Talk:Andrew M. Gleason

message: says it was 'For "Natural Coordinate Systems," an address before the American Mathematical Society,' while Bolker p.1236 (r col) says it was for H5th. EEng (talk) 19:56, 5 April 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Basis for N-C prize 

message: Initial list by EEng (talk) 20:19, 5 April 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Parking place for random article thoughts 

message: *I'm not sure it's appropriate to call Gleason a frog. From all I know he was of Swiss-Irish ancestry.
*More seriously, I don't see anything explicitly characterizing him as a Dysonian frog. While I completely agree it's the right category for him, I don't see how this can escape being WP:SYNTH.
**This is a shame, since a great hook would be: DYK, that colleague X called mathematician AG "more of a frog than a bird" in a national publication? (But this does give one a good idea for a new article, on birds/frogs, that's a cinch for DYK...)
EEng (talk) 20:59, 5 April 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: My feeling is that it's not too much of a leap of deduction to prevent including it in the article, but it isn't solidly enough sourced to use as a DYK hook. Mostly I wanted to say something about his research style; this was just a colorful way of phrasing it. —David Eppstein (talk) 21:34, 5 April 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: First let me say I appreciate your apparent good grace about my somewhat aggressive copyediting, but do speak up if I go too far. Now then, as to frogs... Having read Dyson in detail now, I have to say I think that, beyond being what I really think is SYNTH, I'm just not sure I agree. Dyson says, "People who solve famous unsolved problems may win big prizes, but people who start new programs are the real pioneers." No doubt AMG falls on the problems side of this, looking strictly at his research, but outside of research proper, was he not very much a bird? Even though your text is within the Research section I think it sells him short. Can we agree to drop it, at least for now? I think there's some other way to express the essential idea but I'm still trying to pull together Teaching. EEng (talk) 23:44, 24 April 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: But Dyson's classification, and the section of the article here in which we mention it, are both purely about research. I don't necessarily agree with Dyson's opinion about who is most innovative, but I didn't include that part in what I said about Dyson. —David Eppstein (talk) 00:02, 25 April 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: As I said, I recognize it's in the Research section but nonetheless laymen can easily misinterpret the breadth of the applicability. But more fundamental is that (to me at least) it seems obvious this is synthesis precisely on the order of the plagiarism example at WP:SYNTH. And I don't even see the predicate facts in the sources. Lots of people say Gleason was a terrific problem-solver, liked to come to grips with the fundamentals, but who says he didn't also have attributes we can match to Dyson's birds? Are you and I miscommunicating somehow? -- this seems perfectly plain to me but perhaps I'm just blind to something.  EEng (talk) 01:55, 25 April 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: The source we're using for this, the "50+ years" piece, says explicitly "Andy was a problem solver more than a theory builder". That's exactly the same as Dyson's dichotomy. —David Eppstein (talk) 02:13, 25 April 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: But see, this is why synth is a no-no. Dyson says all kinds things about birds, none of which are particularly close to "theory building". You honestly don't see why this is synth?  Please take a look at the plagiarism example, if you haven't already. Honestly I'm not trying to make fuss but I'm genuinely intrigued now. EEng (talk) 03:01, 25 April 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: Dyson says all sorts of things *that we don't repeat in this article* and that don't detract from his classification of mathematicitians into problem solvers vs theory builders, a classification that is repeated by the 50+ years article in the particular case of Gleason. All we are saying in this article is that Dyson called problem solvers "frogs" and theory builders "birds"; there seems nothing problematic to me about that. —David Eppstein (talk) 03:10, 25 April 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Froggishness 

message: Need to figure out if his preference for Hollis Professor of Mathematicks was officially adopted. If so, how do we handle that in article, esp. wrt the little "academic chair" box at the bottom? EEng (talk) 23:46, 6 April 2013 (UTC)
thread_title: Mathematicks

message: There's a list of his students at  p.1262. Ideally each of them who is himself/herself notable should be listed in the infobox (actually, should check WP guidelines on this), or even discussed in the article if appropriate. A good start on this would be to check who on the list has a WP article of his/her own. Any volunteers? EEng (talk) 03:23, 8 April 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: I think it's simpler to only list bluelinked students in the infobox — that's the usual standard for Wikipedia lists. But it's not hard to make this match up with your looser "each who is notable should be listed" idea, by making a short article for each one who is notable but doesn't yet have one. Judging by number of doctoral students and by citations in Google scholar, Richard Rochberg looks plausible as next in line. —David Eppstein (talk) 02:36, 5 May 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Notable students? 

message: I added a new subsection on coding theory this evening, inspired by a combination of events: (1) using the same source that I had used here (More Mathematical People) to improve another article, Irving Kaplansky, (2) coming across the article on Vera Pless in very sad shape, as part of a sequence of small edits I've been making to many articles, and (3) while fixing up Pless' article, learning that she had been inspired both by Kaplansky and by Gleason. I think the new section is too jargon-heavy but I don't know those aspects of coding theory well enough to explain them in clearer language, so help making it more accessible would be appreciated. Also, we might consider whether Gleason–Prange theorem should be an article (it's currently just a redirect) and whether we should have an article on Gleason polynomials. —David Eppstein (talk) 05:59, 6 May 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: Your continued hard work, and the excellent photos contributed by the subject's wife and others, make me think that FA might be in the future, with moderate additional work. EEng (talk) 04:19, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: I think the usual order is GA first, but we may be close to ready to try that one. —David Eppstein (talk) 04:34, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: Just wanted to confirm that you are in it for the long haul -- not that I had any doubts.  There's much to add (outside of Research, for sure) before we need to think about reviews. EEng (talk) 05:04, 13 May 2013 (UTC)

text: I mean, I'd like to see this TFA someday, for his sake, but everything I've heard about GA, and what little I've seen, is unpleasant. Let's keep the idea in the back of our minds and someday the spirit will move us. Thanks for being willing to stand up earlier -- this mophead has pulled this with me before. EEng 17:02, 22 September 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Coding theory 

message: It is stated incorrectly that Gleason's Theorem can be used to repair von Neumann's faulty proof that quantum mechanics cannot support hidden variables. It is further stated that Bell showed this. This is also false. In fact, Bell showed that Gleason's Theorem COULD NOT BE USED TO FIX VON NEUMANN'S PROOF. I refer you Bell's critique of von Neumann's proof. No one familiar with recent work on quantum mechanics would make this mistake. Hidden variable theories appear abundantly in papers published in refereed journals. -- unsigned by 74.83.182.22
:Maybe Paul Chernoff is losing his familiarity with recent work on quantum mechanics, because at  p.1257 we have:
::Bell’s argument based on Gleason’s theorem avoids the unjustified assumption of additivity of expectation values for noncommuting operators.
:-- though this stops short of claiming to "repair von N.'s faulty proof", but that isn't what the article says anyway. If you think the article can express things better, by all means go ahead, but stop sticking in this uncontextualized link you keep adding. EEng (talk) 05:19, 4 July 2013 (UTC)
thread_title: Gleason's Theorem

message: You still haven't explained why "Gleason polynomial" should be in the infobox here, in either  or . As I , "Gleason polynomial" gives only about 5 distinct Google results on the topic. Gleason is notable for many things, but his iteratively-defined polynomials are not among them.As a side note, please explain why something should be kept in an edit summary; refuting edit summaries on technicalities is different that providing an actual reason for inclusion and the most recent edit summary  doesn't address anything. — MarkH21talk 05:00, 6 January 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm going to let you battle this out with . EEng 05:16, 6 January 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: My short answer: because it's a topic sufficiently notable to be in the title of a reference (and probably notable enough for a separate Wikipedia article), and we should be comprehensive in collecting topics in the scientific literature named after the subject. (Some people with particularly long lists of things named after them, like say Paul Erdős, have separate articles just for those lists, but we're not to that point yet with Gleason.) We shouldn't expect or require that all of these things be equally famous, merely that they be famous enough, and I think this one is. —David Eppstein (talk) 05:21, 6 January 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree that we should be comprehensive in collecting topics named after the subject in mentions in the article, but I don't think that the infobox is necessarily a place for this. I disagree that Gleason polynomials are very notable; there's very little literature on it, besides the two refs used in the article and the five additional Google hits. It's not a major issue though and I seem to be in a local minority here. — MarkH21talk 05:37, 6 January 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: Notability is the criterion for a standalone article; it's not the criterion for article content (or infobox content, for that matter) -- see WP:NNC. I see 5 pages of refs in Gscholar . EEng 06:37, 6 January 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, I know; the point on notability was in response to DE's statement . In general though, my point is still that Gleason polynomials are not what Gleason is notable for in addition to being unnotable themselves. — MarkH21talk 06:45, 6 January 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: Shame on you, DE. But Gleason polynomials are undoubtedly notable. Anyway, are we done?  EEng 07:56, 6 January 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: The small list of publications that mention "Gleason polynomials" doesn't convince me that they are notable in the WP-sense, particularly since many of those 48 sources only mention them in passing and/or have few citations, but this is moving a bit off-topic. It doesn't seem like any of our opinions are really changing and I'm in a local minority, so I think so. — MarkH21talk 09:38, 6 January 2020 (UTC)

text: Re "I don't think that the infobox is necessarily a place for this": if infoboxes aren't the place for collecting out-of-context lists of stuff sort of related to the article topic but with no sense of which ones are the important ones, what are they good for at all? —David Eppstein (talk) 08:07, 6 January 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree to some extent, with the caveat that the lists in infoboxes should still have selection criteria like usual list articles. In this case I would say that the known_for should only apply to contributions that are themselves notable or part of what makes the person notable. This seems to be reflected in the Template:Infobox person documentation which describes the known_for parameter as  — MarkH21talk 09:38, 6 January 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: A concept referenced -- using a single name consistently -- in 50 papers (found by falling off a log) over 50 years, is unquestionably notable. EEng 14:51, 6 January 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Gleason polynomial 

message: Briefly defined on p.14 of Pless (p.25? of the pdf) of . Possibly best treated in the article on Enumerator polynomial. EEng 14:56, 6 January 2020 (UTC)
thread_title: More