Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mathematics/Archive/2007/Oct

message: The Bailey Notation article is up for AfD at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Bailey Notation with concerns over its veracity, any light on this topic from a mathematician will probably be more than welcome and appreciated. Thanks. KTo288 01:43, 3 October 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: This issue seems to have been resolved, with the consensus being delete.  Please be aware that further comments on the AfD page may have the effect of biting a newcomer. Jim 03:27, 3 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Bailey Notation 

message: Degrees of freedom (statistics) is a mess.  It will take time to fix.  The statement that d.f. is always one less than the sample size is nonsense. the "n − r − 1" identity is just as bad.
: 
I'll be back..... Michael Hardy 04:25, 4 October 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Would it help if we had a central generic decent treatment of degrees of freedom, of which the various current d.f. articles (Degrees of freedom (physics and chemistry), Degrees of freedom (engineering) and Degrees of freedom (statistics)) are then "spinouts". Currently Degrees of freedom (physics and chemistry) contains the statement: Note that "degrees of freedom" has a different meaning in the context of engineering and machines. I think, though, that it is essentially the same meaning, but applied in a different context. For Simultaneous equations it would not hurt to be able to refer to this notion either.  --Lambiam 06:16, 4 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  What a mess!! 

message: Here are some unreferenced mathematical articles that have been tagged since June 2006.  
*Fixed-point lemma for normal functions  Done
*Free Boolean algebra  Done
*Geometric analysis  Done
I thought editors might be interested in finding at least one general reference for each article.  Thanks.--BirgitteSB 19:20, 5 October 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I did the first two, and Geometry Guy did the third one. — Carl (CBM · talk) 20:09, 5 October 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks!--BirgitteSB 21:41, 5 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  [[Wikipedia:Unreferenced articles]] 

message: Please see Talk:Metric (mathematics)#Content syncronizing. `'Míkka 17:52, 8 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Metric": Content syncronizing 

message: Banned User:Germanium, also known as Archetype, is pretty much a single-issue editor whose repetitive claim is that 1/0 is the theory of everything, or some such nonsense. I cannot decide if he's serious, but it doesn't really matter. Need some eyes on theory of everything and 1/0 and any other contributions of this IP address. --Trovatore 23:33, 8 October 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Update: The IP has been blocked for three weeks by User:JForget. --Trovatore 23:47, 8 October 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Thank goodness, he also removes see also sections as part of his pattern. If you see him, report him immediately to WP:AIV.—Cronholm144 02:57, 9 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Germanium is back 

message: The username Ademh (talk · contribs) was created today, and immediately the owner started adding a long-winded and completely incorrect section to Gödel's incompleteness theorems. Keep an eye out for edits by this person to other pages, in case the account is not as single-purpose as it seems to be. — Carl (CBM · talk) 15:21, 9 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Another user to watch for 

message: A use manged to move Wikipedia:Requested articles/Mathematics to QZ factorization. I tried to revert the move but its now living at Requested articles/Mathematics (wrong namespace). Could someone with admin privilages please put it back where it belongs. --Salix alba (talk) 15:33, 9 October 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Done. Kusma (talk) 15:36, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

text: And I deleted QZ factorization, which was basically empty. Kusma (talk) 15:39, 9 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Wikipedia:Requested articles/Mathematics 

message: This article has been tagged for cleanup since Nov 2005.  Could someone knowledgeable look at it and see if there are still issues or if has been fixed sometime in the past two year and the tag was simply left on.--BirgitteSB 18:21, 10 October 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Also Maxwell stress tensor is in the same category.--BirgitteSB 18:26, 10 October 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Both articles are miserable, but the latter is a stub: there's essentially no content to clean up there, so I have removed the tag. Geometry guy 20:06, 10 October 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I thought is was weird to tag stubs with .  I am going to leave a note on he template talk about making note of that in under usage.--BirgitteSB 20:10, 10 October 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I can confirm that the articles still needs cleanup, or possibly merging into characteristic polynomial.  (For what it's worth, is there any other context in which "tensor" means "rank 2 covarient tensor" without any further clarification?)  — Arthur Rubin |  (talk) 23:46, 10 October 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Actually, despite the first typo, those are rank three tensors. But I agree that it should be cleaned up; although an explanatory example is not a bad idea. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 01:55, 11 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  [[Invariants of tensors]] 

message: I have been told that this project is considering creating an assessment unit. If any of you would like, I have performed the requisite banner changes and category and page creation often enough to be confident in my ability to create functional counterparts here. I am myself not exactly the world's foremost expert on mathematics articles, so I doubt I would be of much use expect in regards to biographies of mathematicians and the like, but would be willing to offer what assistance I could. Also, having a banner which substantially parallels that of the WP:1.0 group would certainly make it easier for important mathematics articles to be included in the various release versions of wikipedia being created and considered. In any event, if anyone would want an assessment unit created, just leave me a note below or one my user page and I should be able to attend to it in no more than a day or so. John Carter 21:40, 9 October 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: By "assessment unit", are you referring to something like this? If so, then WPM already has one, and has had for quite some time! Your help would be most welcome anyway. Geometry guy 16:03, 10 October 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Yeah, that's it. I didn't say here that I was real bright, and it looks like I proved that in this instance. I guess now the question would be which articles you all believe should be tagged with the banner. Generally, I've seen a few arguments elsewhere that it works best if the project says "any articles within Category X are within the scope of this project". I note the existing "scope" section, while very understandable, makes it hard to decide whether a given article is one you would consider within your scope or not. One way of doing it, particularly with the number of banners out there, would be to tag all the articles within a given category, but make the ones that are specifically mathematical, Automorphic number, for instance, among the higher importance articles to this project. If you could give me a clear idea of the scope, I could at least start tagging the articles, and assessing some of those which I think I might have any competence in. John Carter 16:12, 10 October 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Some time ago we decided against mass automatic tagging of articles, perfering the human touch instead, allowing articles to be graded and comments added. There are something like 17,000 mathematics articles so rather than tag the whole lot we have tended to concentrated on the more important ones mathematically, which are the ones most in need of improvement. In the large world of mathematics articles Automorphic number ranks pretty low, I'd probably give it a low priority. As for categorys we do have List of mathematics categories which include most of the  mathematical categories. That could be a place to start on assessment work. --Salix alba (talk) 16:42, 10 October 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm also against automatic tagging. The list of mathematics articles (now about 17700 of them) is mostly autogenerated from the list of mathematics categories, and contains a large number of articles that are really not worth assessing. At Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Wikipedia 1.0/Importance I suggested the goal of assessing approximately half of the mathematics articles. An assessment drive a few months ago (mostly by Cronholm and myself) made a modicum of progress and the number of assessed articles is now about 3000. We did not, however, touch the List of mathematicians, which I believe accounts for about 3000 of the 17700 articles above, but maybe Oleg Alexandrov has better figures. Given John Carter's comments above, this would seem to me to be a great place to start. Very few mathematician articles are assessed, and many of these articles are rather stubby. Some help with them would be of great benefit to the project. Geometry guy 17:24, 10 October 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I would not propose automatic tagging in any event. Also, regarding the article I mentioned above, I realize it probably isn't particularly important to this project. The down side, unfortunately, is that it is probably even less important to any other project. Would the members of this project be interested in tagging such articles anyway, given that, despite their relative lack of importance to this project, it is possibly the only project to which they are at all important? Adding a banner in such cases at least establishes a link to a group of people who might be able to assist in the event that there is any sort of difficult or even intractable argument about the content of the article. John Carter 14:27, 11 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Assessment 

message: A quick question for those "in the know".  I've noticed a lot of cleanup of Wikipedia:Requested_articles/Mathematics that consists of removing blue links.  Unfortunately, some of those blue links appear simply because someone has created a redirect to another article that mentions the topic in passing.  This does not, in my opinion, obviate the need for a separate article on the requested topic.  I believe that these redirects are a good temporary solution; it's better that these link to some article where at least some information can be found.  But how then do we maintain requests for articles that should be full articles in their own right?  Or is Wikipedia:Requested_articles/Mathematics not the right place for this?  VectorPosse 02:15, 12 October 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree.  I seem to recall having created such redirects recently, precisely because they were better than nothing but not as good as an actual article. Michael Hardy 02:18, 12 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Requested articles 

message: In the past, many topics in logic had been neglected because they were philosophical logic topics which had been disincluded from the foundations field of WP:MATH. Then there was controversy over which articles would be included after the creation of WP:LOGIC, a project distinct from WP:MATH. WP:PHILO has now reorganized so as to accommodate articles from all the branches of philosophy in its assessment program, similar to the way WP:MATH does it. There is a tag "logic=yes" in the project banner which allows us to organize these articles similar to the way "field=foundations" works for WP:MATH. WP:PHILO has designated WikiProject Logic as its "Logic task force." The Math and Phil. projects keep two separate assessment worklists so as not to pollute each other's assessment with articles that are not relevant to the larger project. The Philosophy banner allows an article to participate in more than one field in the assessment, so there is no problem with articles getting lumped into the inappropriate field.
I think it would be nice if the members of WP:MATH interested in mathematical logic, set theory and foundations of mathematics would officially designate WikiProject Logic as the "Logic task force" of WP:MATH and do all the things within its own organization consistent with that designation. This would mean calling WP:LOGIC a descendant project of WP:MATH jointly with WP:PHILO. For more information about "task force-ization," see WP:REFORM. I guess you could call it the "Foundations task force" or whatever. I think this move would make some of our members more comfortable since the logic project has recently become more closely integrated with the philosophy project. Our goal should be for there to be as small an overlap (of maths rating|field=foundations and philosophy|logic=yes tagged articles) as is appropriate. 
Oleg, is there a way to produce an assessment table for the math foundations field that appears in a way similar to the way the  philosophy logic task force assessment works? I would like to display them next to each other at WP:LOGIC. Be well, Greg Bard 21:49, 11 October 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: What benefit is there to making a "task force" for logic? What outstanding problems is it meant to solve? — Carl (CBM · talk) 00:16, 12 October 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Generally, task forces are created to allow those editors who have a specific interest or aptitude in that specific subject to have a place to give focused attention to that subject. As I'm not personally sure what exactly you mean by the word "outstanding", I'm not sure what other reply is possible. John Carter 00:36, 12 October 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I just wondered whether there is actually a problem with the current setup (without task forces). As far as I can tell, the current organization of the math project is working well, so I don't see why it would be necessary to split out a separate logic task force. — Carl (CBM · talk) 15:52, 12 October 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: You may well be right that there may not be any clearly obvious existing problems. The proposal of the joint task force seems to me to be primarily a way to ensure that articles which have relevance to both philosophy and mathematics can be recognized as such with the least possible complications and amount of "bannering" and greatest degree of cooperation in helping improve the articles.  John Carter 15:59, 12 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Logic task force 

message: The article titled mathematics of bookmaking is being worked on by various people who know that bookmaking is obviously a notable subject but are uncertain whether this stuff known under the name of "mathematics" (or something like that) is notable enough to get mentioned in an encyclopedia.
: 
Perhaps some of those here can help that page. Michael Hardy 16:46, 14 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Mathematics of bookmaking 

message: A discussion is going on in Talk:Linesearch about whether the article should be named linesearch or line search. I would appreciate any and all feedback. --Zvika 11:14, 15 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Linesearch vs. Line search 

message: If anyone here is familiar with Object theory, that article could use some attention. My impression is that it is something in philosophy. It was recently expanded from a one-line stub to something longer, but I don't know that the something longer is actually object theory. — Carl (CBM · talk) 13:11, 19 October 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: It might be better titled Abstract Object theory. See The Theory of Abstract Objects for something not too disimilar to what our article is discussing. --Salix alba (talk) 15:01, 19 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Object theory 

message: That template was put on top of this talk page. I'm not sure exactly what its purpose is, but it looks like an announcement, so I'm moving it down here. Eventually it will get archived. If some sort of permanent notice is required, we can work it onto the WP:WPM somewhere. — Carl (CBM · talk) 13:39, 23 October 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Click on the middle link. It seems to be another method of navigation, which I've never seen before. Do we need it? Septentrionalis PMAnderson 00:10, 24 October 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: The link to Wikipedia:Contents has been in the sidebar on every page since March. PrimeHunter 02:25, 24 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Announcement 

message: Need more help at division by zero and any other articles edited by this IP. --Trovatore 22:12, 23 October 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I blocked him for 72 hours for unacceptable language in an edit summary. Probably not long enough to keep him from causing trouble, though. —David Eppstein 22:33, 23 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Germanium again 

message: I have two announcements to help with the article assessment. 
1. User:VeblenBot/Unassessed is a list of the 500 longest math articles that have not been assessed (from the list of mathematics articles). Not all of them should be assessed - the list of math articles is more inclusive than our assessments should be. But it's easy enough to page through the list to find a few articles you're interested in that are not assessed. Or find some long articles to work on. I will eventually start to have a blacklist to remove articles that shouldn't be assessed, so that fresh articles are listed.
2. I wrote a Javascript tool to make it easier to assess articles. To use it, you need to put the following code in your monobook.js:
:importScript('User:AzaToth/morebits.js');
:importScript('User:CBM/ratemath.js');
The script adds a tab called 'rate math'. Click that tab when you are viewing an article or its talk page, choose the rating, and the right template will be added to the talk page. 
— Carl (CBM · talk) 14:34, 20 October 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: 34k of text on whether zero is an even number... eat you heart out Britannica!  Jheald 22:18, 24 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Article assessment - longest unrated articles, javascript rating tool 

message: Waldhausen category has a line of TeX that fails to parse.  Can anyone fix it?  I don't know what the person who wrote it intended. Michael Hardy 19:16, 24 October 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, they're using the "xy" package, also known as "xy-pic", which given the limited support for real TeX we have here, I imagine is a no-no.  One would need to TeX that line externally and upload a picture to fix it. Ryan Reich 19:35, 24 October 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  Which leaves the question of what to change it to. Michael Hardy 23:11, 24 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Waldhausen category 

message: Hi, there's been a spate of drive-by teenager vandalism of bios of mathematicians lately... Sofia Kovalevskaya, Augustin Louis Cauchy, Évariste Galois  and perhaps others. Y'all may wanna kinda take a look at your articles... Thanks... -- Ling.Nut 05:39, 25 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  IP vandalism and mathematicians 

message: The article titled internal consistency could use some attention, to say the least, from someone who knows mathematical logic.  The section on "gaming" was apparently written by someone who thinks no idea existed until it was applied to computer games. Michael Hardy 01:34, 28 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Internal consistency 

message: Should :category:networks really be a subcategory of :category:graph theory? It leads to many things that have nothing to with graphs, like :category:bloggers. Arthena(talk) 16:10, 28 October 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Some of the more graph-theoretic articles in networks, such as average path length, Watts and Strogatz model, polytree, centrality, etc., already list graph theory as a category despite it being a parent of networks. So it seems it wouldn't cause too much damage to remove that link, if some care is taken to go more thoroughly through the articles there and in the subcategories and check that when appropriate they're also listed in some graph-theoretic category. —David Eppstein 16:21, 28 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  [[:category:networks]] 

message: At Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/MathWorld it is proposed to delete the article titled MathWorld, to which nearly 1500 other articles link.  The person who proposed it first proposed it for "speedy deletion" (with no discussion) on the grounds that (he said) it was created only to advertise Wolfram.  Given that MathWorld and Wolfram were generally considered far more noteworthy that Wikipedia at the time that article was created, that seems hard to fathom.
: 
Please express opinions on whether it ought to be deleted at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/MathWorld. Michael Hardy 17:12, 28 October 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Speedy deletion?  What a hoot. CRGreathouse (t | c) 18:37, 28 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  MathWorld to be deleted? 

message: In the article average, there's a section about annualization (as used in finance), and some discussion on the talk page. Geometric average is covered in the article on average, but in finance the geometric average is used to average sequential periodic percent returns. I know that if you lose 50% in one period and gain 50% in the next period, the average gain/loss is 0%, but the dollar loss is 25%. Mutual funds use geometric averages to report average returns. I think this might be related to compound interest or rate of return. Can you take a look at the math in these articles and make sure the math is ok? I've looked at some online math articles, and they don't seem to have any problem with averaging percentiles to come up with an average financial gain or loss, but the percentile averages don't seem to match the dollar gains and losses. I know this is basic boring stuff for you, but if you'd take the time to check the wikipedia finance articles, it's much appreciated!  --Foggy Morning 01:39, 28 October 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Took a look at this article and have to say it needs some serious help. No references are cited, several sections need more explanation, and much of the explanation that is provided is written far too technically. Kaldari 19:55, 29 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Can you help with [[average]] ? 

message: Of all the Wikipedia articles that have been requested for more than 2 years, the only one directly related to Mathematics is unbalanced data. In an effort to wipe out the last of these missing articles, I'm posting notices to the relevant WikiProjects. Anyone brave enough to write a stub or article for unbalanced data will be awarded a barnstar for patching this long-standing hole in Wikipedia content. Kaldari 16:47, 29 October 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Actually, probabilistic potential theory is also related to mathematics. Not sure if this warrants an article, though. The term 'probabilistic potential' (as a term for not formally correct probability distributions) is used in some fields, for example Markov network. Samohyl Jan 17:47, 29 October 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks for the clarification. Unfortunately, it's all over my head :) Kaldari 18:51, 29 October 2007 (UTC)

text: Here is a brief discussion from notes at the University of Minnesota that may be helpful. --KSmrqT 21:39, 29 October 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  I'd be cautious with those notes -- I found them somewhat misleading in trying to come up with a good definition of imbalanced data. Not sure to what extent it's due to my limited statistics background (the material is presented very gently, really) versus the author's possibly misleading explanations. — xDanielx T/C 05:48, 30 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  [[Unbalanced data]]