There is a discussion at Talk:Convolution about whether it is appropriate to mention in the "Definition" section of the Convolution article the designation of the unicode glyph for the asterisk. To me, this seems to be utterly irrelevant in the article. Anyway, I've been accused of edit-warring there (on what seem to be quite spurious grounds). I'd like to ask for other opinions. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 19:45, 22 June 2010 (UTC)
Some terminological confusion that may be beyond Wikipedia's scope to sort out, but let's see. (Note: Diophantus lived in the 3rd century, Brahmagupta in the 7th, Fibonacci in the 12th/13th, and Lagrange in the 18th.) We have an article at Brahmagupta–Fibonacci identity, which gives the identity
(that shows, among other things, that the set of sums-of-squares is closed under multiplication). Now it so happens that although "Fibonacci's identity" elsewhere does seem to refer to this identity, Brahmagupta knew and used something more general:
The previous identity is the special case N=-1. It seems a "waste" to use the name Brahmagupta's identity for the special case. (And in fact the special case may not even be in his work; I haven't checked.) Moreover, the special case — sum of squares — was also known to Diophantus! So why is Fibonacci's name associated with it? (It is hard to suggest that someone knew one of these identities but not the proof; since the proof is trivial.) Should we rename some articles here, or is it the kind of thing we cannot do? Shreevatsa ( talk) 00:29, 26 June 2010 (UTC)
I removed a PROD tag for this article since the subject does seem to be notable. However the article is unreferenced and it appears that it will need a complete rewrite due to accuracy issues. It would be nice if someone knowledgeable about data compression could bring it up to at least stub quality before it goes to AfD.-- RDBury ( talk) 19:35, 24 June 2010 (UTC)
I've put in a request for a peer review for the article Number; I feel that as it is considered a vital article in the area of mathematics it should be improved to at least the standard of a good article. If someone would be willing to put the time into creating a peer review for the article I would be very grateful, and would act to improve any suggestions. The peer review page can be found here.
Thanks, Qwam ( talk) 13:34, 26 June 2010 (UTC)
I don't know if someone else noticed this, but since r59550 we can use the commands \pagecolor and \definecolor in order to change the background color of mathematical formulas. This is useful for example when a formula has to be over a colored background. Ex.:
{| class=wikitable
|-
! Wikicode
! Rendering
|-
| <nowiki><span style="background-color:aqua;"><math>\definecolor{aqua}{RGB}{0,255,255}\pagecolor{aqua}123456789</math></span></nowiki>
| <span style="background-color:aqua;"><math>\definecolor{aqua}{RGB}{0,255,255}\pagecolor{aqua}123456789</math></span>
|-
| <nowiki><math>\definecolor{aqua}{RGB}{0,255,255}\pagecolor{aqua}123456789</math></span></nowiki>
| <math>\definecolor{aqua}{RGB}{0,255,255}\pagecolor{aqua}123456789</math></span>
|-
| <nowiki><math>123456789</math></nowiki>
| <math>123456789</math>
|}
I thought it's worth to note here, in case somebody needs this, since it seems not to be documented anywhere...
Best regards Helder ( talk) 23:58, 27 June 2010 (UTC)
Can we have some standardization on how to represent the adjoint of an operator (matrix)? I see and a lot (for example in the normal matrix, hermitian matrix, self-adjoint operator, Bra-ket notation). Recently I have cleaned up positive-definite matrix to make the notation consistent. As a physicist, I'm more used to the dagger, but it seems to me that the asterisk is much more common in maths. Should then the standard be context-dependent? Tercer ( talk) 01:00, 29 June 2010 (UTC)
There is a strange discussion at Talk:Curl (mathematics) including the claim that a "seven-dimensional cross product" would permit the definition of the curl of a vector field on . More eyes would be helpful there. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 16:54, 1 July 2010 (UTC)
Hi. I have made image of topological model of Mandelbrot set. I have looked for pages about topological models and found nothing. Do you think that it could be useful somewhere ? -- Adam majewski ( talk) 19:36, 30 June 2010 (UTC)
Thx. Probably topologicla here means that it shows a structure of Mandelbrot set and it is more related with model theory. -- Adam majewski ( talk) 14:07, 1 July 2010 (UTC)
Would math related software such as statistical analysis and certain forms of math computations qualify fall under the math wikiproject? Specifically, I'm referring to F(g) Scholar which was once heavily used in math/science academia. Smallman12q ( talk) 20:25, 1 July 2010 (UTC)
Is anyone familiar with the terminology used in the article constructible set (topology)? It claims that a constructible set is one in the algebra generated by the open sets. It's certainly possible that this name is used somewhere but I have never come across it. There's a reference to an arXiv paper, and an external link to a PostScript doc with no indication that it's been published. -- Trovatore ( talk) 18:48, 19 June 2010 (UTC)
{{
cite book}}
: Unknown parameter |location1=
ignored (
help); Unknown parameter |location2=
ignored (
help); Unknown parameter |publisher1=
ignored (
help); Unknown parameter |publisher2=
ignored (
help)The new article Svante Janson will be appearing as on the Wikidepia frontpage as a Did you know? fact. Improvements would be especially useful in the next few days, before hundreds of readers view the page (in its 12 hours of fame). Thanks, Kiefer.Wolfowitz ( talk) 01:05, 4 July 2010 (UTC)
The article non-standard calculus has recently been merged to infinitesimal calculus. There was an old thread discussing this, where the proposal didn't seem to get much support, but someone has gone ahead with the merger anyway. Comments are welcome. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 13:20, 2 July 2010 (UTC)
General comment: In my experience, the term the infinitesimal calculus just means the integral and differential calculus considered together, and has nothing particularly to do with the foundational approach. I think infinitesimal calculus should simply redirect to calculus. That's a comment about the title and where it should point. As to the content, I haven't actually looked. OK, now I have. I think that should be merged into calculus as well, or possibly moved to another title (such as, I don't know, Newtonian and Leibnizian development of the calculus), with the redirect left behind at infinitesimal calculus redirected to calculus. -- Trovatore ( talk) 10:52, 4 July 2010 (UTC)
There is an RfC here on whether it's appropriate to label an identity with the label "Pythagorean theorem". More interested participants are welcome !-- JohnBlackburne words deeds 21:00, 4 July 2010 (UTC)
Relative difference, Percentage change, Percent difference, Fold change are very simple and overlap greatly and do not link up to anything really. Could someone fix this? (I though I had posted this, but searching nothing came up, so I probably never did, If I am repeating myself, I am terribly sorry) Thanks -- Squidonius ( talk) 20:46, 5 July 2010 (UTC)
Hi all,
On a whim, I checked the article assessments for 95 geometers listed in The Penguin Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Geometry by David Wells. Of those, roughly half (46/95) had no assessment by the Math WikiProject. That seems like a surprisingly high fraction of the articles that fall within our scope, although the biographies of geometers may not be representative. I've since added assessments for those articles.
It's not the most pressing issue, of course. But the assessments help us keep track of how we're doing; if I recall correctly, the system was invented by people from this WikiProject. So the next time you're reading or working on a math article, please take a moment to check whether your article has an assessment from WikiProject Math. Thanks muchly! :) Willow ( talk) 23:27, 4 July 2010 (UTC)
PS. The article on Victor Thébault could seriously use some help - any takers? Theodor Reye is missing altogether; I'll work on that one. Willow ( talk) 23:33, 4 July 2010 (UTC)
For biographies, the field is always mathematician, right? For people who don't know about assessments, the idea is to add a line like
{{maths rating|class=Start|priority=Mid|field=mathematician}}
to beginning of the article's Talk page. More details can be found here; thanks! Willow ( talk) 14:35, 5 July 2010 (UTC)
We can be even more heartened because there were only 23 stubs (~24%), albeit some well-known ones such as Möbius, Brianchon, and Feuerbach. Overall, the distribution of qualities was 5/2/10/12/43/23 for FA/GA/B(+)/C/Start/Stub; the Start class seems to be dominant, with almost half of the articles. Willow ( talk) 14:35, 5 July 2010 (UTC)
Neat! Thank you for making that wonderful tool. :) It seems wise and efficient to break the problem into smaller bits. I'll do my share, starting with Dinostratus. Willow ( talk) 13:17, 6 July 2010 (UTC)
To the article titled Young's lattice, I've added a section on the surprising (quite surprising to me, and I'm not the only one!) dihedral symmetry of certain subsets of the lattice, somewhat recently discovered by Ruedi Suter. The bilateral symmetry is obvious, so the surprising part is the rotational symmetry.
Improve the new section if you can. Michael Hardy ( talk) 05:12, 7 July 2010 (UTC)
[First posted here, later here.]
I was wondering if we should aim to use a similar font as the LaTeX output in images that reproduce formulas from the body of the article. For instance, most of the images in HSL and HSV#Formal_derivation that use a Sans Serif font. It's kind of hard to identify in the images what is a formula, and what are merely labels. Using a Latin font might help to distinguish between the two types. Thanks. SharkD Talk 01:40, 30 June 2010 (UTC)
Well it is obviously up to the author of the image, what kind of fonts are used for it and it is up to the article's authors which image they use in the article. We definitely should not have any guideline mandating particular fonts for images. The authors of the concerned article need agree on the exact images they want to use and consider carefully whether rather marginal changes are really worth a lengthy and probably bitter argument.-- Kmhkmh ( talk) 08:45, 1 July 2010 (UTC)
I suspect this is a bad idea for many reasons, but one of them is that the choice of fonts that work in scalable (SVG) images on Wikimedia is...idiosyncratic. For instance, Times and Helvetica are bad choices (they don't scale correctly) and instead one must replace them with Liberation Serif or Liberation Sans respectively. — David Eppstein ( talk) 04:45, 8 July 2010 (UTC)
I just had a look at the preview examples in http://www.mathjax.org/ — it looks much better than what we do for math markup here. Especially nice is the way the math scales when the browser text font size increases or decreases. We should use into the possibility of using this or similar technology in place of our current bad system of math typography. — David Eppstein ( talk) 17:02, 5 July 2010 (UTC)
Matching preclusion has been prodded. Worth keeping or not? Michael Hardy ( talk) 02:04, 11 July 2010 (UTC)
Dirac delta function has been nominated for GA, in case anyone is interested in reviewing it. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 02:08, 11 July 2010 (UTC)
Someone moved inequality to inequality (mathematics) and then made the former into a disambiguation page. A result is that a HUGE number of pages now linking to inequality should link to inequality (mathematics). So there's yet another chore. (Are there bots that can be used to facilitate this?) Michael Hardy ( talk) 02:14, 11 July 2010 (UTC)
Reid W. Barton is another article that looks more like a vanity page or a glorified CV (here is the previous case). I am wondering how many more are there! Arcfrk ( talk) 21:03, 29 June 2010 (UTC)
To clarify: "vanity page" doesn't necessarily imply the subject himself wrote it (for example, pages devoted to one's children/parents/beau/spouse may be so categorized). Dcmq, what are the grounds for dispute? It clearly doesn't pass WP:PROF. I just don't have enough time to devote to AfD, or I would have sent it there already. Arcfrk ( talk) 06:25, 30 June 2010 (UTC)
There are a few other cases (IMO or putnam guys) that should be looked at in this context as well: Christian Reiher, Iurie Boreico, Ciprian Manolescu. In addition we need to consider red links in the articles about Putnam and IMO, because it's fair to assume that red links in those articles are likely to lead to the creation of biography articles.-- Kmhkmh ( talk) 13:18, 1 July 2010 (UTC)
At Proof (informal), editor Vaughan Pratt ( talk · contribs) has written an essay-style article in which he insists that the dictionary definition "A proof is sufficient evidence for the truth of a proposition" applies equally to formal proofs in mathematics and logic as it does to the concept of proof in other fields such as law, rhetoric and philosophy. He believes that formal proof is not essentially different from informal proof , but is only a "higher standard of sufficiency", and that "the notion of "sufficient evidence" does not distinguish between formal and informal argument".
An attempt by myself to clean up the article and restrict its scope to fields in which an evidence-based concept of proof applies were reverted by Pratt, with the talk page comment "so that others would have a chance to judge the original and draw their own conclusions". It would therefore be good to see more contributions to the discussion at Talk:Proof (informal).
To provide context for the talk page discussion, you may need to know that editor Vaughan Pratt identifies himself as Professor Vaughan Pratt of Stanford University. Gandalf61 ( talk) 08:28, 8 July 2010 (UTC)
I'm going though this section to remove obsolete and redundant entries. I'm wondering though if this section is needed at all anymore. It's been nearly a year since the last new entry and most issues can be flagged with a cleanup tag and sorted automatically. Most of the listed issues have long since been resolved so it's apparent that section is not being maintained as it should be. Unless someone can find an issue that can't be adequately handled with a clean up tag and/or a note on the talk page I propose removing the section for simplicity's sake.-- RDBury ( talk) 14:40, 12 July 2010 (UTC)
Looking at the sad state of unimodal function, and noting that the main use, unimodal distribution, is left mostly unexplained, I made an inexperienced attempt at writing unimodal in a way which I hope will be useful to some extent even to casual readers, and redirected unimodal function and unimodal distribution. Feel free to restructure it again. -- Muhandes ( talk) 18:18, 12 July 2010 (UTC)
The new article titled Relation of the Riemann zeta function to pi is at best a mess in its present form. Fix it if possible; prod it if you know it can't be fixed.
The topic seems potentially worthy of an article, but not this article. Michael Hardy ( talk) 03:03, 13 July 2010 (UTC)
I can go to an article and know that this is the type of mathematics that I want to learn and use. But I'm not trained in it. No problem; all the formulas are right there along with any proofs. But I'm not educated in the symbols, variables, and subformulas used, either, and they are never linked to! This just removes the ability to learn mathematics on Wikipedia altogether. I'm sorry, but there's no way to start at the bottom and work my way up to what I want to learn when the things in between are not linked to! "Go to school and learn everything, you loser." is not a reasonable solution. This isn't a problem with normal science, history, or psychology articles, for example, but it constantly is with mathematics articles. I'm not simply too dumb as I have learned and even (independently; not originally, I strongly assume) discovered some not majorly complex mathematical formulas on my own with basic knowledge, so if you're indeed linking to all esoteric (from a layman's perspective; something articles in general seem to tend to do on Wikipedia) terms being used then it's severely non-obvious how you are doing so. I just wish that it wasn't assumed that anyone looking at these articles already knew all of the mathematics used within them, ironically meaning that you could only learn something if you probably already happened to know it anyway, unless of course you're simply a professional looking at an extremely complex article, with such a person not meant to ever be Wikipedia's target audience, it appears elsewhere. 75.4.141.69 ( talk) 04:06, 10 July 2010 (UTC)
The discussion page for each article is open for questions. If a word or symbol is not understood it should be linked to an explanation. Bo Jacoby ( talk) 12:25, 10 July 2010 (UTC).
Gee, who would have guessed?! Say listen folks, whatever you do, don't listen attentively, or otherwise open the mind to the criticism of someone who just wants to use WP to learn math. My goodness it's not like the thing exists for them. Just go ahead and explain to him that the experts have ways of doing things around here and know best. Don't set up a FAQ. WP:MATH deserves to hear this once a month. Greg Bard ( talk) 20:39, 10 July 2010 (UTC)
There are many mathematical articles here that need improvement, no doubt. But I'm kind of sceptical about the chances of improving them simply by flaming the people with the competence to do so. Charles Matthews ( talk) 21:32, 10 July 2010 (UTC)
There are two ways of writing a mathematics article.
(1) We can strike a healthy balance between equations and plain English, with a view to making sure that all likely questions will be answered in the article. Or,
(2) We can make a work of art using the most cryptic 'pure maths speak' of the day, in order to ensure that the article is so incomprehensible that any casual reader will have to ask.
The benefit of the latter method is that it keeps the wiki oracles in business. David Tombe ( talk) 22:58, 10 July 2010 (UTC)
Willow, It's a good idea. But ultimately we should be aiming for a situation in which no questions need to be asked. I only stated option (2) above tongue-in-cheek as a way of emphasizing that this is exactly what we don't want. Why don't you start your idea with the article Seven-dimensional cross product. David Tombe ( talk) 23:28, 10 July 2010 (UTC)
A few comments:
Arcfrk ( talk) 09:00, 11 July 2010 (UTC)
An FAQ and other easy-to-find help items on the Mathematics Portal is excellent idea! Does anyone wish to volunteer to do that?
I examined the proposed template button in the text browser lynx and it was treated as an ordinary link, nicely centered by itself in the middle of the screen. I also examined the button using the VoiceOver screen reader on the Mac, and it also worked as an ordinary link. If there are lingering doubts, I'll boot up my Windows laptop and check that it works as well using the JAWS and NVDA screen readers. Therefore, it seems to present no problems for text browsers or screen readers.
My sense, however, is that most people here are content with the status quo. I won't push this solution on the WikiProject, but I likewise hope that no one will object if I experiment with it, e.g., by adding it to a few of the articles that I've written and maintained. Like you, I'm not terribly interested in spending a lot of time answering poorly formulated questions from people who are unwilling to think for themselves. But I believe that that mental image of our questioners and critics is a hypothesis, not a fact. It seems plausible, I grant you, and it's a convenient trope, because we don't need to work, just ignore them or redirect them to the Portal. But my own experience tells me that some of that criticism is valid — and valuable in improving our articles. Therefore, I would like the freedom to test out this new method of getting feedback, and to collect actual data (not suppositions) on the types of feedback we get from it. That doesn't seem unreasonable, given that other respected contributors have supported this approach. I was a little shocked that my initial test was reverted without discussion, and I hope to avoid that happening again. Indulge me? :) Willow ( talk) 17:04, 11 July 2010 (UTC)
I believe that I have overcome all of your prior objections, and I'll gradually work on these two most recent ones. I must say, though, that I'm surprised by this dogged resistance to a sincere effort to get more and complementary feedback on how to improve our articles. This button idea may be lame, I'll be the first to admit it, but my impression is that this resistance would have arisen no matter what change to the status quo had been proposed. Are we really so hidebound? It seems a shame to give up on all forms of experimentation, which are officially sanctioned by WP:BOLD and WP:IAR. I think we can agree that, collectively, our articles have significant problems, and that we should try to find constructive solutions for them — as this button aimed to be. It seems, well, a little medieval to close our ears to sincere criticisms and forbid people from taking data to improve things, don't you think? Willow ( talk) 18:04, 11 July 2010 (UTC)
It appears a common occurrence in political discussions has occurred here too: switch the subject. The switch is from a discussion about how clearer articles might be arrived at, to a discussion about making WP a teaching tool. Clearer articles would result from two major changes: (i) insistence upon proper sourcing to accessible literature (accessible both in level and in easy availability – not access through JSTOR or some other privileged method) and (ii) inhibition of dog-in-the-manger suppression of editors trying to add clarity by those who aren't happy without a . Brews ohare ( talk) 21:55, 11 July 2010 (UTC)
Note that the stupid policy that says that "Wikipedia is not a manual, guidebook, textbook", is frequently violated and that's a good thing. Many of my contributions to Wikipedia are outright violations of this policy, because the whole point of writing technical texts for Wikipedia is not to write a nice encyclopedic text, rather you are writing for an audience that wants to learn something. E.g. the very encyclopedic article on the Yang–Baxter equation is completely and utterly useless. I can make it more encyclopedic, and hence even worse, right now by by mentioning Hopf algebra's in one sentence in that article (but I won't do that) :) .
An example of a good math article is Methods of contour integration. We need many more articles like this. Count Iblis ( talk) 22:07, 11 July 2010 (UTC)
Wow, all the math cranks
tendentious editors are out in force. Gregbard, David Tombe, Brews ohare, and now Count Iblis. All we need is for WAREL or Milogardner to join the party and we'll have bingo. And weren't some combination of Tombe/ohare/Iblis forbidden from interacting with each other by ARBCOM due to past tag-team tendentiousness? —
David Eppstein (
talk) 22:57, 11 July 2010 (UTC)
CRGreathouse, see here, if you have the time to read it Count Iblis ( talk) 00:02, 12 July 2010 (UTC)
Gee, who would have guess that the issue would devolve into calling people's credibility into question at WP:MATH? (You know, it's surprising because we have such civil, decent, non-arrogant people here). Excuse me, why exactly am I counted among the "cranks?" This is yet another reason the members of WP:MATH should be ashamed of themselves. Greg Bard ( talk) 01:05, 12 July 2010 (UTC)
Dmcq, yes, but then everyone has some knowledge from which he/she can learn more. The OP says that the things he doesn't know are not linked to. But if we write all wikipedia articles in textbook style and have wikilinks for almost everything, then you have a sort-of multidimensional textbook for all of math that is superior to any conventional textbook. Count Iblis ( talk) 23:31, 11 July 2010 (UTC)
John, the contour integration article can be written up better, but it would still be textbook style. I don't think it would be bad at all to make this the standard format for math and physics articles. Count Iblis ( talk) 23:34, 11 July 2010 (UTC)
Here is a very simple suggestion: require all articles to have in-line sources, a See also subsection identifying related topics, and never to use a mathematical term or notation without a definition or a link to another article where it is defined and discussed. Brews ohare ( talk) 19:44, 12 July 2010 (UTC)
One issue with an overemphasis on inline sourcing is that in practice it can lead to low-value sources such as [2]. There is no reason that the article " automorphism", which is on elementary abstract algebra, should be citing a book in computational engineering for a basic fact about group automorphisms. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 11:18, 13 July 2010 (UTC)
In an article about a very basic topic (like absolute difference, which I just wrote) it really does link to absolute value and subtraction. In a more advanced, specialized topic, this doesn't make a lot of sense, since it wouldn't generally be useful to learn about that topic until you'd already studied background in that general area. Every article comes with some assumptions about the background of the reader, and is generally targeted based on the expected demographics of that particular article's readers; the website's technology is simply not constructed in a way to easily adapt to serve people of diverse backgrounds. We could consider things like footnotes and collapsible sections - the latter creates problems for print versions however. I think we need new and different technology to adequately address the concerns raised here. Another issue is that we do sometimes make poor assumptions about the order in which people learn things (e.g. if they know about graph theory, they must know about high school algebra) that are artifacts of the dominant school system, rather than inherent. Dcoetzee 12:57, 13 July 2010 (UTC)
Another proposal. Let us first copy a bunch of WP articles to Wikiversity, and then gradually change them there in order to fit the need of self-study. Does it make sense? Boris Tsirelson ( talk) 06:14, 15 July 2010 (UTC)
I see from working on s:Talbot, William Henry Fox (DNB00) that William Fox Talbot, known as a photographic pioneer, also wrote a fair amount of mathematics. The DNB article says he might have rediscovered Abel's theorem in geometry; which I kind of doubt. But his mathematics is not currently mentioned in his WP article. Charles Matthews ( talk) 08:35, 14 July 2010 (UTC)
I think it's better to post here than post a general RfC, as some of the concerns are fairly technical, but if someone could look over the points of differences and comment it would be appreciated. The main discussion starts here.-- JohnBlackburne words deeds 15:09, 15 July 2010 (UTC)
There seems to be a trend to replace all inline LaTeX with \scriptstyle. I think it may be time to revisit our WP:MOSMATH recommendation concerning the use of scriptstyle. My impression is that it should be used only under very exceptional circumstances, but perhaps I am in the shrinking minority. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 13:25, 9 July 2010 (UTC)
What do people think of edits such as [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8], [9], [10], [11], [12]? Ozob ( talk) 03:23, 10 July 2010 (UTC)
Without scriptstyle, "displayed" TeX is about three times the size of the surrounding text in my browser window. With or without scriptsyle, "inline" (as opposed to "displayed") TeX usually gets misaligned. To high or to low, or the period or comma that follows it appears at the beginning of the next line, etc. Michael Hardy ( talk) 03:53, 10 July 2010 (UTC)
I think that of the two options for inline math (latex or html), html is visually preferable in general; however, it fails to do certain simple things such as place a superscript and subscript vertically aligned as in (as far as I know one can only accomplish Lɑb or Lbɑ) (Also note that I've had to use the IPA "script a" above for the a to display as it would in math; many editors don't know where to find this character) (Even more annoying is trying to get : in my editor, φ shows up as "varphi", but not when the page is displayed; to get "varphi" displayed I need to put it in a span element and change the style like this: φ (this problem is apparently browser specifc, and I guess firefox 3.6.6 on a mac isn't good enough)). So, at the very least, David Eppstein's suggestion would require allowing certain exceptions (it wouldn't make any sense to write not inline if its simply the name of an object). RobHar ( talk) 04:28, 10 July 2010 (UTC)
See Talk:Fourier_transform#.5Cscriptstyle for examples. Bo Jacoby ( talk) 21:54, 10 July 2010 (UTC).
Update. I removed the text from WP:MOSMATH that seemed to encourage scriptstyle. We should move this discussion to WT:MOSMATH. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 14:24, 17 July 2010 (UTC)
Just a minor guideline suggestion: to define maps and functions, latex has the special character "\colon", which is a little bit closer to the left than ":". For example
Correct version
Incorrect version
Note the for the definition sign (:=) and quantors, you should still use ":". For example
-- Roman3 ( talk) 13:17, 17 July 2010 (UTC)
Reminder: We have this page: Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Typography. Michael Hardy ( talk) 22:23, 17 July 2010 (UTC)
The article E8 (mathematics) gets a steady trickle of links to fringe websites and theories, and could do with being on a few more watchlists.
This may be partly because of some new age religion that got excited about E8 a few years back. The fringe websites about E8 all have some really impressive and colorful graphics explaining their theories, some of which seem to be creeping into the wikipedia article. r.e.b. ( talk) 14:30, 17 July 2010 (UTC)
The claim in lead is correct: simple Lie algebras can correspond to more than 1 Lie group, as the Lie group can have a nontrivial center. r.e.b. ( talk) 22:01, 17 July 2010 (UTC)
Typo fixed. r.e.b. ( talk) 00:27, 18 July 2010 (UTC)
Could someone familiar with the field look at Trigenus? It was written in what looks like non-fluent English. I wikified it some, but I don't know the field well enough to make all the sentences clear. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 14:35, 17 July 2010 (UTC)
It's not obvious to me why we need separate articles on this, Heegaard splitting, and handle decompositions of 3-manifolds. For that matter, I also don't understand how the orientable trigenus can take the form (0,0,g) — I thought that in a Heegaard splitting the two handlebodies had to have the same genus, so shouldn't it be (0,g,g)? Maybe some sort of merge is called for? — David Eppstein ( talk) 19:48, 17 July 2010 (UTC)
Have a look at
Does it look like something strange has happened to the \circ in the first case? Or is it that the number should be smaller? Dmcq ( talk) 15:06, 17 July 2010 (UTC)
The article titled false precision could use some improvements in two forms: inline citations, and more good examples. Michael Hardy ( talk) 21:02, 18 July 2010 (UTC)
Maybe some people here can shed some light on this query? Michael Hardy ( talk) 18:36, 19 July 2010 (UTC)
FYI, א0 has been nominated for deletion. 76.66.193.119 ( talk) 00:20, 21 July 2010 (UTC)
Please note the conflict between WP:MOSNUM#Fractions and WP:MOSMATH#Fractions, and comment, if you wish to, at WT:MOSNUM#Fractions. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 20:10, 21 July 2010 (UTC)
I finished changing the manual list of issues in the Pages needing attention/Mathematics page to cleanup tags and removed the section as mentioned above. I just removed the issues that were already resolved and added the appropriate cleanup/expand/merge tags to the article for the ones that weren't.
I noticed the Statistics Project uses a different bot for their cleanup listings; it has some advantages and some disadvantages compared with the one we're using. See Wikipedia:WikiProject Statistics/Cleanup listing for a sample.-- RDBury ( talk) 13:59, 20 July 2010 (UTC)
I gave up, but someone should have a look. Anne Bauval ( talk) 16:52, 20 July 2010 (UTC)
At Q.E.D. it says "... French, German, Italian and Russian (which are, together with English, the main languages of modern mathematical publication)[citation needed]". Is this verifiable? I would guess that there are certain journals that only accept papers in these languages, or some similar situation (?) - possibly it just needs one more sentence and a ref, for this additional context. Thanks. -- Quiddity ( talk) 00:21, 21 July 2010 (UTC)
Well I definitely miss Chinese and Spanish, in particular since the statement doesn't indicate any restriction on large, internationally oriented journals or the availability of translations. In general it seems more targeted more towards important historic publication than current publications.-- Kmhkmh ( talk) 09:09, 22 July 2010 (UTC)
We currently have two articles, List of topics in mathematics and Areas of mathematics, which would seem to serve as outlines of mathematics. The first one is the current redirect target for "Outline of mathematics" as given in Portal:Contents/Outline of Knowledge. We also have Lists of mathematics topics which has been proposed for a merge with the first article. The second article, based on the AMS subject classification, is written more like an outline, but is in an unfinished state since there are explanations for only about half if the subjects. We need a target for OoK, but I'm thinking the second article, if improved and renamed, would make a better one. On the other hand I'm not entirely convinced that we shouldn't just merge all three articles. There was some controversy last year related to this, see Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mathematics/Archive 54#List of X topics vs Outline of X, and I'd like to avoid opening that can of worms again. But I don't think the current state is the desired one and there should be some discussion on which direction we should go.-- RDBury ( talk) 13:56, 19 July 2010 (UTC)
I've used mathematics as a main example in an RfC I'm still drafting ( Navigational pages RfC), so here's some details, which should help this thread. -- Quiddity ( talk) 01:50, 21 July 2010 (UTC)
Slightly off-topic discussion - collapsed
|
---|
I've been trying to help maintain/organize Portal:Contents and its contents for a few years, and can possibly answer any questions you have regarding background (e.g. the disagreements over naming conventions, and namespaces). And yes, other topic areas are just as navigationally prolific! Hope that helps. -- Quiddity ( talk) 01:50, 21 July 2010 (UTC)
|
Here is a more useful and less biased form of the list:
This gives the correct current and historical state, and is spilt to show that there is not so much overlap as the previous list implied (though there may still be a problem). Verbal chat 08:03, 23 July 2010 (UTC)
I have proposed renaming Mathematical jargon to the standard glossary format, per discussion above. Please see the discussion on the talk page. Verbal chat 10:13, 24 July 2010 (UTC)
There is a discussion at Talk:Convolution about whether it is appropriate to mention in the "Definition" section of the Convolution article the designation of the unicode glyph for the asterisk. To me, this seems to be utterly irrelevant in the article. Anyway, I've been accused of edit-warring there (on what seem to be quite spurious grounds). I'd like to ask for other opinions. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 19:45, 22 June 2010 (UTC)
Some terminological confusion that may be beyond Wikipedia's scope to sort out, but let's see. (Note: Diophantus lived in the 3rd century, Brahmagupta in the 7th, Fibonacci in the 12th/13th, and Lagrange in the 18th.) We have an article at Brahmagupta–Fibonacci identity, which gives the identity
(that shows, among other things, that the set of sums-of-squares is closed under multiplication). Now it so happens that although "Fibonacci's identity" elsewhere does seem to refer to this identity, Brahmagupta knew and used something more general:
The previous identity is the special case N=-1. It seems a "waste" to use the name Brahmagupta's identity for the special case. (And in fact the special case may not even be in his work; I haven't checked.) Moreover, the special case — sum of squares — was also known to Diophantus! So why is Fibonacci's name associated with it? (It is hard to suggest that someone knew one of these identities but not the proof; since the proof is trivial.) Should we rename some articles here, or is it the kind of thing we cannot do? Shreevatsa ( talk) 00:29, 26 June 2010 (UTC)
I removed a PROD tag for this article since the subject does seem to be notable. However the article is unreferenced and it appears that it will need a complete rewrite due to accuracy issues. It would be nice if someone knowledgeable about data compression could bring it up to at least stub quality before it goes to AfD.-- RDBury ( talk) 19:35, 24 June 2010 (UTC)
I've put in a request for a peer review for the article Number; I feel that as it is considered a vital article in the area of mathematics it should be improved to at least the standard of a good article. If someone would be willing to put the time into creating a peer review for the article I would be very grateful, and would act to improve any suggestions. The peer review page can be found here.
Thanks, Qwam ( talk) 13:34, 26 June 2010 (UTC)
I don't know if someone else noticed this, but since r59550 we can use the commands \pagecolor and \definecolor in order to change the background color of mathematical formulas. This is useful for example when a formula has to be over a colored background. Ex.:
{| class=wikitable
|-
! Wikicode
! Rendering
|-
| <nowiki><span style="background-color:aqua;"><math>\definecolor{aqua}{RGB}{0,255,255}\pagecolor{aqua}123456789</math></span></nowiki>
| <span style="background-color:aqua;"><math>\definecolor{aqua}{RGB}{0,255,255}\pagecolor{aqua}123456789</math></span>
|-
| <nowiki><math>\definecolor{aqua}{RGB}{0,255,255}\pagecolor{aqua}123456789</math></span></nowiki>
| <math>\definecolor{aqua}{RGB}{0,255,255}\pagecolor{aqua}123456789</math></span>
|-
| <nowiki><math>123456789</math></nowiki>
| <math>123456789</math>
|}
I thought it's worth to note here, in case somebody needs this, since it seems not to be documented anywhere...
Best regards Helder ( talk) 23:58, 27 June 2010 (UTC)
Can we have some standardization on how to represent the adjoint of an operator (matrix)? I see and a lot (for example in the normal matrix, hermitian matrix, self-adjoint operator, Bra-ket notation). Recently I have cleaned up positive-definite matrix to make the notation consistent. As a physicist, I'm more used to the dagger, but it seems to me that the asterisk is much more common in maths. Should then the standard be context-dependent? Tercer ( talk) 01:00, 29 June 2010 (UTC)
There is a strange discussion at Talk:Curl (mathematics) including the claim that a "seven-dimensional cross product" would permit the definition of the curl of a vector field on . More eyes would be helpful there. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 16:54, 1 July 2010 (UTC)
Hi. I have made image of topological model of Mandelbrot set. I have looked for pages about topological models and found nothing. Do you think that it could be useful somewhere ? -- Adam majewski ( talk) 19:36, 30 June 2010 (UTC)
Thx. Probably topologicla here means that it shows a structure of Mandelbrot set and it is more related with model theory. -- Adam majewski ( talk) 14:07, 1 July 2010 (UTC)
Would math related software such as statistical analysis and certain forms of math computations qualify fall under the math wikiproject? Specifically, I'm referring to F(g) Scholar which was once heavily used in math/science academia. Smallman12q ( talk) 20:25, 1 July 2010 (UTC)
Is anyone familiar with the terminology used in the article constructible set (topology)? It claims that a constructible set is one in the algebra generated by the open sets. It's certainly possible that this name is used somewhere but I have never come across it. There's a reference to an arXiv paper, and an external link to a PostScript doc with no indication that it's been published. -- Trovatore ( talk) 18:48, 19 June 2010 (UTC)
{{
cite book}}
: Unknown parameter |location1=
ignored (
help); Unknown parameter |location2=
ignored (
help); Unknown parameter |publisher1=
ignored (
help); Unknown parameter |publisher2=
ignored (
help)The new article Svante Janson will be appearing as on the Wikidepia frontpage as a Did you know? fact. Improvements would be especially useful in the next few days, before hundreds of readers view the page (in its 12 hours of fame). Thanks, Kiefer.Wolfowitz ( talk) 01:05, 4 July 2010 (UTC)
The article non-standard calculus has recently been merged to infinitesimal calculus. There was an old thread discussing this, where the proposal didn't seem to get much support, but someone has gone ahead with the merger anyway. Comments are welcome. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 13:20, 2 July 2010 (UTC)
General comment: In my experience, the term the infinitesimal calculus just means the integral and differential calculus considered together, and has nothing particularly to do with the foundational approach. I think infinitesimal calculus should simply redirect to calculus. That's a comment about the title and where it should point. As to the content, I haven't actually looked. OK, now I have. I think that should be merged into calculus as well, or possibly moved to another title (such as, I don't know, Newtonian and Leibnizian development of the calculus), with the redirect left behind at infinitesimal calculus redirected to calculus. -- Trovatore ( talk) 10:52, 4 July 2010 (UTC)
There is an RfC here on whether it's appropriate to label an identity with the label "Pythagorean theorem". More interested participants are welcome !-- JohnBlackburne words deeds 21:00, 4 July 2010 (UTC)
Relative difference, Percentage change, Percent difference, Fold change are very simple and overlap greatly and do not link up to anything really. Could someone fix this? (I though I had posted this, but searching nothing came up, so I probably never did, If I am repeating myself, I am terribly sorry) Thanks -- Squidonius ( talk) 20:46, 5 July 2010 (UTC)
Hi all,
On a whim, I checked the article assessments for 95 geometers listed in The Penguin Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Geometry by David Wells. Of those, roughly half (46/95) had no assessment by the Math WikiProject. That seems like a surprisingly high fraction of the articles that fall within our scope, although the biographies of geometers may not be representative. I've since added assessments for those articles.
It's not the most pressing issue, of course. But the assessments help us keep track of how we're doing; if I recall correctly, the system was invented by people from this WikiProject. So the next time you're reading or working on a math article, please take a moment to check whether your article has an assessment from WikiProject Math. Thanks muchly! :) Willow ( talk) 23:27, 4 July 2010 (UTC)
PS. The article on Victor Thébault could seriously use some help - any takers? Theodor Reye is missing altogether; I'll work on that one. Willow ( talk) 23:33, 4 July 2010 (UTC)
For biographies, the field is always mathematician, right? For people who don't know about assessments, the idea is to add a line like
{{maths rating|class=Start|priority=Mid|field=mathematician}}
to beginning of the article's Talk page. More details can be found here; thanks! Willow ( talk) 14:35, 5 July 2010 (UTC)
We can be even more heartened because there were only 23 stubs (~24%), albeit some well-known ones such as Möbius, Brianchon, and Feuerbach. Overall, the distribution of qualities was 5/2/10/12/43/23 for FA/GA/B(+)/C/Start/Stub; the Start class seems to be dominant, with almost half of the articles. Willow ( talk) 14:35, 5 July 2010 (UTC)
Neat! Thank you for making that wonderful tool. :) It seems wise and efficient to break the problem into smaller bits. I'll do my share, starting with Dinostratus. Willow ( talk) 13:17, 6 July 2010 (UTC)
To the article titled Young's lattice, I've added a section on the surprising (quite surprising to me, and I'm not the only one!) dihedral symmetry of certain subsets of the lattice, somewhat recently discovered by Ruedi Suter. The bilateral symmetry is obvious, so the surprising part is the rotational symmetry.
Improve the new section if you can. Michael Hardy ( talk) 05:12, 7 July 2010 (UTC)
[First posted here, later here.]
I was wondering if we should aim to use a similar font as the LaTeX output in images that reproduce formulas from the body of the article. For instance, most of the images in HSL and HSV#Formal_derivation that use a Sans Serif font. It's kind of hard to identify in the images what is a formula, and what are merely labels. Using a Latin font might help to distinguish between the two types. Thanks. SharkD Talk 01:40, 30 June 2010 (UTC)
Well it is obviously up to the author of the image, what kind of fonts are used for it and it is up to the article's authors which image they use in the article. We definitely should not have any guideline mandating particular fonts for images. The authors of the concerned article need agree on the exact images they want to use and consider carefully whether rather marginal changes are really worth a lengthy and probably bitter argument.-- Kmhkmh ( talk) 08:45, 1 July 2010 (UTC)
I suspect this is a bad idea for many reasons, but one of them is that the choice of fonts that work in scalable (SVG) images on Wikimedia is...idiosyncratic. For instance, Times and Helvetica are bad choices (they don't scale correctly) and instead one must replace them with Liberation Serif or Liberation Sans respectively. — David Eppstein ( talk) 04:45, 8 July 2010 (UTC)
I just had a look at the preview examples in http://www.mathjax.org/ — it looks much better than what we do for math markup here. Especially nice is the way the math scales when the browser text font size increases or decreases. We should use into the possibility of using this or similar technology in place of our current bad system of math typography. — David Eppstein ( talk) 17:02, 5 July 2010 (UTC)
Matching preclusion has been prodded. Worth keeping or not? Michael Hardy ( talk) 02:04, 11 July 2010 (UTC)
Dirac delta function has been nominated for GA, in case anyone is interested in reviewing it. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 02:08, 11 July 2010 (UTC)
Someone moved inequality to inequality (mathematics) and then made the former into a disambiguation page. A result is that a HUGE number of pages now linking to inequality should link to inequality (mathematics). So there's yet another chore. (Are there bots that can be used to facilitate this?) Michael Hardy ( talk) 02:14, 11 July 2010 (UTC)
Reid W. Barton is another article that looks more like a vanity page or a glorified CV (here is the previous case). I am wondering how many more are there! Arcfrk ( talk) 21:03, 29 June 2010 (UTC)
To clarify: "vanity page" doesn't necessarily imply the subject himself wrote it (for example, pages devoted to one's children/parents/beau/spouse may be so categorized). Dcmq, what are the grounds for dispute? It clearly doesn't pass WP:PROF. I just don't have enough time to devote to AfD, or I would have sent it there already. Arcfrk ( talk) 06:25, 30 June 2010 (UTC)
There are a few other cases (IMO or putnam guys) that should be looked at in this context as well: Christian Reiher, Iurie Boreico, Ciprian Manolescu. In addition we need to consider red links in the articles about Putnam and IMO, because it's fair to assume that red links in those articles are likely to lead to the creation of biography articles.-- Kmhkmh ( talk) 13:18, 1 July 2010 (UTC)
At Proof (informal), editor Vaughan Pratt ( talk · contribs) has written an essay-style article in which he insists that the dictionary definition "A proof is sufficient evidence for the truth of a proposition" applies equally to formal proofs in mathematics and logic as it does to the concept of proof in other fields such as law, rhetoric and philosophy. He believes that formal proof is not essentially different from informal proof , but is only a "higher standard of sufficiency", and that "the notion of "sufficient evidence" does not distinguish between formal and informal argument".
An attempt by myself to clean up the article and restrict its scope to fields in which an evidence-based concept of proof applies were reverted by Pratt, with the talk page comment "so that others would have a chance to judge the original and draw their own conclusions". It would therefore be good to see more contributions to the discussion at Talk:Proof (informal).
To provide context for the talk page discussion, you may need to know that editor Vaughan Pratt identifies himself as Professor Vaughan Pratt of Stanford University. Gandalf61 ( talk) 08:28, 8 July 2010 (UTC)
I'm going though this section to remove obsolete and redundant entries. I'm wondering though if this section is needed at all anymore. It's been nearly a year since the last new entry and most issues can be flagged with a cleanup tag and sorted automatically. Most of the listed issues have long since been resolved so it's apparent that section is not being maintained as it should be. Unless someone can find an issue that can't be adequately handled with a clean up tag and/or a note on the talk page I propose removing the section for simplicity's sake.-- RDBury ( talk) 14:40, 12 July 2010 (UTC)
Looking at the sad state of unimodal function, and noting that the main use, unimodal distribution, is left mostly unexplained, I made an inexperienced attempt at writing unimodal in a way which I hope will be useful to some extent even to casual readers, and redirected unimodal function and unimodal distribution. Feel free to restructure it again. -- Muhandes ( talk) 18:18, 12 July 2010 (UTC)
The new article titled Relation of the Riemann zeta function to pi is at best a mess in its present form. Fix it if possible; prod it if you know it can't be fixed.
The topic seems potentially worthy of an article, but not this article. Michael Hardy ( talk) 03:03, 13 July 2010 (UTC)
I can go to an article and know that this is the type of mathematics that I want to learn and use. But I'm not trained in it. No problem; all the formulas are right there along with any proofs. But I'm not educated in the symbols, variables, and subformulas used, either, and they are never linked to! This just removes the ability to learn mathematics on Wikipedia altogether. I'm sorry, but there's no way to start at the bottom and work my way up to what I want to learn when the things in between are not linked to! "Go to school and learn everything, you loser." is not a reasonable solution. This isn't a problem with normal science, history, or psychology articles, for example, but it constantly is with mathematics articles. I'm not simply too dumb as I have learned and even (independently; not originally, I strongly assume) discovered some not majorly complex mathematical formulas on my own with basic knowledge, so if you're indeed linking to all esoteric (from a layman's perspective; something articles in general seem to tend to do on Wikipedia) terms being used then it's severely non-obvious how you are doing so. I just wish that it wasn't assumed that anyone looking at these articles already knew all of the mathematics used within them, ironically meaning that you could only learn something if you probably already happened to know it anyway, unless of course you're simply a professional looking at an extremely complex article, with such a person not meant to ever be Wikipedia's target audience, it appears elsewhere. 75.4.141.69 ( talk) 04:06, 10 July 2010 (UTC)
The discussion page for each article is open for questions. If a word or symbol is not understood it should be linked to an explanation. Bo Jacoby ( talk) 12:25, 10 July 2010 (UTC).
Gee, who would have guessed?! Say listen folks, whatever you do, don't listen attentively, or otherwise open the mind to the criticism of someone who just wants to use WP to learn math. My goodness it's not like the thing exists for them. Just go ahead and explain to him that the experts have ways of doing things around here and know best. Don't set up a FAQ. WP:MATH deserves to hear this once a month. Greg Bard ( talk) 20:39, 10 July 2010 (UTC)
There are many mathematical articles here that need improvement, no doubt. But I'm kind of sceptical about the chances of improving them simply by flaming the people with the competence to do so. Charles Matthews ( talk) 21:32, 10 July 2010 (UTC)
There are two ways of writing a mathematics article.
(1) We can strike a healthy balance between equations and plain English, with a view to making sure that all likely questions will be answered in the article. Or,
(2) We can make a work of art using the most cryptic 'pure maths speak' of the day, in order to ensure that the article is so incomprehensible that any casual reader will have to ask.
The benefit of the latter method is that it keeps the wiki oracles in business. David Tombe ( talk) 22:58, 10 July 2010 (UTC)
Willow, It's a good idea. But ultimately we should be aiming for a situation in which no questions need to be asked. I only stated option (2) above tongue-in-cheek as a way of emphasizing that this is exactly what we don't want. Why don't you start your idea with the article Seven-dimensional cross product. David Tombe ( talk) 23:28, 10 July 2010 (UTC)
A few comments:
Arcfrk ( talk) 09:00, 11 July 2010 (UTC)
An FAQ and other easy-to-find help items on the Mathematics Portal is excellent idea! Does anyone wish to volunteer to do that?
I examined the proposed template button in the text browser lynx and it was treated as an ordinary link, nicely centered by itself in the middle of the screen. I also examined the button using the VoiceOver screen reader on the Mac, and it also worked as an ordinary link. If there are lingering doubts, I'll boot up my Windows laptop and check that it works as well using the JAWS and NVDA screen readers. Therefore, it seems to present no problems for text browsers or screen readers.
My sense, however, is that most people here are content with the status quo. I won't push this solution on the WikiProject, but I likewise hope that no one will object if I experiment with it, e.g., by adding it to a few of the articles that I've written and maintained. Like you, I'm not terribly interested in spending a lot of time answering poorly formulated questions from people who are unwilling to think for themselves. But I believe that that mental image of our questioners and critics is a hypothesis, not a fact. It seems plausible, I grant you, and it's a convenient trope, because we don't need to work, just ignore them or redirect them to the Portal. But my own experience tells me that some of that criticism is valid — and valuable in improving our articles. Therefore, I would like the freedom to test out this new method of getting feedback, and to collect actual data (not suppositions) on the types of feedback we get from it. That doesn't seem unreasonable, given that other respected contributors have supported this approach. I was a little shocked that my initial test was reverted without discussion, and I hope to avoid that happening again. Indulge me? :) Willow ( talk) 17:04, 11 July 2010 (UTC)
I believe that I have overcome all of your prior objections, and I'll gradually work on these two most recent ones. I must say, though, that I'm surprised by this dogged resistance to a sincere effort to get more and complementary feedback on how to improve our articles. This button idea may be lame, I'll be the first to admit it, but my impression is that this resistance would have arisen no matter what change to the status quo had been proposed. Are we really so hidebound? It seems a shame to give up on all forms of experimentation, which are officially sanctioned by WP:BOLD and WP:IAR. I think we can agree that, collectively, our articles have significant problems, and that we should try to find constructive solutions for them — as this button aimed to be. It seems, well, a little medieval to close our ears to sincere criticisms and forbid people from taking data to improve things, don't you think? Willow ( talk) 18:04, 11 July 2010 (UTC)
It appears a common occurrence in political discussions has occurred here too: switch the subject. The switch is from a discussion about how clearer articles might be arrived at, to a discussion about making WP a teaching tool. Clearer articles would result from two major changes: (i) insistence upon proper sourcing to accessible literature (accessible both in level and in easy availability – not access through JSTOR or some other privileged method) and (ii) inhibition of dog-in-the-manger suppression of editors trying to add clarity by those who aren't happy without a . Brews ohare ( talk) 21:55, 11 July 2010 (UTC)
Note that the stupid policy that says that "Wikipedia is not a manual, guidebook, textbook", is frequently violated and that's a good thing. Many of my contributions to Wikipedia are outright violations of this policy, because the whole point of writing technical texts for Wikipedia is not to write a nice encyclopedic text, rather you are writing for an audience that wants to learn something. E.g. the very encyclopedic article on the Yang–Baxter equation is completely and utterly useless. I can make it more encyclopedic, and hence even worse, right now by by mentioning Hopf algebra's in one sentence in that article (but I won't do that) :) .
An example of a good math article is Methods of contour integration. We need many more articles like this. Count Iblis ( talk) 22:07, 11 July 2010 (UTC)
Wow, all the math cranks
tendentious editors are out in force. Gregbard, David Tombe, Brews ohare, and now Count Iblis. All we need is for WAREL or Milogardner to join the party and we'll have bingo. And weren't some combination of Tombe/ohare/Iblis forbidden from interacting with each other by ARBCOM due to past tag-team tendentiousness? —
David Eppstein (
talk) 22:57, 11 July 2010 (UTC)
CRGreathouse, see here, if you have the time to read it Count Iblis ( talk) 00:02, 12 July 2010 (UTC)
Gee, who would have guess that the issue would devolve into calling people's credibility into question at WP:MATH? (You know, it's surprising because we have such civil, decent, non-arrogant people here). Excuse me, why exactly am I counted among the "cranks?" This is yet another reason the members of WP:MATH should be ashamed of themselves. Greg Bard ( talk) 01:05, 12 July 2010 (UTC)
Dmcq, yes, but then everyone has some knowledge from which he/she can learn more. The OP says that the things he doesn't know are not linked to. But if we write all wikipedia articles in textbook style and have wikilinks for almost everything, then you have a sort-of multidimensional textbook for all of math that is superior to any conventional textbook. Count Iblis ( talk) 23:31, 11 July 2010 (UTC)
John, the contour integration article can be written up better, but it would still be textbook style. I don't think it would be bad at all to make this the standard format for math and physics articles. Count Iblis ( talk) 23:34, 11 July 2010 (UTC)
Here is a very simple suggestion: require all articles to have in-line sources, a See also subsection identifying related topics, and never to use a mathematical term or notation without a definition or a link to another article where it is defined and discussed. Brews ohare ( talk) 19:44, 12 July 2010 (UTC)
One issue with an overemphasis on inline sourcing is that in practice it can lead to low-value sources such as [2]. There is no reason that the article " automorphism", which is on elementary abstract algebra, should be citing a book in computational engineering for a basic fact about group automorphisms. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 11:18, 13 July 2010 (UTC)
In an article about a very basic topic (like absolute difference, which I just wrote) it really does link to absolute value and subtraction. In a more advanced, specialized topic, this doesn't make a lot of sense, since it wouldn't generally be useful to learn about that topic until you'd already studied background in that general area. Every article comes with some assumptions about the background of the reader, and is generally targeted based on the expected demographics of that particular article's readers; the website's technology is simply not constructed in a way to easily adapt to serve people of diverse backgrounds. We could consider things like footnotes and collapsible sections - the latter creates problems for print versions however. I think we need new and different technology to adequately address the concerns raised here. Another issue is that we do sometimes make poor assumptions about the order in which people learn things (e.g. if they know about graph theory, they must know about high school algebra) that are artifacts of the dominant school system, rather than inherent. Dcoetzee 12:57, 13 July 2010 (UTC)
Another proposal. Let us first copy a bunch of WP articles to Wikiversity, and then gradually change them there in order to fit the need of self-study. Does it make sense? Boris Tsirelson ( talk) 06:14, 15 July 2010 (UTC)
I see from working on s:Talbot, William Henry Fox (DNB00) that William Fox Talbot, known as a photographic pioneer, also wrote a fair amount of mathematics. The DNB article says he might have rediscovered Abel's theorem in geometry; which I kind of doubt. But his mathematics is not currently mentioned in his WP article. Charles Matthews ( talk) 08:35, 14 July 2010 (UTC)
I think it's better to post here than post a general RfC, as some of the concerns are fairly technical, but if someone could look over the points of differences and comment it would be appreciated. The main discussion starts here.-- JohnBlackburne words deeds 15:09, 15 July 2010 (UTC)
There seems to be a trend to replace all inline LaTeX with \scriptstyle. I think it may be time to revisit our WP:MOSMATH recommendation concerning the use of scriptstyle. My impression is that it should be used only under very exceptional circumstances, but perhaps I am in the shrinking minority. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 13:25, 9 July 2010 (UTC)
What do people think of edits such as [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8], [9], [10], [11], [12]? Ozob ( talk) 03:23, 10 July 2010 (UTC)
Without scriptstyle, "displayed" TeX is about three times the size of the surrounding text in my browser window. With or without scriptsyle, "inline" (as opposed to "displayed") TeX usually gets misaligned. To high or to low, or the period or comma that follows it appears at the beginning of the next line, etc. Michael Hardy ( talk) 03:53, 10 July 2010 (UTC)
I think that of the two options for inline math (latex or html), html is visually preferable in general; however, it fails to do certain simple things such as place a superscript and subscript vertically aligned as in (as far as I know one can only accomplish Lɑb or Lbɑ) (Also note that I've had to use the IPA "script a" above for the a to display as it would in math; many editors don't know where to find this character) (Even more annoying is trying to get : in my editor, φ shows up as "varphi", but not when the page is displayed; to get "varphi" displayed I need to put it in a span element and change the style like this: φ (this problem is apparently browser specifc, and I guess firefox 3.6.6 on a mac isn't good enough)). So, at the very least, David Eppstein's suggestion would require allowing certain exceptions (it wouldn't make any sense to write not inline if its simply the name of an object). RobHar ( talk) 04:28, 10 July 2010 (UTC)
See Talk:Fourier_transform#.5Cscriptstyle for examples. Bo Jacoby ( talk) 21:54, 10 July 2010 (UTC).
Update. I removed the text from WP:MOSMATH that seemed to encourage scriptstyle. We should move this discussion to WT:MOSMATH. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 14:24, 17 July 2010 (UTC)
Just a minor guideline suggestion: to define maps and functions, latex has the special character "\colon", which is a little bit closer to the left than ":". For example
Correct version
Incorrect version
Note the for the definition sign (:=) and quantors, you should still use ":". For example
-- Roman3 ( talk) 13:17, 17 July 2010 (UTC)
Reminder: We have this page: Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Typography. Michael Hardy ( talk) 22:23, 17 July 2010 (UTC)
The article E8 (mathematics) gets a steady trickle of links to fringe websites and theories, and could do with being on a few more watchlists.
This may be partly because of some new age religion that got excited about E8 a few years back. The fringe websites about E8 all have some really impressive and colorful graphics explaining their theories, some of which seem to be creeping into the wikipedia article. r.e.b. ( talk) 14:30, 17 July 2010 (UTC)
The claim in lead is correct: simple Lie algebras can correspond to more than 1 Lie group, as the Lie group can have a nontrivial center. r.e.b. ( talk) 22:01, 17 July 2010 (UTC)
Typo fixed. r.e.b. ( talk) 00:27, 18 July 2010 (UTC)
Could someone familiar with the field look at Trigenus? It was written in what looks like non-fluent English. I wikified it some, but I don't know the field well enough to make all the sentences clear. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 14:35, 17 July 2010 (UTC)
It's not obvious to me why we need separate articles on this, Heegaard splitting, and handle decompositions of 3-manifolds. For that matter, I also don't understand how the orientable trigenus can take the form (0,0,g) — I thought that in a Heegaard splitting the two handlebodies had to have the same genus, so shouldn't it be (0,g,g)? Maybe some sort of merge is called for? — David Eppstein ( talk) 19:48, 17 July 2010 (UTC)
Have a look at
Does it look like something strange has happened to the \circ in the first case? Or is it that the number should be smaller? Dmcq ( talk) 15:06, 17 July 2010 (UTC)
The article titled false precision could use some improvements in two forms: inline citations, and more good examples. Michael Hardy ( talk) 21:02, 18 July 2010 (UTC)
Maybe some people here can shed some light on this query? Michael Hardy ( talk) 18:36, 19 July 2010 (UTC)
FYI, א0 has been nominated for deletion. 76.66.193.119 ( talk) 00:20, 21 July 2010 (UTC)
Please note the conflict between WP:MOSNUM#Fractions and WP:MOSMATH#Fractions, and comment, if you wish to, at WT:MOSNUM#Fractions. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 20:10, 21 July 2010 (UTC)
I finished changing the manual list of issues in the Pages needing attention/Mathematics page to cleanup tags and removed the section as mentioned above. I just removed the issues that were already resolved and added the appropriate cleanup/expand/merge tags to the article for the ones that weren't.
I noticed the Statistics Project uses a different bot for their cleanup listings; it has some advantages and some disadvantages compared with the one we're using. See Wikipedia:WikiProject Statistics/Cleanup listing for a sample.-- RDBury ( talk) 13:59, 20 July 2010 (UTC)
I gave up, but someone should have a look. Anne Bauval ( talk) 16:52, 20 July 2010 (UTC)
At Q.E.D. it says "... French, German, Italian and Russian (which are, together with English, the main languages of modern mathematical publication)[citation needed]". Is this verifiable? I would guess that there are certain journals that only accept papers in these languages, or some similar situation (?) - possibly it just needs one more sentence and a ref, for this additional context. Thanks. -- Quiddity ( talk) 00:21, 21 July 2010 (UTC)
Well I definitely miss Chinese and Spanish, in particular since the statement doesn't indicate any restriction on large, internationally oriented journals or the availability of translations. In general it seems more targeted more towards important historic publication than current publications.-- Kmhkmh ( talk) 09:09, 22 July 2010 (UTC)
We currently have two articles, List of topics in mathematics and Areas of mathematics, which would seem to serve as outlines of mathematics. The first one is the current redirect target for "Outline of mathematics" as given in Portal:Contents/Outline of Knowledge. We also have Lists of mathematics topics which has been proposed for a merge with the first article. The second article, based on the AMS subject classification, is written more like an outline, but is in an unfinished state since there are explanations for only about half if the subjects. We need a target for OoK, but I'm thinking the second article, if improved and renamed, would make a better one. On the other hand I'm not entirely convinced that we shouldn't just merge all three articles. There was some controversy last year related to this, see Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mathematics/Archive 54#List of X topics vs Outline of X, and I'd like to avoid opening that can of worms again. But I don't think the current state is the desired one and there should be some discussion on which direction we should go.-- RDBury ( talk) 13:56, 19 July 2010 (UTC)
I've used mathematics as a main example in an RfC I'm still drafting ( Navigational pages RfC), so here's some details, which should help this thread. -- Quiddity ( talk) 01:50, 21 July 2010 (UTC)
Slightly off-topic discussion - collapsed
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I've been trying to help maintain/organize Portal:Contents and its contents for a few years, and can possibly answer any questions you have regarding background (e.g. the disagreements over naming conventions, and namespaces). And yes, other topic areas are just as navigationally prolific! Hope that helps. -- Quiddity ( talk) 01:50, 21 July 2010 (UTC)
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Here is a more useful and less biased form of the list:
This gives the correct current and historical state, and is spilt to show that there is not so much overlap as the previous list implied (though there may still be a problem). Verbal chat 08:03, 23 July 2010 (UTC)
I have proposed renaming Mathematical jargon to the standard glossary format, per discussion above. Please see the discussion on the talk page. Verbal chat 10:13, 24 July 2010 (UTC)