Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mathematics - Wikipedia

I noticed, when looking at Category:Numbers (don't ask why I was looking at it), I found 777 (number) and 8 (number), but no other actual numerals. Obviously, those should only be in Category:Integers, but I was also wondering about Category:Prime numbers, (which includes 2³¹−1 and 2⁶¹−1 written out as a number). Any ideas on standardization, and whether there should be any articles other than Number in Category:Numbers, rather than in subcategories.

(I'm heading out, or I would have put notes on the talk pages of the categories mentioned.) — Arthur Rubin (talk) 18:15, 17 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

We could put it into Template:Number which would automatically put most numbers in the category, but I'm not sure if it is appropriate for a template to have a category (I could make the template itself not be in the category however). Jkasd 09:04, 18 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

Category:Numbers shouldn't have individual numerals. 2147483647 (2³¹−1) and 2305843009213693951 (2⁶¹−1) only have articles because they are large primes and the articles say more about primes than that the number happens to be prime. So I think it's OK to have them in Category:Prime numbers without having articles about small numbers where primality is a minor part of the article. Whether the articles should be merged to Mersenne prime is another matter. Category:Integers uses a special sort key to sort by the first digit and then by size instead of the second digit. If Template:Number adds the category then it should implement the sort key. Many templates add categories. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:20, 18 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

Wait, do you mean that Category:Numbers should have individual numbers or not? Jkasd 08:55, 19 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

Category:Numbers should not have individual numbers. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:06, 19 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

I added {{catdiffuse}} to the category. CRGreathouse (t | c) 15:26, 19 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

Its very difficult to get to Category:Integers from Category:Numbers you have to go via Category:Real numbers and Category:Rational numbers. Would not a flatter tree server readers better? --Salix (talk): 15:38, 19 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

I don't think so, but you're welcome to WP:BOLDly flatten it yourself if you think it would. A compromise would be linking Category:Integers directly on the Category:Numbers page. CRGreathouse (t | c) 15:46, 19 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

I think a flatter tree would be a good idea. I mean, we don't put Algebraic numbers < Complex numbers < Hypercomplex numbers, or Real numbers < Complex numbers for that matter. Integers and rational numbers should be accessible directly as subcategories of Category:Numbers. Sławomir Biały (talk) 20:53, 21 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

Please have a look at uncertainty theory. It's entirely unreferenced, with a single link to a website whose owner has the same surname as the supposed originator of "uncertain programming", which work is dated this year. --Trovatore (talk) 21:39, 19 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

I am, of course, uncertain what to think about it. The author is clearly a real and active professor at Tsinghua University. His 300-page book Uncertainty Theory has had two English editions (Springer), a Chinese edition (Tsinghua University Press), and apparently also a Japanese edition. It's now available from his professional homepage. [1] There is also Theory and Practice of Uncertain Programming by the same author, which moved from Wiley via Physica-Verlag to Springer.

Apparently a key idea is to work with "uncertainty measures". The following list from p. 180 (Section "Evolution of Measures") of the PDF version of the book provides some context:

1933: Probability Measure (A.N. Kolmogoroff);

1954: Capacity (G. Choquet);

1974: Fuzzy Measure (M. Sugeno);

1978: Possibility Measure (L.A. Zadeh);

2002: Credibility Measure (B. Liu and Y. Liu);

2007: Uncertain Measure (B. Liu).

Hans Adler 22:13, 19 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

The online version of the book is dated a few days ago, but of course the previous editions appeared much earlier. Members of his Uncertainty Theory Lab have published 99 papers since 1996. It's clearly legitimate and may well be notable, although I am not completely convinced of that. Hans Adler 22:20, 19 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

In light of that I would not be interested in arguing for deletion. Just the same it would be good to find sources not written by this prof or his employees. Well, more than "good"; it would be a fairly bad thing if we couldn't find them. --Trovatore (talk) 22:23, 19 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

I fully agree, but couldn't find any significant citations from outside China. If there is another group working on this it must be Chinese as well.

On the other hand I have found an overview over fuzzy random variables from an actuarial perspective. It doesn't seem to discuss uncertainty theory, but it discusses related topics and cites Baoding Liu. [2] Hans Adler 23:01, 19 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

In the mean time a number of related stubs with little information have been created. Together with the main article they are all at AfD right now. See WP:Articles for deletion/Uncertainty theory. Hans Adler 17:02, 22 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

Any edit to articles should improve the readers ability to understand the subject material. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 64.106.38.252 (talk) 22:49, 19 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

I think that you will find that we have been striving to make articles clearer all along. Unfortunately, some topics require more thought (or background) from the reader than others. Also editors often disagree about which wording is clearer. JRSpriggs (talk) 08:38, 27 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

This article badly need a major rewrite. For example it starts off with "Let A be a symmetric matrix ... ". The next section starts off with "If p = S_kl is apivot element ..."

It appears that now the matrix is being called S. Then   is some function not defined in the article.

The Algorithm section is unreadable because so many of the relationships appear only as a blank square.

Dryheataz (talk) 02:15, 20 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

The posting above has no link to the article. Here it is: Jacobi eigenvalue algorithm Michael Hardy (talk) 14:46, 20 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

This article Contractibility_of_unit_sphere_in_Hilbert_space is a disaster. At present I have enough articles on my plate but perhaps someone could take a look at it and start fixing some the the largest disasters? Is this topic even worthy of a Wikipedia page, does it meet Wikipedia's standards? It's a common homework problem in intro algebraic topology courses, I for one would prefer it it was deleted but I could certainly understand if I'm in the minority on this. Rybu (talk) 06:43, 20 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

It is related to Kuiper's theorem, possibly an easy corollary (the sphere being a homogeneous space for the unitary group). The result isn't dull, so I suppose you are concerned about it standing alone as a topic. Charles Matthews (talk) 17:09, 20 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

Right, the sphere in Hilbert space is also contractible, it's just that the argument in Contractibility_of_unit_sphere_in_Hilbert_space is wrong. Moreover, the fact that it's a cute homework problem rather than a notable theorem makes me want to delete it. It's not the role of Wikipedia to be a repository of homework solutions. The contractibility of the sphere isn't notable. People didn't write papers on the topic, it was pretty clear to people like Whitehead so they didn't make a big deal of it. Kuiper's theorem was notable at the time because it was a significant extension of the contractibility of the sphere. That's why Kuiper got to publish a paper on the topic. Rybu (talk) 17:34, 20 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

Well, OK, if we can figure out that the obvious type of proof from Kuiper's theorem is valid, the stabiliser being another unitary group, the result can go in the Kuiper's theorem article, as an already-known corollary, and the other article can be redirected (just the references merged). Charles Matthews (talk) 17:56, 20 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

By the way, this result is cited quite often. The proof may be "homework", but the result itself seems entirely notable. I'm going to merge it into Kuiper's theorem, and try to develop it a little. Charles Matthews (talk) 10:42, 21 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

Every once in awhile someone decides that Template:SpecialChars should be plastered over mathematics articles. I assume that there is unspoken consensus against this. Sławomir Biały (talk) 19:54, 20 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

I think it's not even unspoken -- the consensus against the template can be found in the archives, I believe. CRGreathouse (t | c) 19:57, 20 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

I agree. For example, Subset looks bad; {{SpecialChars}} has displaced the lead image, and it looks as if the special characters (in boldface) were the first thing that anyone should learn about subsets. (Besides, it's 2009, non-Latin-1 characters aren't really a new thing. And the MediaWiki software could handle the issue automatically by displaying some instructions whenever it detects a combination of an old web browser and an article with "special characters".) — Miym (talk) 15:04, 21 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

You seem to echo part of my concern, that the special characters template really has nothing to do with the subject of a mathematics article, and so shouldn't displace the lead image (and arguably doesn't belong in the article anyway). For some articles, specifically those that are about a character set or written language, the template seems to serve a more encyclopedically useful purpose. But there seems to be an enormous amount of confusion and uncertainty about when this template is appropriate and when it is inappropriate. Sławomir Biały (talk) 16:24, 21 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

Part of the problem with Subset is that the template is used in a way that maximizes its obtrusiveness. The article List of XML and HTML character entity references is much better in that it omits the image to keep the box small and has it at the bottom of the lead instead of the top. In both articles, the characters could just as well be written with using the &name; syntax but you can add characters such as ≤ directly through the wikipedia edit screen and these aren't coded that way. In fact I would presume that if your browser can't handle ⊂ and ⊃ then it wouldn't be able to handle ≤ and ≥ either, so you'd get funny boxes on the wikipedia editing window and it would be hard to complain about what appears in an article. It's also a bit odd that articles where I do see the funny boxes, such as Japan, don't seem to have the template. In any case, if there a consensus in the archive it should be added to the MOS instead of having it buried where no one will find it unless they look really hard.--RDBury (talk) 22:35, 21 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

Some prior discussion: Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mathematics/Archive 49#Template:SpecialChars. — Miym (talk) 22:25, 21 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

I also found a discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mathematics/Archive 22#Special characters. There didn't seem to be a consensus on whether to prohibit the template but in this discussion someone did complain about not being able to see the article correctly.--RDBury (talk) 22:35, 21 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

With respect to mathematics articles at least the template is unneeded, and articles look much better without it. I've removed it from subset. Paul August ☎ 22:37, 21 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

There might be some need in articles on math history or biographies where foreign language alphabets are actually used. But nearly every math article is going to use some kind of special characters and unless we enclosed everything but plain ASCII in <math> tags, which will cause other problems, we'd have to add the tag to every one of them to be consistent. I don't know if we can assume by now that everyone has upgraded from IE7 (which was why the tag was added to the Subset article in the first place), but I agree that it seems silly to have the tag for small minority.--RDBury (talk) 22:56, 21 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

Looking at the table at WP:WPM#Assessment of mathematics articles, there are about 900 articles that are marked as quality=stub but have no priority set. Really all three fields (quality, priority, and field) should be filled in.

Unless there are objections, I think it makes sense to go through and set the priority on these to low (which is a sort of default priority). I will also assign fields to them by manual inspection, and if any article seems like it should have a higher priority I'll take care of that at the same time. I'm just posting here to make sure nobody objects before I start. Of course anyone else can change the ratings at any time if they seem incorrect. I would like to get at least some values into the templates, however. — Carl (CBM · talk) 16:01, 22 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

The point of having ratings is to convey information. Setting every one of them to low by default will provide no more accurate information than what is currently conveyed and hence doesn't seem to provide any pros. On the negative side, doing this will convey incorrect information. Why do you want possibly incorrect values in these templates? If anything, leaving them empty is an invitation to people who want to go through them and actually determine priority. I strongly object to setting these to low priority for no reason. RobHar (talk) 16:39, 22 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

But did you note the words "and if any article seems like it should have a higher priority I'll take care of that" above? Boris Tsirelson (talk) 16:54, 22 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

(ec) Yeah, I saw that. I was reacting to the sentence: "Unless there are objections, I think it makes sense to go through and set the priority on these to low (which is a sort of default priority)." I don't think that makes sense, I don't think that should be thought of as a default priority, and hence object. The fact that in the next sentence CBM states they will set a higher priority seems to me like it could be in direct contradiction to the sentence I have quoted, and I found it better to assume that CBM meant something by the sentence I quoted, so I responded to it. Furthermore, CBM did not outline the procedure by which they will accomplish their stated purpose; for all I know, they will first set every priority to low, and subsequently manually go through every article making appropriate adjustments, possibly moving on to something else before they finish. It happens. So, I figured I would signal my objection. I believe my objection was clearly stated: "I strongly object to setting these to low priority for no reason." RobHar (talk) 17:08, 22 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

Replied below. — Carl (CBM · talk) 17:25, 22 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

It used to be that unclassified was regarded as "lower than low" priority, I guess with the philosophy being that if no one bothered to classify its importance, than it wasn't significant enough to attract anyone's attention to it. There probably isn't a bright line between "low" priority and this kind of "insignificant" priority, and maybe it doesn't matter for the purposes that the template was intended to fulfill. Sławomir Biały (talk) 16:59, 22 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

If you're doing them manually, I don't mind, since you'll be reading them and using your judgment to determine whether they are really low importance or not. From your text it seems you're going to do this manually, so it's fine with me. (An automated Unassessed -> Low conversion isn't that great an idea though.) --Robin (talk) 17:04, 22 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

I would look at each article manually, but with a strong prejudice towards making the priority "low" unless I see a reason why the priority should be higher. Anybody could do that anyway, I just posted here since it's a significant number of articles. Also, I am only talking about articles that are already marked as stubs; that quality rating is another sign that the priority probably is low, since otherwise the articles would probably not still be stubs. I will review articles that are not marked as stubs on a case-by-case basis, but there are far fewer of these. And, like I said, everyone else is always free to change article ratings if they disagree with the present ratings. — Carl (CBM · talk) 17:13, 22 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

Re Robhar: The name is not very descriptive, but the idea is that the importance ratings should form a pyramid, with very few "Top" priority, a few "High" priority, some "Mid" priority, and a lot of "Low" priority. I am only talking about articles that are also marked as "stubs", and I will inspect the text of each article before I change the rating, just like I do when making edits by hand. So if I only get halfway through, I only get halfway through. And if anyone thinks I have misrated an article (for example, because they see the edit on their watchlist), I hope they change the rating to whatever they prefer.

At some point, somebody has to go through and actually assign ratings to all the math articles, and so I am planning to put in the time to get it done before the next release version (0.8) is selected next year. — Carl (CBM · talk) 17:25, 22 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

Sounds good to me. RobHar (talk) 17:31, 22 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

Right now, each article that is assessed with the maths rating template can be assigned a "field"; VeblenBot makes per-field tables that make it easy to browse by field. Here are a couple thoughts and requests for comment:

1. Right now, these fields do not have any categories corresponding to them. As part of work towards upgrading the WP 1.0 bot, I will need to add categories to the tagged talk pages. This should cause no changes to the output of the template, just extra categories a the bottom of the talk page.
2. Currently, each article with a maths rating template can only be put into one "field". This works for most articles, but occasionally there are articles that are hard to fit into this scheme. With the upgraded WP 1.0 bot, it should be perfectly possible to assign more than one field to an article. I have a mockup of this at User:CBM/Sandbox2. Is this something anyone else would be interested in?

— Carl (CBM · talk) 17:06, 22 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

I think 2. is a great idea. RobHar (talk) 17:09, 22 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

I also think 2 is a great idea. Recently I had a minor disagreement with CBM about whether complexity theory and computability theory articles should go under "discrete" or "foundations". Both viewpoints can be well-supported with arguments, so if we have the ability to add two fields, we could add both to such articles. However, this got me thinking on whether this is counter-productive (at least for these topics in particular). Perhaps it's just better to have a new field called "theoretical computer science" in this WikiProject to take care of such articles. --Robin (talk) 17:21, 22 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

I think that would also overlap with recursion theory inside mathematical logic, leading to the same issue of multiple fields. — Carl (CBM · talk) 17:30, 22 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

But with your new scheme, multiple fields are no longer the problem: the bigger problem are articles that don't fit comfortably into any of the existing fields. —David Eppstein (talk) 17:37, 22 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

Yes, those will always be a problem. If there were a large number of them, we could try to make new fields to catch them. But the present collection of fields is pretty inclusive: analysis, algebra, geometry, applied, probability and statistics, number theory, discrete, foundations (logic and set theory), mathematical physics, topology, and mathematicians.

I always thought the issue was with "general" and "basic" fields. For example, should empty set be "basic topics" or "set theory"?

Did you have some problematic articles in mind? — Carl (CBM · talk) 17:45, 22 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

Not specifically, but this was a follow-on to the question of how to classify articles in computational complexity theory. The other subject I've never really been clear on how to classify is order theory: the best fit seems to be foundations, but it also has strong elements of discrete math, algebra (lattice theory), and even point-set topology (finite preorders and finite topological spaces are essentially the same thing as each other, and we have many related equivalences between orders and spaces). —David Eppstein (talk) 19:23, 22 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

Perhaps we can define our fields in terms of MSC? If we must make an arbitrary choice when categorising something, we might as well do it uniformly. We can put all fundamental articles about orders into discrete math, into algebra or into topology; it doesn't really matter much. What we shouldn't do is distribute them randomly between these fields. Hans Adler 19:42, 22 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

Along the lines of the "lets make a uniformly arbitrary choice" suggestion, should P versus NP problem be in "discrete" or "foundations" (or both, in the future)? And what about Halting problem and Computability theory? Or do we just wait till we get the ability to add 2 fields, and add both? (Currently, the first two are discrete, the third one is foundations.) --Robin (talk) 03:50, 23 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

I've just created the List of topics named after Fibonacci. (So get busy improving it and linking to it from other articles.)

Guess what? There appears to be no List of topics named after Augustin-Louis Cauchy. We've got these for Riemann, Gauss, Euler, and various others (Hilbert?). (I created the one for Riemann? I'm not sure if I created the one for Euler.) Shall we compile a list of those that ought to be created? Michael Hardy (talk) 21:02, 22 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

I did not create the one for Euler.

I just checked and we don't have one for Hilbert. Michael Hardy (talk) 21:04, 22 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

We definitely need one for Erdős. There would be a large overlap with the listing in Erdős conjecture. —David Eppstein (talk) 21:06, 22 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

I'm pretty sure we've got one for Erdos. Michael Hardy (talk) 21:08, 22 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

List of things named after Paul Erdős. I created this one too. Michael Hardy (talk) 21:09, 22 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

....and should we have an article that is a list of these lists? It should of course include the ones that don't exist but ought to. And should we codify (gasp) the relevant notability standards? Michael Hardy (talk) 21:08, 22 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

I don't know whether we need a parent article, but I've made a parent category: Category:Lists of things named after mathematicians. I suppose it could have been "topics" instead of "things" but "things" is more consistent with its parent category, things named after people. —David Eppstein (talk) 21:32, 22 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

OK, I've put Cauchy there. But it's incomplete. Work on it. Michael Hardy (talk) 21:22, 22 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

... how 'bout Arthur Cayley? Michael Hardy (talk) 21:23, 22 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

A conspicuous thing about Category:Lists of things named after mathematicians is how many names are not there. Thomas Bayes and David Hilbert are conspicuous among them. Michael Hardy (talk) 21:50, 22 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

I think we should codify the relevant notability standards. --Robin (talk) 22:00, 22 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

Henri Poincaré is another one. Michael Hardy (talk) 23:45, 22 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

And Emmy Noether. RobHar (talk) 01:18, 23 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

And maybe Archimedes, Georg Cantor, Isaac Newton, Euclid, Albert Einstein, John von Neumann, Pierre-Simon Laplace and Pierre de Fermat. --Robin (talk) 03:12, 23 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

And Joseph Louis Lagrange. Jkasd 03:20, 23 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

I went ahead and made List of things named after Joseph Louis Lagrange. Jkasd 03:41, 23 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

The street in Paris named after Lagrange has its own short article on French Wikipedia. I wasn't sure it was worth an article on English Wikipedia. So I linked to the French article from the introductory paragraph, rather than including the street in the list. Michael Hardy (talk) 06:56, 23 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

And we already have List of things named after Albert Einstein. Jkasd 03:25, 23 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

Also, it's perhaps better if we don't add these articles to both "Lists of things named after people" and "Lists of things named after mathematicians" when the person in question was clearly a mathematician. Maybe it's fine to add to both if the person was not solely a mathematician, like Einstein or Newton. --Robin (talk) 03:55, 23 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

I admit I don't understand how categories are supposed to be very well, so I removed that category from that page. Jkasd 04:06, 23 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

If Category A is a member of Category B, the articles in A don't need to be in B. (Like all guidelines, this may fail in special cases.) Septentrionalis PMAnderson 20:01, 24 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

For Euclid, see Euclid (disambiguation) and Euclidean; there's plenty of material there. —David Eppstein (talk) 17:57, 23 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

While we're talking about maths ratings, I've been noticing loads of mathematics pages on Wikipedia that don't have the wikiproject math tag on their discussion page. I've been tagging whatever I come across but there has been quite a large number of them. Is there an easy way to identify math-related wikipedia pages that don't have the wikiproject math tag? Rybu (talk) 19:54, 23 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

The list of mathematics articles has articles that are picked up by mathbot. There are sometimes false positives, but not usually any false negatives of any importance. Sławomir Biały (talk) 20:02, 23 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

Sorry, I misread your question. ;-P Sławomir Biały (talk) 20:03, 23 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

There is no easy way with a web browser, but it's not hard to do by downloading the List of mathematics articles and also downloading a list of all pages with the maths rating tag. The issue is that, historically, we have agreed not to do mass bot-tagging runs to add a maths rating tag to all these. There are several reasons:

• We already have a list that is automatically maintained (List of mathematics articles), so we do not need the maths rating tag to identify math articles. Worse, the maths rating tags are manually maintained and so the automatic list is likely to be more complete.
• There is little benefit in just adding an "assessment" tag without actually filling it in. The lack of any assessment tag is perfectly good at conveying the fact that there is no assessment info; we don't need a category "unknown assessment data" as well.

I wasn't suggesting that. Nor have I ever done that. Rybu (talk) 20:14, 23 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

• To make the second bullet worse, when tags are added without assessment info, someone else has to go behind and fill in the parameters later. See a couple sections higher on this page, where I am discussing filling in about 1000 articles that were improperly tagged. Huge backlogs like that should be avoided.

So if you do want to tag lots of math article talkpages, please fill in the quality, priority, and field parameters as you go. — Carl (CBM · talk) 20:08, 23 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

For manually adding the maths rating template, I suggest enabling the "Display an assessment of an article's quality as part of the page header for each article." option in your settings if you haven't already done so. When an article hasn't been assessed at all, this will be displayed on the article page so you can see this without going to the talk page. (Most people probably already do this, I just thought I'd mention it for those who didn't know about this feature.) --Robin (talk) 21:01, 23 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

I should point out there is a benefit to tagging the articles that are most important to us: it helps them get selected for release versions of wikipedia. Wikipedia 0.7, a test release, is almost done, and the goal is to finish Wikipedia 0.8 soon after that now that the tools are more developed. So particularly articles that would be tagged as Top- or High-priority should have a project banner ASAP. But I think most of those are probably already tagged. — Carl (CBM · talk) 21:46, 23 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

But where is the benefit to having Wikipedia 0.8? Article assessment is one of the encyclopedia's most obvious failures. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 20:02, 24 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

The goal is to have the right collection of math articles on Wikipedia-on-a-CD and Wikipedia-on-a-DVD releases. That's the fundamental point of article assessment. — Carl (CBM · talk) 19:27, 27 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

To get back to the original issue, yes there is a backlog of math articles with no tag or tags with fields not filled in. (In fact there is a backlog of a lot of things, but that is more or less the nature of Wikipedia.) But in my experience it takes a human with some knowledge of the material to fill in the missing info correctly, and it's better have it left 'unknown' than filled in with the wrong value.--RDBury (talk) 01:47, 25 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

That's why we need editors to go through and fill them in by hand, as I am planning to do. — Carl (CBM · talk) 19:27, 27 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

I was going over the articles needing attention list and noticed that Topology was on the list of articles needing references. It does have Further reading and External links sections, but there are no inline citations and an article of that size and importance should certainly list some general references. For now, I demoted the class to Start quality but this is a high visibility article and it would probably be a good idea to find some good sources and do some fact checking.--RDBury (talk) 15:29, 24 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

I've renamed the "Further reading" section to "References", since that's what they are, and added Willard and Bourbaki as a general references, to accompany Kelly and the others. So the article does have references. What might be needed are some inline citations (particularly in the "History" section), for more granular sourcing. Paul August ☎ 15:59, 24 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

That's a good start. The Unreferenced tag was not appropriate but I did add a No footnotes tag instead. I agree that the History section is where it's most needed; most of the other material can probably be found in any standard textbook.--RDBury (talk) 16:15, 24 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

I agree with the demotion to start class, but there is no requirement that B class articles need to have inline citations. For example, while inline citations wouldn't hurt articles on narrow topics like measure (mathematics), general references are ordinarily enough in these cases to meet the demands of WP:V. There is, I believe, a time-honored consensus at WP:WPM on this point. Anyway, as Paul August points out, the history section could benefit from inline references, and the article overall is not really up to scratch. Sławomir Biały (talk) 17:56, 24 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

Codified in WP:SCG. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 20:03, 24 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

From the archives I see that this has been discussed over an year ago (here), but I'm not too clear about the situation. It seems currently that Category:GA-Class_mathematics_articles is a strict superset of Category:Bplus-Class_mathematics_articles. The first category actually includes all GA-class articles + Bplus-class articles. Why do we do this? This means all Bplus articles are in two categories. A related question is why do we have Bplus and B, instead of B and C (which would make us consistent with other wikiprojects)? For instance, see Talk:Gottfried_Leibniz where it is rated C-class under WikiProject Mathematics too, to make it consistent with all the other WPs which have assigned it C-class. --Robin (talk) 04:39, 25 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

GA is a meaningless noise; don't worry about it. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 07:44, 25 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

The way I understand it, Bplus is a math-specific rating; GA is a wikipedia rating. GA's are usually assigned based on article structure and certain requirements. That is good for history or biography articles, where the information contained within is relatively easy to grasp. The content of mathematics articles by nature are often inherently more difficult to grasp, and so we have our own rating that can be assigned, and that rating does not pay as much (if any) attention to the structure/citation points that GA does. As an aside, we had some bad experiences a few montha ago with a(n ostensibly) well-meaning editor doing GA review on a bunch of math articles, and de-listing them because they didn't exactly fit the GA mold, even though they were written in accordance with our own MoS. It is possible to get Math articles the GA tag. For example, I helped bring Maximum spacing estimation to GA and Actuary to FA. Although the latter is not such a good example, as the content is more along the lines of a bio/history article, even though it is properly a Math/Stats/Business article. -- Avi (talk) 07:56, 25 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

Unfortunately GA reviewers are as bad on historical and biographical articles, which is why I ignore the rating entirely. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 08:15, 25 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

The original intention of B+ was to identify those articles which were pretty close to the GA standard, as opposed to most B's which would have required more work. If it still serves a useful function I'm not sure. --Salix (talk): 08:24, 25 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

So Bplus is supposed to be our version of GA? (Or something close to that?) So what should an editor of a math article do when he/she believes that it is a very good article? Try to get class A rating? (Which is a rating internal to this project, I think, so it'll be evaluated by the WPM community.) --Robin (talk) 13:39, 25 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

The problem with A-ratings is that discussions stall for months on end, see Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/A-class rating#Current discussions. My personal opinion is that we should try to simultaneously get B+/A ratings from participants in this project as well as the GA rating from the general community; it's not impossible although it is frustrating, especially for the more technically advanced members of this project, of which I admit I am not. I think any article which is A-rated by the project is pretty much a shoe-in for FA; personally, I originally felt that I should not put a math article up for WP:FAC unless it is A-rated by the experts here, but as the A-rating process is all but defunct, I am rethinking that position. -- Avi (talk) 15:10, 25 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

I just changed Euclid from C class to Start since we don't use C. There are over 50 other articles with math rating C; I though it would be a good idea to check before changing all of them. I found some previous discussion about adding C for WPM (see archives 38 and 42) but nothing seems to have come from it. Any thoughts?--RDBury (talk) 18:22, 26 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

I would support adding class C. At the very least it makes us consistent with other WikiProjects. If that feels like too many distinct ratings, Bplus should be scrapped and moved down to B, and B becomes C. But if scrapping Bplus is not an option, I still support adding class C. --Robin (talk) 20:14, 26 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

There was some discussion about this some time ago. I don't think any meaningful consensus emerged. Sławomir Biały (talk) 22:23, 26 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

I don't see any benefit to the C class rating. Having a coarse rating system has the advantage of being easy to explain. So I feel like I can tell a difference between Start- and B-class articles, but I don't know how to tell the difference between Start- and C-class or C- and B-class.

The Bplus rating is a separate point; it is essentially a project-specific analogue of GA. — Carl (CBM · talk) 19:30, 27 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

I've started a discussion on Template talk:Infobox scientist (see here) about the possible removal of the "Religious stance" field from this template. This isn't exactly a mathematical issue, but many mathematician bio's use this template so I thought people here might like the chance to comment. Comments will be appreciated. Cheers, Ben (talk) 22:27, 26 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

The field should only be used where there is clear evidence the scientist identifies with some set of religious or philosophical beliefs rather than being a nominal catholic or whatever. SO I see no problem with it - religion of a scientist is a question people ask and if a scientist clearly says they are Buddist or an atheist or whatever that seems reasonable to me. Dmcq (talk) 00:13, 27 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

I'm basically opposed to info boxes in general. Paul August ☎ 02:13, 27 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

I don't think a religion or religious stance belongs in the infobox. since in most cases the information has no connection or influence on his work plus it smacks a bit like "religion versus science"-settings, which imho we should avoid. In the few cases where religion matters and scientist has a particular prominent position for or against religion and ir matters significantly in his life or work it is sufficient enough to deal with that in the article itself.--Kmhkmh (talk) 06:05, 27 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

Wikipedia isn't in the business of fixing the world by censoring things. People do go in for religion versus science and ask about the religion beliefs of scientists. That said the infobox description does say that field should only be filled in where the person clearly states their beliefs and identifies with them rather than it just being a nominal belief or affiliation. So saying atheism on Richard Dawkins is perfectly reasonable. The 'eclectic' on Einstein is rather a bit more problematic but his religion has been a matter of intense interest. The 'Lutheran' on Gauss is I feel wrong unless someone can produce something saying he identified with it, so a {{cn}} would be justified there. Dmcq (talk) 08:39, 27 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

Nobody suggested censorship, the question was about relevant information and the religious affiliation or lack thereof is irrelevant information about most scientists. If you have an infobox, then it should contain/summarize the most important characteristic you can state for most scientists and religious affiliation or stance is not among them.--Kmhkmh (talk) 10:44, 27 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

I feel that infoboxes, if they exist, should contain information that is relevant to large classes of scientists (if not all), and I don't understand why religious stance is any more relevant, in general, than say, the scientists favourite country. In both the religious stance and favourite country cases there may be exceptional articles where it is relevant. But surely that should be discussed in the article text in those exceptional cases, as opposed to having an infobox that is designed for a large class of people containing a field for information that is not relevant for much of that class of people. Cheers, Ben (talk) 09:01, 27 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

+1 I can live with or without infoboxes, but infoboxes containing largely irrelevant or even private information make no sense to me.--Kmhkmh (talk) 10:40, 27 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

I'm with Paul August on the general point. But obviously any information about religious beliefs must be first verifiable (you need to be able to document religious affiliation as accurately as anything else), and a salient point about the person. Otherwise the information has no business in the article, in an infobox or anywhere else. Charles Matthews (talk) 10:16, 27 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

Which is basically what the template says and I fully agree with that. I think infoboxes are a reasonable way of putting together structured information about subjects. It may be fairly rudimentary but it is the easiest way for a robot to extract data like famous mathematicians born in Germany between 1800 and 1850. Wikipedia is in the business of making information like that freely available. Dmcq (talk) 11:38, 27 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

Btw the main purpose for an infobox is still just a short "summary" for the reader. If the purpose is just to other bots and software access to rudimentary data you can use invisible templates(see Wikipedia:Persondata for instance)

True but I can't say I'm very happy with that. It stops editors seeing the data and correcting it. There's currently a debate going on about making infoboxes more accessible to databases at Wikipedia talk:Requests for comment/infobox template coherence and that is the better way to go I think. Lots of humans like bits of information to be accessible in a structured fashion too. Dmcq (talk) 12:17, 27 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

Let me expand a bit on my general objection expressed above. Infoboxes, If they exist at all, should only exist as an adjunct to the article. It shouldn't contain any content not judged important or relevant enough to be in the article itself, and It should certainly not be used as a place for content instead of the article. Infoboxes are inherently redundant. So for example if religion isn't mentioned in the article (probably true for the vast majority of our articles) it shouldn't be in the infobox. And for those rare occasions where religion will be judged to be relevant enough to be mentioned in the article, something as complex and nuanced as "religious stance" will often not be able to be summarized meaningfully and accurately by being squashed into the narrow confines of a field in an infobox. Cookie cutter, baseball card like infoboxes may have there place, but probably not much of one. Paul August ☎ 17:14, 27 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

+1 well said--Kmhkmh (talk) 18:22, 28 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

I also agree entirely. Ozob (talk) 22:21, 29 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

Thanks everyone for the input. This has now been removed. Now that most articles using the template will have a superfluous 'religion' field, I'm wondering if anyone know of a bot that can clean up the articles using the template? Or should it just be left? Cheers, Ben (talk) 22:32, 30 November 2009 (UTC).Reply

Came across Additive K-theory during my new page patrol. Right now, the article consists of just the formula and nothing else (no explanation, etc.). It definitely can't stay as it is, but I know nothing about this topic to expand the article. Anyone here able to take a look? Singularity42 (talk) 06:42, 27 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

Certainly the article should not be deleted (note that if you wish to delete a mathematics article, it would be wise to perform a google scholar search first) - [3]. Politely speaking, I am unable to understand where in the article lies a "formula". Rather, it is an isomorphism. Without claiming expertise on the subject, I am quite sure that it is an important area in mathematics (compare also to algebraic K-theory). --PST 12:18, 27 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

Oh, I fully admit I made a mistake with my PROD (I'm not familiar with the subject, and screwed up my Google search) - but that's nothing to do with my request for something more to be added to the article. Anyway, that has been done now, so the issue is now resolved. Singularity42 (talk) 15:50, 27 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

↦ ≡ ≫ ≈ ∩

Such things as the above are occasionally found in Wikipedia articles. They are not among the things found next to the word "Insert" nor the one found next to "Symbols" in the menu that contains those items and also "Wiki Markup", "Greek", "Cyrillic", etc. Where are they found? Are they tabulated somewhere? Michael Hardy (talk) 19:54, 27 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

You can probably find them in the various Unicode tables, e.g. Unicode mathematical operators.--RDBury (talk) 20:08, 27 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

(ec) The big list is at User:KSmrq/Chars. There is also a somewhat less comprehensive list at List of mathematical symbols. These and other resources should probably be added to our project via Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Editor resources. Sławomir Biały (talk) 20:09, 27 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

Here is one more: http://htmlhelp.com/reference/html40/entities/symbols.html – not comprehensive, but I think everything on this list is fairly well supported in web browsers.. — Miym (talk) 20:36, 27 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

The big one is probably the \mapsto one (↦), which lacks an html shorthand (no ↦). I propose the template {{mapsto}} to handle this, since I see a lot of ad hoc <math>\mapsto</math> to achieve this. Sławomir Biały (talk)

I have created the {{mapsto}} template, but now I have a different difficulty. How does one find instances of <math>\mapsto</math>, e.g., as in a b, where html is used except for the mapsto glyph? These should probably all be replaced by the unicode equivalent. Sławomir Biały (talk) 15:26, 29 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

Querying a database dump is one option. AutoWikiBrowser is another. Algebraist 16:04, 29 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

I can run searches against the database dumps if you ask. I searched for the regular expression /<math> *\\mapsto/ in the dump from 2009-10-17 and found the following 32 articles. — Carl (CBM · talk) 23:56, 29 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

Approximately finite dimensional C*-algebra - Bilinear map - Cancellation property - Compact-open topology - Differential geometry of surfaces - Dragon curve - Functor - Galois connection - Graded C*-algebra - Group action - Group ring - Hereditary C*-subalgebra - Integral domain - Kaplansky density theorem - Koszul complex - Lie group - Light's associativity test - Multibrot set - Natural transformation - Noncommutative integral - Permutation group - Polynomial code - Resolution (logic) - Riemannian connection on a surface - Scalar (mathematics) - Similar matrix - Spectrum of a C*-algebra - Table of mathematical symbols - Transfer principle - Vector bundle - Vector flow - Zappa-Szép product

I have proposed David Foreman (mathematician) for deletion (PROD). If you feel Dr. Foreman does meet the standards at WP:PROF, please remove the proposed deletion notice, or discuss the issue on the article's talk page. — Carl (CBM · talk) 01:19, 28 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

Hi all, I was wondering if we could get some help from this project. I'm working on the Wikipedia:Disambiguation pages with links project, and one of the most-linked dabs is Limit. This comes almost completely via the redirects Convergence (mathematics) and Limit (mathematics). This is a tricky one, and we don't want to get it wrong. Could someone help us point these articles to the correct target? You can find the lists here and here. Thanks! --JaGa^talk 03:33, 28 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

The problem here stems from the recent undiscussed redirection of Limit (mathematics), which heretofore operated as an overview article on limits in mathematics, and to which Convergence (mathematics) used to redirect. I've restored the previous status quo until we've discussed this and reached some consensus as to what we should do if anything. In the meantime we should review the links to Limit (mathematics) and see if some ought to be more specifically directed. and redirect the links to Convergence (mathematics) as appropriate. Paul August ☎ 04:11, 28 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

I've done a bit of link sorting. Lot's more to do. Paul August ☎ 05:36, 28 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

Thanks much for the help, Paul. --JaGa^talk 02:07, 29 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

I stumbled across this random mathematics page that was posted to the English Wikipedia in Spanish--Variedad Nehari. I'll be the first to admit that I don't know a thing about advanced mathematics and frankly don't have the least clue what the article is talking about. I gave it a quick translation to English, but it definitely needs some attention by a mathematician for accuracy's sake. I'd like to move the article to an English name, but have no idea what the real name of the concept is, much less whether it's valid or original research (one of the infoboxes added by the original editor raised a bit of a flag with that when the "creator" name matched his username, although there are references cited).

I noticed there's been page requests for Nehari theorem and the Nehari extension problem on the "Missing science pages" list, and the original author seems to translate it to the "Nehari manifold" when he posted the image... Admittedly trawling Google and investigating the results still leaves me lost as to where it may belong, or if it belongs at all. If anyone might be able to give this article a better name, or let me know if it should be suggested for deletion or what... I'd appreciate it. :) Thanks! Tehae (talk) 00:52, 29 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

It looks like someone already created a redirect moved the page to Nehari manifold. The original article should have been posted to the Spanish wikipedia since it doesn't exist yet there. My understanding is the Variedad is the correct translation for Manifold.--RDBury (talk) 02:13, 30 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

For manifold, or for variety? (Strangely, we don't seem to have an article on varieties, in the sense of things that are almost manifolds but can have singularities and boundaries. There's algebraic variety and abstract variety, but neither of those is quite the concept I'm talking about. Or maybe the latter one even is; it's hard to tell.`) --Trovatore (talk) 20:52, 30 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

Nehari manifold is what English language sources call it. Sławomir Biały (talk) 21:44, 30 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

Also, it's good to keep in mind that in romance languages, "manifold" translates to the cognate of "variety". Our "variety" translates to the cognates of "analytic variety" or "algebraic variety". Ozob (talk) 00:25, 1 December 2009 (UTC)Reply

I've tagged Variedad Nehari as {{db-g6}} since there is no need for a redirect from a Spanish translation of the title. Sławomir Biały (talk) 23:25, 30 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

I went ahead and untagged it -- as I understand it, redirects don't really need to be "needed". They just need to be plausibly useful, and not harmful. I think this one meets both those criteria. --Trovatore (talk) 23:45, 30 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

I'm not sure what the logic is in having redirects from foreign language titles. That seems to be what interwiki's are good for, not redirects. Otherwise we should have much more high-profile titles like variedad → manifold, análisis complejo → complex analysis, and so forth. Maybe this is hypothetically useful, but it is clearly absurd. Sławomir Biały (talk) 00:00, 1 December 2009 (UTC)Reply

There are lots of redirects that serve no really compelling purpose. So what? It's obviously not worthwhile to add the redirects you mention, but I see no great advantage in deleting them either. --Trovatore (talk) 00:16, 1 December 2009 (UTC)Reply

The mathworld article [4] says is an obsolete term for Tensor product. If that is the case then the article Dyadic tensor should just redirect there instead of having it's own article. Is there some context where Dyadic is still in current usage or is this something that can be added to another article as an aka?--RDBury (talk) 02:27, 30 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

I think the article should not be merged to tensor product, although perhaps it should be moved to dyadic notation. Firstly, the fact that this term doesn't appear in any modern treatments of tensor products (that I am aware of at least) would rather strongly argue against tensor product as a suitable merge targent. Secondly, the mathworld article, the entry in Arfken and the entry in Jeffreys and Jeffreys establish notability. Moreover, there is even a recent book entitled "Generalized Vector and Dyadic Analysis" published by Oxford University Press. The target audience seems to be engineers rather than mathematicians. Thirdly, there is no rule that an encyclopedia should only cover things that are in contemporary use. It is obviously an important task of an encyclopedia to have many articles on things that would be regarded as obsolete. At any rate, I don't think dyadics are entirely obsolete, so this is more of a counterpoint to your point. Sławomir Biały (talk) 13:54, 30 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

I disagree with a lot of what you're saying but since you can cite a reference that the term Dyadic is current in engineering math I'm not going to argue the rest. The article popped up on my radar because it had no references, so thanks for locating one and adding it to the article. It's not really my specialty so I can't say if 'dyadic notation' is the best move target, but it seems better than 'dyadic tensor'. From what I'm reading in the article and Mathworld, a dyad is a type of tensor so the article name is like saying 'tensoric tensor'.--RDBury (talk) 14:59, 30 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

Actually, this article needs to get merged with dyadics and dyadic product, since they all treat exactly the same object but with slightly different notation. Any suggestions? objections? Sławomir Biały (talk) 18:56, 30 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

A dyad is not just any tensor. It is a rank 2 tensor written in vector rather than tensor notation. So it deserves its own article. JRSpriggs (talk) 02:56, 1 December 2009 (UTC)Reply

I assume you are replying to the original post, not my own post. I agree that dyadics deserve their own article. They do not deserve three more or less identical articles, however. Sławomir Biały (talk) 09:00, 1 December 2009 (UTC)Reply

I think it should stay a separate article but support the mergers. Jason Quinn (talk) 16:58, 1 December 2009 (UTC)Reply

Hey, does anyone have Springerlink access? If so, could they email me the various Springerlink papers linked to on my userpage? Thanks, Nousernamesleft (talk) 23:46, 30 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

Please don't solicit copyright violations on Wikipedia. Ozob (talk) 00:27, 1 December 2009 (UTC)Reply

Oh; I'm sorry, I didn't realize it was a copyright violation. Never mind then. Nousernamesleft (talk) 02:26, 1 December 2009 (UTC)Reply

In the U.S. at least, the common wisdom is that personal copies of articles may be legally created to further non-profit scholarly research. But since the user above doesn't have an email address on their user page, and the "email this user" link does not accept attachments, it would be very hard to fulfill this request. — Carl (CBM · talk) 02:31, 1 December 2009 (UTC)Reply

Is editing Wikipedia a "non-profit scholarly research"? It's clearly non-profit... -- Taku (talk) 02:57, 1 December 2009 (UTC)Reply

I'd say so. But that doesn't make it ok to put up commercial intellectual property in a way that makes it accessible to anyone. Emailing a copy to the individual user seems more acceptable, and some journal publishers' terms of use seem to explicitly allow it, but Springer's don't seem to. Reading through their terms, and going by analogy from what they say is ok for interlibrary loan requests, it seems the most they will allow is mailing a physical printed copy of the paper. —David Eppstein (talk) 03:14, 1 December 2009 (UTC)Reply

It is not clear to me whether a SpringerLink subscriber is allowed to help with these kinds of requests. There are numerous conditions in the contract ("limited amounts", "incidental and non-systematic manner", "non commercial scientific communication", "not for re-transmission", etc.), and IANAL. However, you can always contact the original authors of the papers! In many cases (including Springer's copyright transfer agreements that I have recently signed), authors retain the permission to post their own versions of the articles on their own web sites. If the authors haven't done this yet, maybe you could email them and ask why this is the case; it would solve your problem and also help everyone else who is interested in those articles. — Miym (talk) 17:28, 1 December 2009 (UTC)Reply

All right, I'll try this. Thanks! And oh, I hadn't realized that the Wikipedia email system doesn't allow for attachments. Whoops. Nousernamesleft (talk) 21:47, 1 December 2009 (UTC)Reply

Since this is one of the bigger projects, and that a couple of Wikipedia-Books are math-related, could this project adopt the book-class? This would really help WikiProject Wikipedia-Books, as the WP Math people can oversee books like Mathematics much better than we could as far as merging, deletion, content, and such are concerned. Eventually there probably will be a "Books for discussion" process, so that would be incorporated in the Article Alerts. I'm placing this here rather than on the template page since several taskforces would be concerned.

There's an article in this week Signpost if you aren't familiar with Wikipedia-Books and classes in general. Thanks. Headbomb {^ταλκ_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 21:06, 1 December 2009 (UTC)Reply