I've been being WP:BOLD with the subcategories of Category:Recreational mathematics. In particular I've emptied its rather ill-defined subcategory Category:Mathematical recreations and puzzles; a lot of its articles have found much better homes, but those that really did want to be somewhere under both Category:Recreational mathematics and Category:Puzzles I've put in one of a few joint subcategories such as Category:Mechanical puzzles. (Putting "puzzles" as a subcat of "recreational mathematics", as suggested on one talk page, isn't really an option: there are a lot of puzzles there that really aren't mathematical.)
While I was at it I also emptied Category:Puzzle games, which had an identity crisis as some people thought it was Category:Puzzle computer and video games while others couldn't tell it from Category:Puzzles.
Anyway, I expect I've offended innumerable people one way or another. If I've put your favourite article somewhere you don't think it belongs, please don't hesitate to move it (hopefully not into the categories I've carefully emptied). If you dislike the entire new categorization, please don't hesitate to argue with me about it. Though I can't imagine I've made things worse, since everything was categorized more or less at random to begin with. — Blotwell 14:35, 1 March 2006 (UTC)
Category:Mathematicians by religion has a single subcategory, Category:Jewish mathematicians. I would think that being Jewish does not necessarily mean being religious. And do we actually need to categorize mathematicians on whether they were relegious, and if yes, what relegion they were practicing? Oleg Alexandrov ( talk) 23:48, 1 March 2006 (UTC)
I note that Category:Christians in science is applied both to Blaise Pascal, a Christian writer, and Bernhard Riemann, where as far as I can see it does little. I didn't much like like classifying mathematicians by nationality, when it came in; but it was inevitable with the growth, and the issue of several nationalities has the solution of including all of them. There are problems with all such classifications, and I'm not keen on them. Charles Matthews 09:05, 2 March 2006 (UTC)
Um, I don't actually know french, but I thought only the first "e" in "etale" had an acute accent. So is this edit incorrect? Dmharvey 03:11, 2 March 2006 (UTC)
Étaler being a verb, étalé is the past participle (has been spread out, roughly). My MicroRobert says étale, adjective, can be applied to the sea as 'calm', when the tide is about to turn. We have been using sheaf space for espace étalé, which is not so common in English. HTH. Charles Matthews 09:13, 2 March 2006 (UTC)
After a check in the "Annales de l'Ecole Normale Supérieure", the good term is "espace étalé". -- pom 11:18, 2 March 2006 (UTC)
I think Elementary function (differential algebra) should be moved to Elementary function, currently a disambiguation page with little value. Despite the title, said article covers the concept of elementary functions in the general sense. Fredrik Johansson 23:50, 2 March 2006 (UTC)
Charles Matthews and I are having a discussion about the correct definition of general linear group. It might be useful to have more input. The question is whether it should be defined initially in terms of rings or fields. Talk:General_linear_group A5 22:19, 4 March 2006 (UTC)
I have created a template to tag articles in need of LaTeX formatting. My concern is that it uses the LaTeX logo, which may or may not be a problem. The image was created using LaTeX, and using LaTeX to create images like doesn't seem to be a problem; yet, the image is still a logo with questionable copyright status. I was wondering what everyone else thought? Isopropyl 00:04, 5 March 2006 (UTC)
I don't quite know, and for myself I would be fine with a mix. But if you find it stylistically ugly to have html mixed with LaTeX, then a better solution would be maybe to just convert the html to LaTeX right away, rather than put a "work needed" template on it and hoping that a kind soul would do it some time. There is a huge amount of articles needing serious work, as listed at Wikipedia:Pages needing attention/Mathematics, and I think that labeling an article as needing work because of TeX/HTML inconsistency would be probably not good. Cheers, Oleg Alexandrov ( talk) 23:57, 5 March 2006 (UTC)
I agree with Oleg. Paul August ☎ 01:48, 6 March 2006 (UTC)
I've been playing around with the database dumps and extracted the most links and least linked mathematics articles.
The top linked articles might be useful for directing our efforts as these are probably most visited pages. The orphaned articles and redirects could help with some housekeeping. For example there is Squircle which seems quite dubious, and there are several highly linked redirects which indicate a need for some topics to be expanded. -- Salix alba ( talk) 13:54, 6 March 2006 (UTC)
I knew we'd have to discuss this one eventually. The arguments for the A-endash-B theorem if A and B are two people are (a) it parses uniquely if you don't happen to be able to recognise double-barrelled names, and (b) it is a more professional piece of format. I would, however, always recommend creating [[A-hyphen-B]]'' first, as a precaution, so as to pick up any hungry red links; and only then move to the endash version. Charles Matthews 21:58, 6 March 2006 (UTC)
This article was intended to be comprehensible to all mathematicians.
It was not intended to teach mathematical induction. It was not intended to explain what mathematical induction is, nor how to use it.
It was nominated for deletion by those who did not understand it. To some extent, they did not understand it because it was a stub and failed to explain what audience it was intended for and what its purpose was.
A bunch of (mostly) non-mathematicians looking at the stub form in which the article appeared when it was nominated from deletion saw that
...and voted to delete.
And so I have now expanded the article far beyond the stub stage, including
Therefore, I have invited those who voted to delete before I did these recent de-stubbing edits, to reconsider their votes in light of the current form of the article.
I also ask others here to vote on it by clicking here.
(Nothing like nomination for deletion to get you to work on a long-neglected stub article!) Michael Hardy 23:42, 6 March 2006 (UTC)
My assumption of good faith in User:WAREL (formerly User:DYLAN LENNON) is being sorely tested. I know I'm not the only one who has wasted a lot of time over the past few weeks dealing with him/her. I'm wondering whether anyone else here has any thoughts about how to deal with WAREL, short of deploying an automatic WAREL-edit-reverting-bot. Dmharvey 18:00, 7 March 2006 (UTC)
I left a comment at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents#Disruptive_contributor to_mathematics articles. Oleg Alexandrov ( talk) 05:47, 9 March 2006 (UTC)
This isn't about mathematics, but it is about a mathematician. Anybody who has spare time and is willing to read a long talk page is kindly request to comment on the dispute regarding al-Khwarizmi's etnicity at Talk:al-Khwarizmi. Cheers, — Ruud 14:49, 9 March 2006 (UTC)
Discussion moved to Wikipedia:WikiProject_Mathematics/Wikipedia_1.0 Tompw 16:40, 13 April 2006 (UTC)
Notice: interested contributors may wish to participate in the Wikipedia talk:Scientific peer reviews by working scientists.
-- Ancheta Wis 17:10, 11 March 2006 (UTC)
Gallagher Index is a Political Science article and subject. But currently it could probably do with a mathematicans eye (alongside a few more things as well). Essentially, is there a neater or nicer way of doing the table at the bottom as an example of how the index is generated? Cheers, -- Midnighttonight 08:47, 13 March 2006 (UTC)
On my suggestion, Salix alba made a list of Wikipedia articles which are not categorized, but which are linked from a math article. That list has a bunch of false positives, but also articles which are math and are not categorized. I suggest we start a cat wiki-pet (short for a Categorizing Wikiproject), going through those articles and categorizing them.
I split the list into 47 sections of 50 articles each. One may choose a section to work on, and sign at the bottom when done. I did the first three, and found roughly 3-5 articles out of 50 which may need categorizing. See the list at User:Salix alba/maths/uncategorised maths. Oleg Alexandrov ( talk) 20:14, 14 March 2006 (UTC)
I made the sections be 20 items rather than 50, as those were too big I think. To continue with the note at the top of this section, the person who does most work will get a cat as a wiki-pet (the Wikipet which anybody can touch (and edit)). Oleg Alexandrov ( talk) 05:08, 15 March 2006 (UTC)
Not all is lost, the race is still fully open! By the way, if you look at my bot's changes page, you will see a good harvest of math articles for March 15. Awesome work! Oleg Alexandrov ( talk) 03:37, 16 March 2006 (UTC)
This is the new title of History of pi. Even I think this is pædantry, so it may be over the top. Can we discuss this here, away from the Pi day crowds? Septentrionalis 00:48, 15 March 2006 (UTC)
Hi guys,
I was wondering why I can find so many maths-related articles here that do not reference relevant pages from MathWorld. I'm not sure what their license model is, but I can only assume that this is the reason why it's not popular around here? Please let me know if you think including their articles as references is a desirable thing. I'm watching this page, so do reply here. - Samsara ( talk • contribs) 13:18, 15 March 2006 (UTC)
The delete votes seem to be from non-mathematicians who erroneously think they understand the article. The main idea is this:
Therefore 22/7 > π.
But the article also includes exposition, discussion, and mention of the appearance of this problem in the Putnam Competition.
One "delete"-voter says this is no more significant than, for example, a proof that π > 3.14159 or the like. The fact that 22/7 is a convergent in the continued fraction expansion of π seems to mean nothing to that person or to escape his notice altogether. The fact that this particular integral is so simple and has a neat pattern also seems to escape them. Another shows signs of thinking that all articles on π-related topics should get merged into one article (see list of topics related to pi). Michael Hardy 02:22, 16 March 2006 (UTC)
So what's the deal with linking to the arxiv? This has come up quite a number of times in the last little while. Someone has gone trigger-happy recently on some papers there by Diego Saá, and it took a lot of convincing to get User:WAREL to stop linking there. (Or maybe he/she is still at it.) I would think generally such papers do not qualify for linking from Wikipedia, unless there are very good reasons to the contrary. Somehow a link to the arXiv has an air of respectability that you don't get from your home page on geocities etc, but it's not deserved, and we shouldn't be misleading people into thinking that the arXiv is a reliable resource. Dmharvey 02:16, 17 March 2006 (UTC)
The arXiv is mostly reliable, except for the general mathematics (GM) section which is where the crank articles seem to get listed. I removed all the links to Diego Saá's papers that I could find; they were added by User:Diegueins, who claims to be his son. R.e.b. 05:57, 17 March 2006 (UTC)
If you have this talk page on your watchlist, then you should add your name, field(s) of expertise and interests to the Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Participants page! I know there are some newcomers who haven't yet signed up, and I suspect there are some old-timers as well. linas 22:15, 17 March 2006 (UTC)
I submit the following statistics as an argument to block WAREL for, I suppose, a few days.
User:WAREL was born 17th Feb 2006. He/she has a total of 242 edits since then. The following survey includes 99 of those edits (41%), plus a few of User:DYLAN LENNON's edits (WAREL is a reincarnation of DYLAN LENNON).
Of these 113 edits, there are at least 88 reversions, which is 78% of the edits listed above, or 36% of all edits logged.
He/she was even reverted twice on his/her own talk page.
WAREL has been reverted by at least 17 distinct editors: User:Jitse Niesen, User:JoshuaZ, User:Dmharvey, User:EJ, User:Schildt.a, User:Arthur Rubin, User:ANTI-WAREL, User:Oleg Alexandrov, User:Elroch, User:Mfc, User:Trovatore, User:Zundark, User:Fropuff, User:Fredrik, User:Paul August, User:KSmrq, User:Melchoir, many of whom you will recognise as being respected contributors to mathematics articles.
On the other hand, I note that WAREL has also made several nontrivial, non-reverted contributions to several mathematics articles: Riemann hypothesis, Perfect number, Hilbert's fifth problem, Perfect power, Proof that the sum of the reciprocals of the primes diverges. He/she also makes plenty of edits to articles in which I am not competent, especially relating to Japanese mathematicians and musicians. Therefore, in my opinion, a permanent block is not (yet) warranted, even given the fact that he/she was permanently blocked on the Japanese wikipedia.
Dmharvey 01:23, 20 March 2006 (UTC)
Just noticed at perfect number (at the bottom of the section on odd perfect numbers), this math tag:
<math>2^{4^{n}}</math>
is getting rendered as this html:
<span class="texhtml">2<sup>4</sup><i>n</i></span>
to appear as:
24n
.. which is clearly wrong.
I wasted some time tracking down the paper to check the clearly wrong result before realising that it was the rendering rather than the text that was at fault. I don't know if this is a well known bug, but a brief search on Mediazilla didn't throw up any candidates. I have reported it to the Wikitech-l mailing list mailing list. Hv 16:12, 20 March 2006 (UTC)
There is a discussion on which name is more appropriate at talk:decimal representation. Comments welcome. Oleg Alexandrov ( talk) 03:39, 21 March 2006 (UTC)
There is an editor, User:Jagged 85, whom you may recognize as being interested in the contribution of Indian mathematicians. At transfinite number he has been making edits that attribute the concept to certain ancient Jaina mathematicians/philosophers. The evidence presented is, in my estimation, of the sort that would be accepted only by someone who either has an agenda, or who does not really understand the contemporary concept. I'd appreciate it if some interested folks would drop by and take a look. -- Trovatore 21:46, 22 March 2006 (UTC)
Vladimir Arnold or Arnol'd? Vladimir Drinfel'd or Drinfeld? We should be consistent: and preferably across all references to them in WP. (In both cases we currently use the apostrophe sometimes, but far from consistently.) — Blotwell 06:46, 24 March 2006 (UTC)
I just stumbled across the Springer Online Encyclopaedia of Mathematics it claims to be
and seems to live up to its description. It seems like this could be a useful resouces for many articles. -- Salix alba ( talk) 00:14, 25 March 2006 (UTC)
Would be a good idea to add those entries to Wikipedia:Missing science topics. I will try to look into that these days. Oleg Alexandrov ( talk) 06:45, 25 March 2006 (UTC)
First article I hit was the
normal distribution
[3] I was quite disappointed in that it doesn't have a single graph of it. That said, it'd be worth copying the index into a new article or added to the missing science topics.
Cburnett
06:56, 25 March 2006 (UTC)
Is it worth an article SpringerLink Online Encyclopaedia of Mathematics? -- Salix alba ( talk) 20:21, 25 March 2006 (UTC)
They have a lot of great articles. They're beating us in a lot of areas, and already kick the crap out of mathworld (soon it'll be time to put mathworld out of its misery). However, have you seen their diagrams? Complete garbage! - lethe talk + 17:23, 26 March 2006 (UTC)
I've looked things up in the library's copy one or two times; good to see I don't have to go all the way there now... :-) Anyone know if the online edition differs significantly from the one in print? Fredrik Johansson 00:32, 27 March 2006 (UTC)
none of the springer links seems to work. how does one get to it from the springer website? thanks. Mct mht 07:15, 5 April 2006 (UTC)
Major changes since 0.4.3 are:
Useful links:
Dmharvey 14:10, 26 March 2006 (UTC)
There is some disagreement on what to include in the gradient article. It is argued by some parties that it should be a disambig. Comments welcome at talk:gradient#Should gradient be a disambigutation page? Oleg Alexandrov ( talk) 17:20, 26 March 2006 (UTC)
What programs would people around here recommend for making images to illustrate geometry and linear algebra concepts (and the like)? I'd like to manually input coordinates for vector arrows, line segments, points, etc., choose colors and line styles, and output the result to SVG. Eukleides looks good, but it doesn't do 3D and I need that. Fredrik Johansson 23:45, 26 March 2006 (UTC)
I wonder what people think of a policy of changing unicode html tokens to tex tags in order to ensure compatibility with Internet explorer browsers which apparently have problems with some unicode symbols. I guess compatibility with IE takes precedence over our own MoS guidelines, right? What do you folks say? - lethe talk + 11:53, 28 March 2006 (UTC)
I am the "user [who] went on a crusade to replace all instances of ℵ with ". I was just replacing characters which I could not read with IE in those articles which I was trying to clean up for other reasons. alefsym causes the same problem as "ℵ" in IE. Also there is an element symbol which does not display correctly; and a proves symbol. Although these are rare. Oddly, I think that the actual Hebrew letter aleph works (at least I see the Hebrew letters OK in Google when I switch languages). JRSpriggs 05:24, 29 March 2006 (UTC)
![]() |
This page contains Indic text. Without rendering support, you may see irregular vowel positioning and a lack of conjuncts. More... |
What about the difference between ''x''² x² and ''x''<sup>2</sup> x2? I'd say the latter looks better on my screen. -- Salix alba ( talk) 23:39, 29 March 2006 (UTC)
John Reid moved the article "Ruler-and-compass constructions" to "Compass and straightedge". As the article currently stands, I think there are problems with the new name. I intended to move the article back to its original name, until we can reach a consensus, but I inadvertently left out the hyphens and moved it instead to Ruler and compass constructions. Please share your views on any of this at Talk:Ruler and compass constructions. I will volunteer to make any necessary changes after we arrive at a consensus about what to do. Thanks — Paul August ☎ 17:58, 28 March 2006 (UTC)
Some of us can't agree on how to properly call the article Ruler and compass constructions, with the other option being Compass and straightedge. "Votes" at Talk:Ruler and compass constructions are solicited. :) Oleg Alexandrov ( talk) 21:49, 29 March 2006 (UTC)
Please see Jim Loy's angle trisection page. He shows a few methods using forbidden tools; I call your attention to the so-called tomahawk and to the movable, marked carpenter's square. Is the use of these tools not equivalent to neusis? John Reid 18:33, 31 March 2006 (UTC)
Please! Neusis? Yes? No? John Reid 19:59, 7 April 2006 (UTC)
I've been being WP:BOLD with the subcategories of Category:Recreational mathematics. In particular I've emptied its rather ill-defined subcategory Category:Mathematical recreations and puzzles; a lot of its articles have found much better homes, but those that really did want to be somewhere under both Category:Recreational mathematics and Category:Puzzles I've put in one of a few joint subcategories such as Category:Mechanical puzzles. (Putting "puzzles" as a subcat of "recreational mathematics", as suggested on one talk page, isn't really an option: there are a lot of puzzles there that really aren't mathematical.)
While I was at it I also emptied Category:Puzzle games, which had an identity crisis as some people thought it was Category:Puzzle computer and video games while others couldn't tell it from Category:Puzzles.
Anyway, I expect I've offended innumerable people one way or another. If I've put your favourite article somewhere you don't think it belongs, please don't hesitate to move it (hopefully not into the categories I've carefully emptied). If you dislike the entire new categorization, please don't hesitate to argue with me about it. Though I can't imagine I've made things worse, since everything was categorized more or less at random to begin with. — Blotwell 14:35, 1 March 2006 (UTC)
Category:Mathematicians by religion has a single subcategory, Category:Jewish mathematicians. I would think that being Jewish does not necessarily mean being religious. And do we actually need to categorize mathematicians on whether they were relegious, and if yes, what relegion they were practicing? Oleg Alexandrov ( talk) 23:48, 1 March 2006 (UTC)
I note that Category:Christians in science is applied both to Blaise Pascal, a Christian writer, and Bernhard Riemann, where as far as I can see it does little. I didn't much like like classifying mathematicians by nationality, when it came in; but it was inevitable with the growth, and the issue of several nationalities has the solution of including all of them. There are problems with all such classifications, and I'm not keen on them. Charles Matthews 09:05, 2 March 2006 (UTC)
Um, I don't actually know french, but I thought only the first "e" in "etale" had an acute accent. So is this edit incorrect? Dmharvey 03:11, 2 March 2006 (UTC)
Étaler being a verb, étalé is the past participle (has been spread out, roughly). My MicroRobert says étale, adjective, can be applied to the sea as 'calm', when the tide is about to turn. We have been using sheaf space for espace étalé, which is not so common in English. HTH. Charles Matthews 09:13, 2 March 2006 (UTC)
After a check in the "Annales de l'Ecole Normale Supérieure", the good term is "espace étalé". -- pom 11:18, 2 March 2006 (UTC)
I think Elementary function (differential algebra) should be moved to Elementary function, currently a disambiguation page with little value. Despite the title, said article covers the concept of elementary functions in the general sense. Fredrik Johansson 23:50, 2 March 2006 (UTC)
Charles Matthews and I are having a discussion about the correct definition of general linear group. It might be useful to have more input. The question is whether it should be defined initially in terms of rings or fields. Talk:General_linear_group A5 22:19, 4 March 2006 (UTC)
I have created a template to tag articles in need of LaTeX formatting. My concern is that it uses the LaTeX logo, which may or may not be a problem. The image was created using LaTeX, and using LaTeX to create images like doesn't seem to be a problem; yet, the image is still a logo with questionable copyright status. I was wondering what everyone else thought? Isopropyl 00:04, 5 March 2006 (UTC)
I don't quite know, and for myself I would be fine with a mix. But if you find it stylistically ugly to have html mixed with LaTeX, then a better solution would be maybe to just convert the html to LaTeX right away, rather than put a "work needed" template on it and hoping that a kind soul would do it some time. There is a huge amount of articles needing serious work, as listed at Wikipedia:Pages needing attention/Mathematics, and I think that labeling an article as needing work because of TeX/HTML inconsistency would be probably not good. Cheers, Oleg Alexandrov ( talk) 23:57, 5 March 2006 (UTC)
I agree with Oleg. Paul August ☎ 01:48, 6 March 2006 (UTC)
I've been playing around with the database dumps and extracted the most links and least linked mathematics articles.
The top linked articles might be useful for directing our efforts as these are probably most visited pages. The orphaned articles and redirects could help with some housekeeping. For example there is Squircle which seems quite dubious, and there are several highly linked redirects which indicate a need for some topics to be expanded. -- Salix alba ( talk) 13:54, 6 March 2006 (UTC)
I knew we'd have to discuss this one eventually. The arguments for the A-endash-B theorem if A and B are two people are (a) it parses uniquely if you don't happen to be able to recognise double-barrelled names, and (b) it is a more professional piece of format. I would, however, always recommend creating [[A-hyphen-B]]'' first, as a precaution, so as to pick up any hungry red links; and only then move to the endash version. Charles Matthews 21:58, 6 March 2006 (UTC)
This article was intended to be comprehensible to all mathematicians.
It was not intended to teach mathematical induction. It was not intended to explain what mathematical induction is, nor how to use it.
It was nominated for deletion by those who did not understand it. To some extent, they did not understand it because it was a stub and failed to explain what audience it was intended for and what its purpose was.
A bunch of (mostly) non-mathematicians looking at the stub form in which the article appeared when it was nominated from deletion saw that
...and voted to delete.
And so I have now expanded the article far beyond the stub stage, including
Therefore, I have invited those who voted to delete before I did these recent de-stubbing edits, to reconsider their votes in light of the current form of the article.
I also ask others here to vote on it by clicking here.
(Nothing like nomination for deletion to get you to work on a long-neglected stub article!) Michael Hardy 23:42, 6 March 2006 (UTC)
My assumption of good faith in User:WAREL (formerly User:DYLAN LENNON) is being sorely tested. I know I'm not the only one who has wasted a lot of time over the past few weeks dealing with him/her. I'm wondering whether anyone else here has any thoughts about how to deal with WAREL, short of deploying an automatic WAREL-edit-reverting-bot. Dmharvey 18:00, 7 March 2006 (UTC)
I left a comment at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents#Disruptive_contributor to_mathematics articles. Oleg Alexandrov ( talk) 05:47, 9 March 2006 (UTC)
This isn't about mathematics, but it is about a mathematician. Anybody who has spare time and is willing to read a long talk page is kindly request to comment on the dispute regarding al-Khwarizmi's etnicity at Talk:al-Khwarizmi. Cheers, — Ruud 14:49, 9 March 2006 (UTC)
Discussion moved to Wikipedia:WikiProject_Mathematics/Wikipedia_1.0 Tompw 16:40, 13 April 2006 (UTC)
Notice: interested contributors may wish to participate in the Wikipedia talk:Scientific peer reviews by working scientists.
-- Ancheta Wis 17:10, 11 March 2006 (UTC)
Gallagher Index is a Political Science article and subject. But currently it could probably do with a mathematicans eye (alongside a few more things as well). Essentially, is there a neater or nicer way of doing the table at the bottom as an example of how the index is generated? Cheers, -- Midnighttonight 08:47, 13 March 2006 (UTC)
On my suggestion, Salix alba made a list of Wikipedia articles which are not categorized, but which are linked from a math article. That list has a bunch of false positives, but also articles which are math and are not categorized. I suggest we start a cat wiki-pet (short for a Categorizing Wikiproject), going through those articles and categorizing them.
I split the list into 47 sections of 50 articles each. One may choose a section to work on, and sign at the bottom when done. I did the first three, and found roughly 3-5 articles out of 50 which may need categorizing. See the list at User:Salix alba/maths/uncategorised maths. Oleg Alexandrov ( talk) 20:14, 14 March 2006 (UTC)
I made the sections be 20 items rather than 50, as those were too big I think. To continue with the note at the top of this section, the person who does most work will get a cat as a wiki-pet (the Wikipet which anybody can touch (and edit)). Oleg Alexandrov ( talk) 05:08, 15 March 2006 (UTC)
Not all is lost, the race is still fully open! By the way, if you look at my bot's changes page, you will see a good harvest of math articles for March 15. Awesome work! Oleg Alexandrov ( talk) 03:37, 16 March 2006 (UTC)
This is the new title of History of pi. Even I think this is pædantry, so it may be over the top. Can we discuss this here, away from the Pi day crowds? Septentrionalis 00:48, 15 March 2006 (UTC)
Hi guys,
I was wondering why I can find so many maths-related articles here that do not reference relevant pages from MathWorld. I'm not sure what their license model is, but I can only assume that this is the reason why it's not popular around here? Please let me know if you think including their articles as references is a desirable thing. I'm watching this page, so do reply here. - Samsara ( talk • contribs) 13:18, 15 March 2006 (UTC)
The delete votes seem to be from non-mathematicians who erroneously think they understand the article. The main idea is this:
Therefore 22/7 > π.
But the article also includes exposition, discussion, and mention of the appearance of this problem in the Putnam Competition.
One "delete"-voter says this is no more significant than, for example, a proof that π > 3.14159 or the like. The fact that 22/7 is a convergent in the continued fraction expansion of π seems to mean nothing to that person or to escape his notice altogether. The fact that this particular integral is so simple and has a neat pattern also seems to escape them. Another shows signs of thinking that all articles on π-related topics should get merged into one article (see list of topics related to pi). Michael Hardy 02:22, 16 March 2006 (UTC)
So what's the deal with linking to the arxiv? This has come up quite a number of times in the last little while. Someone has gone trigger-happy recently on some papers there by Diego Saá, and it took a lot of convincing to get User:WAREL to stop linking there. (Or maybe he/she is still at it.) I would think generally such papers do not qualify for linking from Wikipedia, unless there are very good reasons to the contrary. Somehow a link to the arXiv has an air of respectability that you don't get from your home page on geocities etc, but it's not deserved, and we shouldn't be misleading people into thinking that the arXiv is a reliable resource. Dmharvey 02:16, 17 March 2006 (UTC)
The arXiv is mostly reliable, except for the general mathematics (GM) section which is where the crank articles seem to get listed. I removed all the links to Diego Saá's papers that I could find; they were added by User:Diegueins, who claims to be his son. R.e.b. 05:57, 17 March 2006 (UTC)
If you have this talk page on your watchlist, then you should add your name, field(s) of expertise and interests to the Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Participants page! I know there are some newcomers who haven't yet signed up, and I suspect there are some old-timers as well. linas 22:15, 17 March 2006 (UTC)
I submit the following statistics as an argument to block WAREL for, I suppose, a few days.
User:WAREL was born 17th Feb 2006. He/she has a total of 242 edits since then. The following survey includes 99 of those edits (41%), plus a few of User:DYLAN LENNON's edits (WAREL is a reincarnation of DYLAN LENNON).
Of these 113 edits, there are at least 88 reversions, which is 78% of the edits listed above, or 36% of all edits logged.
He/she was even reverted twice on his/her own talk page.
WAREL has been reverted by at least 17 distinct editors: User:Jitse Niesen, User:JoshuaZ, User:Dmharvey, User:EJ, User:Schildt.a, User:Arthur Rubin, User:ANTI-WAREL, User:Oleg Alexandrov, User:Elroch, User:Mfc, User:Trovatore, User:Zundark, User:Fropuff, User:Fredrik, User:Paul August, User:KSmrq, User:Melchoir, many of whom you will recognise as being respected contributors to mathematics articles.
On the other hand, I note that WAREL has also made several nontrivial, non-reverted contributions to several mathematics articles: Riemann hypothesis, Perfect number, Hilbert's fifth problem, Perfect power, Proof that the sum of the reciprocals of the primes diverges. He/she also makes plenty of edits to articles in which I am not competent, especially relating to Japanese mathematicians and musicians. Therefore, in my opinion, a permanent block is not (yet) warranted, even given the fact that he/she was permanently blocked on the Japanese wikipedia.
Dmharvey 01:23, 20 March 2006 (UTC)
Just noticed at perfect number (at the bottom of the section on odd perfect numbers), this math tag:
<math>2^{4^{n}}</math>
is getting rendered as this html:
<span class="texhtml">2<sup>4</sup><i>n</i></span>
to appear as:
24n
.. which is clearly wrong.
I wasted some time tracking down the paper to check the clearly wrong result before realising that it was the rendering rather than the text that was at fault. I don't know if this is a well known bug, but a brief search on Mediazilla didn't throw up any candidates. I have reported it to the Wikitech-l mailing list mailing list. Hv 16:12, 20 March 2006 (UTC)
There is a discussion on which name is more appropriate at talk:decimal representation. Comments welcome. Oleg Alexandrov ( talk) 03:39, 21 March 2006 (UTC)
There is an editor, User:Jagged 85, whom you may recognize as being interested in the contribution of Indian mathematicians. At transfinite number he has been making edits that attribute the concept to certain ancient Jaina mathematicians/philosophers. The evidence presented is, in my estimation, of the sort that would be accepted only by someone who either has an agenda, or who does not really understand the contemporary concept. I'd appreciate it if some interested folks would drop by and take a look. -- Trovatore 21:46, 22 March 2006 (UTC)
Vladimir Arnold or Arnol'd? Vladimir Drinfel'd or Drinfeld? We should be consistent: and preferably across all references to them in WP. (In both cases we currently use the apostrophe sometimes, but far from consistently.) — Blotwell 06:46, 24 March 2006 (UTC)
I just stumbled across the Springer Online Encyclopaedia of Mathematics it claims to be
and seems to live up to its description. It seems like this could be a useful resouces for many articles. -- Salix alba ( talk) 00:14, 25 March 2006 (UTC)
Would be a good idea to add those entries to Wikipedia:Missing science topics. I will try to look into that these days. Oleg Alexandrov ( talk) 06:45, 25 March 2006 (UTC)
First article I hit was the
normal distribution
[3] I was quite disappointed in that it doesn't have a single graph of it. That said, it'd be worth copying the index into a new article or added to the missing science topics.
Cburnett
06:56, 25 March 2006 (UTC)
Is it worth an article SpringerLink Online Encyclopaedia of Mathematics? -- Salix alba ( talk) 20:21, 25 March 2006 (UTC)
They have a lot of great articles. They're beating us in a lot of areas, and already kick the crap out of mathworld (soon it'll be time to put mathworld out of its misery). However, have you seen their diagrams? Complete garbage! - lethe talk + 17:23, 26 March 2006 (UTC)
I've looked things up in the library's copy one or two times; good to see I don't have to go all the way there now... :-) Anyone know if the online edition differs significantly from the one in print? Fredrik Johansson 00:32, 27 March 2006 (UTC)
none of the springer links seems to work. how does one get to it from the springer website? thanks. Mct mht 07:15, 5 April 2006 (UTC)
Major changes since 0.4.3 are:
Useful links:
Dmharvey 14:10, 26 March 2006 (UTC)
There is some disagreement on what to include in the gradient article. It is argued by some parties that it should be a disambig. Comments welcome at talk:gradient#Should gradient be a disambigutation page? Oleg Alexandrov ( talk) 17:20, 26 March 2006 (UTC)
What programs would people around here recommend for making images to illustrate geometry and linear algebra concepts (and the like)? I'd like to manually input coordinates for vector arrows, line segments, points, etc., choose colors and line styles, and output the result to SVG. Eukleides looks good, but it doesn't do 3D and I need that. Fredrik Johansson 23:45, 26 March 2006 (UTC)
I wonder what people think of a policy of changing unicode html tokens to tex tags in order to ensure compatibility with Internet explorer browsers which apparently have problems with some unicode symbols. I guess compatibility with IE takes precedence over our own MoS guidelines, right? What do you folks say? - lethe talk + 11:53, 28 March 2006 (UTC)
I am the "user [who] went on a crusade to replace all instances of ℵ with ". I was just replacing characters which I could not read with IE in those articles which I was trying to clean up for other reasons. alefsym causes the same problem as "ℵ" in IE. Also there is an element symbol which does not display correctly; and a proves symbol. Although these are rare. Oddly, I think that the actual Hebrew letter aleph works (at least I see the Hebrew letters OK in Google when I switch languages). JRSpriggs 05:24, 29 March 2006 (UTC)
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This page contains Indic text. Without rendering support, you may see irregular vowel positioning and a lack of conjuncts. More... |
What about the difference between ''x''² x² and ''x''<sup>2</sup> x2? I'd say the latter looks better on my screen. -- Salix alba ( talk) 23:39, 29 March 2006 (UTC)
John Reid moved the article "Ruler-and-compass constructions" to "Compass and straightedge". As the article currently stands, I think there are problems with the new name. I intended to move the article back to its original name, until we can reach a consensus, but I inadvertently left out the hyphens and moved it instead to Ruler and compass constructions. Please share your views on any of this at Talk:Ruler and compass constructions. I will volunteer to make any necessary changes after we arrive at a consensus about what to do. Thanks — Paul August ☎ 17:58, 28 March 2006 (UTC)
Some of us can't agree on how to properly call the article Ruler and compass constructions, with the other option being Compass and straightedge. "Votes" at Talk:Ruler and compass constructions are solicited. :) Oleg Alexandrov ( talk) 21:49, 29 March 2006 (UTC)
Please see Jim Loy's angle trisection page. He shows a few methods using forbidden tools; I call your attention to the so-called tomahawk and to the movable, marked carpenter's square. Is the use of these tools not equivalent to neusis? John Reid 18:33, 31 March 2006 (UTC)
Please! Neusis? Yes? No? John Reid 19:59, 7 April 2006 (UTC)