exaggeration. But really. Wikipedia is truly unprecedented, and I don't think there's actually any exaggeration in this instance. 'nother words, I agree with the original sentiment here. Michael Hardy ( talk) 03:31, 17 June 2011 (UTC)
Hey there! I'm from WP Elements, and we want to start using Bplus-class for our articles, but without any idea how to introduce it. I noticed you use it, so could you help us to do it? Help is surely appreciated-- R8R Gtrs ( talk) 09:36, 16 June 2011 (UTC)
The Monty Hall problem article, one of our longest standing featured articles, has been delisted. From what I gather this was due to long-standing and apparently unresolvable editing disputes, see Wikipedia:Featured article review/Monty Hall problem/archive3 for the full discussion. I'm also a bit surprised that until now this hasn't appeared either here or on the article alerts page. (Correct me if I'm wrong, though I do try to keep an eye on both.) Any ideas on getting the article relisted?-- RDBury ( talk) 20:00, 16 June 2011 (UTC)
Currently, Equivalent norms redirects to norm (mathematics), which doesn't describe norm equivalence. Is there a better article for it to redirect to? — Kallikanzarid talk 23:00, 16 June 2011 (UTC)
The file File:Sine Cos Proofs.pdf has recently come up at WP:FFD. There may well not be a place for this file on WP; but it does seem rather a more useful self-contained take-away than the section of our current omnibus article Proofs_of_trigonometric_identities#Angle_sum_identities, which there might be a case for breaking into smaller self-contained chunks. Jheald ( talk) 21:57, 8 June 2011 (UTC)
Pickands–Balkema–de Haan theorem is a complete orphan: No other articles link to it. Work on it! Michael Hardy ( talk) 03:27, 17 June 2011 (UTC)
I found constructive ordinal to be a red link, so I've redirected it to ordinal notation and labeled it a "redirect with possibilities". Should we have an article with this title? Michael Hardy ( talk) 04:47, 19 June 2011 (UTC)
There is a nothingness and the empty set discussion at the Nothingness article. That article can use a lot of improvement as to both content and sources. PPdd ( talk) 15:01, 9 June 2011 (UTC)
LivingBot is adding a number of dubious tags to some article talk pages, such as this [88]. Does anyone know about this? I'm inclined to revert... Jakob.scholbach ( talk) 19:33, 20 June 2011 (UTC)
This kind of spam seems to have finally reached the level where Amazon can no longer ignore it. [89] So hopefully we will soon see an end of this nonsense. Hans Adler 08:41, 21 June 2011 (UTC)
I was prompted by some recent off-wiki email (asking me for advice on getting started with Wikipedia editing) to write an essay on Wikipedia editing for research scientists. It's in my user space for now but it seems reasonable to move it to Wikipedia essay namespace at some point. Any feedback would be welcome. — David Eppstein ( talk) 17:27, 21 June 2011 (UTC)
The new article Horn angle, is basically a DICDEF with inaccuracies (see the talk page). There is an obsolete term translated as Cornicular angle, or horn-like angle and Heath gives more than 3 pages of material on it (in small print) in his commentary on Euclid Book III Prop. 16. Mathworld also has a "Horn angle" article which has more modern references. I'd like to either change the article to a summary of Heath or change it to a redirect if no one thinks it's worthwhile.-- RDBury ( talk) 14:37, 23 June 2011 (UTC)
There is a new weekly section on the main page called "Today's featured list" and I have nominated List of winners of the Mathcounts competition to have a spot here. There has been some opposition to the nomination and it looks like the list could become a removal candidate very soon unless the quality of the list is improved. If you are interested in maintaining the list's featured status and seeing a summary of it up on the main page, your help in improving the article would be greatly appreciated. Neelix ( talk) 03:37, 25 June 2011 (UTC)
A new article titled Charles Paul Narcisse Moreau, created by user:r.e.b., is one of the more unusual biographical articles, in that identification of the person seems to be a moderately intractable problem, and the intractability itself seems somewhat well-documented. These three people seem to be known to have existed:
The question is: Are all three the same person? Considerable circumstantial evidence that these three are the same has been published.
In the unlikely event that somebody knows something, could they further edit the article accordingly? Michael Hardy ( talk) 23:50, 24 June 2011 (UTC)
The introduction of the article seems to say that the Ricci tensor is symmetric for all pseudo-Riemannian manifolds. In a book I'm reading at the moment, it says that an affine connection ∇ with zero torsion has symmetric Ricci tensor if and only if ∇ is locally equi-affine. Where we call an affine connection locally equi-affine if around each point x of M there is a parallel volume form, i.e. a non-vanishing n-form ω such that ∇ω = 0. Which one is correct, the article or the book? It seems to me that there are some missing hypotheses in the article's statement. — Fly by Night ( talk) 17:04, 25 June 2011 (UTC)
Discussion on the notability guidelines for specialized books, such as math or programming is going on at Wikipedia talk:Notability (books)#Criterion out of context. Some editors maintain that book that have not been covered in-depth in venues for a general audience, such as the New York Times, should be deleted from Wikipedia. However, recent AfD discussion on math and programming books ended up with such books being kept if they pass the less restrictive WP:GNG. I'm aware that every book in the Springer Graduate Texts in Mathematics, for instance, has probably been reviewed in some math journals, so passes GNG, but whether it passes NBOOK is open to interpretation. Please voice your opinion in that discussion. FuFoFuEd ( talk) 01:24, 27 June 2011 (UTC)
I was surprised to come across an article for Discrete Green's theorem. This isn't exactly a deep result; I suspect that it wasn't published much earlier only because noone thought it worthwhile. The "history" section of the article claims that the theorem was introduced in 2007. A MathSciNet search turns up something from 2005 with a reference list suggesting that the same authors published on this subject in 2003. I wouldn't be surprised to find that others independently had the same idea earlier.
My main concern with the article as it stands is that it reads too much like promotion of Finkelstein's work. There's also some potential conflict of interest with User:Amiruchka (who identifies himself as Amir Shachar) editing the page. In particular, it's unusual to have a link to a YouTube video in the lead paragraph. Does anyone know enough about the topic to improve this article? Jowa fan ( talk) 07:45, 27 June 2011 (UTC)
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How do we feel about this edit to vector field? Someone seems to be adding links to the article pentagram map to any article that is even vaguely connected with it (including some high profile articles like Non-Euclidean geometry, Projective plane, Golden ratio). A Google scholar search for "Pentagram map" (33 hits with the highest citation count being just 17) indicates that while there are some people who study this concept, it certainly isn't significant enough to be spammed across so many basic mathematics articles. Do we revert these changes? Sławomir Biały ( talk) 12:58, 29 June 2011 (UTC)
David, with respect, WP:BRD might apply eventually. But this was hardly an endless or unproductive discussion, as it has been open a matter of mere hours. To expect it to come to fruition without an opportunity for interested parties to respond (we are coming up on July 4th weekend) is, I think, preemptive. Best wishes. 7&6=thirteen ( ☎) 16:20, 29 June 2011 (UTC)
Hi everyone. I am the person who wrote most of the pentagram map wiki page, and I thought it might help if I made some remarks about it. The pentagram map is certainly a small subject inside mathematics. It is a topic that sits inside the intersection of dynamical systems and projective geometry. I would say that maybe 6 authors total have written articles on this topic, though the interest in the topic seems to be increasing. Perhaps twice that many people will be interested within a year. The reason I edited the wiki page now is that the few people working on the subject (myself included) felt that it would be nice to have an accurate and up-to-date article that grad students and researchers in nearby areas could benefit from. I believe that what happened was that 7&6=thirteen (who was quite helpful to me and quite supportive of my foray into wiki editing) liked my effort and thought that the page should be better tied into wikipedia as a whole. I definitely like his suggestions and ideas, though it looks like he made some links that a mathematician would probably not make.
It is hard to say exactly which links should be made. One algorithm might be to follow something like the AMS 2010 math subject classification and choose articles in closely allied areas. Certainly, there is no need to have links to it either from very fundamental pages or from very high-profile pages, and those should probably be erased. I suppose that it might be reasonable to have links to it from projective geometry and integrable systems, but if and only if those pages have links to other pages having the same specificity. Likewise, it seems plausible to have links from theorems about configurations in projective geometry, like Pascal's theorem, which involve both polygons and projective geometry. It might take me, or the others working on this small topic, or other mathematicians, some time and effort to figure out exactly which links should be made but I hope that over the months we can occasionally put in things that are both useful and unobtrusive.
One reply I'd like to make about the comments above is that it is not fair to compare the wiki article to the original article I wrote, calling the former a hyped up mess. The wiki article is much more dense because it summarizes 19 years of development beyond the original article. Nothing there is supposed to be hype, just a summary of all results currently on the topic. The original article was quite simple and straightforward because I didn't have much to say. Now that I and others have thought about the thing for a long time, there is much more to say and the picture is more intricate. I suppose that this could be said of any subject of math that evolves over time.
I'd like to apologize to people for my part in causing this controversy. I gave the page a complete overhaul without pausing to get critiques from more experienced wiki writers. That caused a number of other editors to offer both criticism and help and the thing seems to have gotten a bit out of control. I think that the pentagram map is a small but beautiful piece of mathematics and I'd like to see it get exactly its proper weight inside wikipedia. RichardEvanSchwartz ( talk) 01:01, 30 June 2011 (UTC)
I started the article free boundary problem and had a volunteer editor look over it. He suggested that I ask here for some more targeted feedback from the experts. I think I've included enough content that it should not be regarded as a stub. Also, it's linked to from other articles ( Stefan problem, Obstacle problem) so as to avoid orphanhood.
Any suggestions on the content or organization would be appreciated; I think it could use some of the categorization links and so forth. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Compsonheir ( talk • contribs) 16:41, 30 June 2011 (UTC)
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