Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mathematics/Archive/2007/Feb

message: * 
Uncle G 10:54, 29 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: The AfD was closed with a resolution of keep. --KSmrqT 20:21, 1 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Articles listed at Articles for deletion 

message: Out of curiosity, I made a version of Special:Ancientpages just for math articles: User:CMummert/Oldpages. It lists articles on Mathbot's list whose last edit was in 2005.  There are no articles on Mathbot's list older than that (except for one redirect page, but I think I fixed that).  CMummert · talk 04:53, 1 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: List of mathematics articles are not Mathbot's pages. They were there long before mathbot or me were around. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 05:13, 1 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Point taken. CMummert · talk 05:18, 1 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  So the list shows that the vast majority of articles are edited quite a bit, although of course those edits could be trivial or vandalism. Interesting. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 15:44, 1 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  I was pleasantly surprised.  The median age, by the way, is Dec. 21, 2006, and over 70% have been edited since Nov 1, 2006. CMummert · talk 16:49, 1 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Ancient pages 

message: For some time the article modularity theorem had the incorrect title Taniyama–Shimura theorem, a name invented by an editor who wrongly thought that was what the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture was called when it was proved, and never used by mathematicians. This has been fixed on the English wikipedia, but unfortunately this mistake was copied to wikipedias in many other languages. 
So the corresponding  page in the following languages needs to be fixed:
Català
Deutsch
Español
Français
Italiano
עברית
日本語
Português
Русский
Suomi
Tiếng Việt
中文
(There are links to the pages in these languages at modularity theorem.) R.e.b. 19:45, 1 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Modularity theorem 

message: Infinite monkey theorem has been nominated for a featured article review. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. Please leave your comments and help us to return the article to featured quality. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, articles are moved onto the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Remove" the article from featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. Reviewers' concerns are here. LuciferMorgan 04:54, 2 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: User:Farever, who apparently created his/her account for the sole purpose of nominating this article for FAR, has stated a kind of vendetta against the article's existence.  This would appear to be a misuse of the FAR process.  Is there a way it can be "speedy" closed?  --C S (Talk) 06:13, 2 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Infinite monkey theorem FAR 

message: See Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Ed Pegg, Jr.. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 16:23, 31 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: The AfD was closed with a resolution of keep. (After the stub was expanded there was no dissent.) --KSmrqT 18:21, 4 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Recreational mathematician article for deletion. 

message: I found number spiral a complete orphan---no other pages linked to it at all.  I did a few small copy-edits and put a link to it into another article, and added the "number theory" category.  Perhpas others here can figure out which other articles should link to it or other categories it should be in.  It would also benefit from an illustration and perhaps other additional work. Michael Hardy 23:11, 4 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Somebody linked Ulam spiral to it.--70.231.149.0 01:23, 5 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I believe number spiral fails the notability guideline's requirement of multiple independent nontrivial references, so I nominated it for deletion. Discuss at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Number spiral. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 01:38, 5 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Nearly orphaned article 

message: We really need to merge polynomial factorization and factorization; most of the article factorization is in fact on polynomial factorization, but it is treated more basically.  Should we merge polynomial factorization into factorization, or merge most of the stuff in factorization on polynomial factorization into polynomial factorization? —Mets501 (talk) 04:11, 5 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Although polynomial factorization is certainly a kind of factorization, a merge in either direction would be unhelpful. Each topic has a great deal to be said about it, and neither should be burdened with the baggage of the other. If anything, factorization should be expanded in other ways. --KSmrqT 05:23, 5 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Factorization 

message: is editing math and physics related articles and (I think deliberately) introducing errors. They are not so easy to spot, see this edit for example. Such things are much more worrisome than plain vandalism. Something to watch for. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 04:23, 5 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: did something similar at General relativity and elsewhere — changing the values of physical constants. JRSpriggs 05:46, 6 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Hoaxing

message: What do we think about: Template:Hilbert's problems. Given that we have :Category:Hilbert's problems, do we think the template is useful? Paul August ☎ 19:27, 8 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Some people prefer template navigation. But if we keep it, we should do one of two things: 
*mask with Roman (or arabic) numerals (X,
*replace it with  (or ) Septentrionalis PMAnderson 19:47, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

text: The ancient debate of navational boxes vs. categories. Navigational boxes do not add any information, but as PMAnderson notes some people find them user friendlier (less mouseclicks.) Now if all those boxes where properly marked up being navigational boxes, people who dislike them could hide them. (P.S. Maybe there should a way to automatically generate those boxes through the articles included in a certain category.) —Ruud 20:03, 8 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: There is a class="messagebox standard-talk collapsible collapsed" command which gives a template the little show/hide box. See . But is that enough to fix this? Septentrionalis PMAnderson 00:12, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

text: Agree. If I saw that box at the bottom of the page, I wouldn't know what to do with it. I know what the problems are (generally), but I wouldn't know them by number. There's no real benefit in providing easy navigation if the user can't tell where they're going. The table present in Hilbert's problems is much better for navigation. A notice like  should be fine (though it ought to point to Hilbert's problems, not the category, in my opinion). --Sopoforic 02:51, 9 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: It does both; it has two arguments; see Template talk:otherarticles Septentrionalis PMAnderson 06:01, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

text: Yeah, but I still question whether it adds any value. The only use cases I can think of are: you accidentally stumble upon an article for one of Hilbert's problems, and realize that you want to look at problem #17, but don't feel like clicking the link to Hilbert's problems; or, you want to navigate through all of them to read about them, but don't want to have an extra window/tab open to click them from Hilbert's problems. The first is unlikely; the second is possible, but I don't know whether it's going to be important enough to justify an otherwise-meaningless template. On the other hand, space at the bottom of the article is cheap: this isn't doing much harm, anyway. --Sopoforic 17:15, 9 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  Possible uses would be quickly opening each article in a tab or reading the introduction of all the Hilbert problems by using popups. Some people find this useful, some don't. —Ruud 19:57, 9 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: If you're opening them in tabs or reading with popups, you can do it from Hilbert's problems just as easily. But, like I said, it isn't really doing any harm, either. --Sopoforic 23:50, 10 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  [[Template:Hilbert's problems]] 

message: Exponential smoothing has been around for a long time. Although it appears to be on a legitimate topic, it is one of the most poorly written articles. So badly written in fact, that the difficulty of fixing it probably deters people from even trying. As  said, "I feel really sorry to see poor work like this on Wiki.". It is too far out of my field for me to fix it. If no statistician is willing to fix it, perhaps we should put it up for deletion. What do you think? JRSpriggs 06:46, 5 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Why not just rewrite it as a short stub, since the current content is quite odd. Eventually someone will decide to expand it from there. Deletion is usually reserved for topics that don't deserve an article even if it was written well; there is no deletion criteria for articles with bad writing. CMummert · talk 14:03, 5 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm willing to take a stab at a complete rewrite, since I have extensive experience with time series. I notice that moving average already exists as a financial topic. Although financial applications of time series attract a great deal of attention today, the statistical techniques for improving "signal to noise ratio" are more widely applicable than that. For instance, someone with limited daily temperature data for a particular location might base his "forecasts" for this year's daily highs and lows on a moving average of actual temperature data from the past two or three years.  DavidCBryant 16:52, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

text: Thanks, Michael. I hope you and the others can stand to wade through it. JRSpriggs 05:54, 6 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: OK, I just dumped a complete rewrite in there. It's not comprehensive, but at least it's a reasonable start. Please take a look and polish it up a bit. Thanks!  DavidCBryant 00:50, 10 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks, David. It looks much better. Now that you have fixed it up, I expect more people will jump in with changes. JRSpriggs 06:32, 10 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I put a comment on the weighting on the talk page Talk:Exponential smoothing#Problems with weighting. JRSpriggs 03:51, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

text: Many thanks to Michael and David for cleaning it up. --A bit iffy 07:53, 12 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  What can be done about "Exponential smoothing"? 

message: Some time ago I was looking at free algebra's for a paper I was doing in Universal Algebra and I looked at the wp page on the subject.  The definition was a sort of "abstract algebraic" or "ring theory" definition, and it got me to wondering about definitions of mathematical objects on WP.  A free algebra could be defined in the language of UA, of category theory, or probably in other ways.  How does one know which way to go for a WP page on a mathematical object?  If someone wanted, they could easily go to dozens of articles and add in UA or category theory or whatever definitions of everything from logic operators to who knows.  I was thinking of adding this question to the Math MoS, but I figured it would be ok to add it here.  I think that the answer should be incorporated into the MMos, or somewhere in a policy guideline.
To answer my own question a bit, in many cases the most naive definition is best, who wants to mess with this stuff in an arithmetic page.  On the other hand there are some cases where almost all of the research in a subject is done by logicians or computer scientists or whatever, so the definition they use is best.  But, this is a type of WP imperialism, as many pages are defined with the CS way of looking at it due to the high number of editors with CS backgrounds, frustrating other potential users.  Sometimes the subject can be safely split into how different fields look at it (such as Combinatorial game theory and Game theory), which can also help. Smmurphy(Talk) 02:15, 13 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: It depends on the level of the expected reader of the article.  The article on natural numbers should be much more elementary than the article on groupoids.  But there is no limitaton on the space that we can use to describe a topic, so any relevant and notable definition can be included, at least in a subsection. For example, Peano axioms gives a categorical definition as a subsection.  CMummert · talk 02:30, 13 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I am having this daydream of future WP wars where category theorists approach every math article and add a category theory definition (or move that definition to the top), while putting new research into a new category, "math which is not yet sophisticated enough to warrant a category theory approach."  Computer scientists counter marking articles as "math which doesn't and will never have real world applications," and universal algebraists add a reference to Burris & Sankappanavar to dozens of articles. Smmurphy(Talk) 02:46, 13 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  question about definitions of objects 

message: Could someone have a look at Gauss-Lucas theorem. It needs to be put into context and made understandable to a general audience. − Twas Now ( talk • contribs • e-mail ) 05:04, 13 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Recently translated article, needs expertise 

message: :Category:Claude Shannon, :Category:Norbert Wiener are up for deletion at WP:CFD 132.205.44.134 00:45, 15 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  categories for deleteion 

message: I have a short list of missing mathematics topics. I have tried to find all relevant links to similar articles but I would appreciate if someone could have a look at it. Thank you. - Skysmith 13:44, 16 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: There is a list of requested articles at Wikipedia:Requested articles/Mathematics. You should consider adding these to that list. CMummert · talk 19:25, 17 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Some missing topics 

message: I just rewrote this article; please visit, improve the article, and offer comments. It's a vital article, so I think we should work to improve it to at least good article standard. --N Shar 20:25, 20 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: If you are interested in getting some sort of assessment for the article, I would recommend first improving it, then putting it up for peer review, and finally nominating it for Featured Article status.  But you should be aware that the criteria for featured articles may differ from the criteria that we ordinarily use to assess mathematical writing. CMummert · talk 20:43, 20 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Actually, I'm just looking for reassurance that I didn't completely ruin the article. --N Shar 20:59, 20 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: The new article is a significant improvement over the previous version. CMummert · talk 22:40, 20 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks. I'm still working on it; maybe I will nominate for peer review/GA after it gets some references. --N Shar 22:45, 20 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  [[Numerical digit]] 

message: The article Checking if a coin is fair is up for deletion. People who read this page might want to take a look at it.  DavidCBryant 14:59, 15 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: The decision was to keep the article. --KSmrqT 15:19, 24 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Another AfD 

message: Felix A. Keller and Keller's Expression
Keller keeps adding himself and his unimportant and obvious expression to the page about e.  He has done this at least four times since 2004.  Now he has promoted himself and his expression to a pair of articles.
See Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Felix A. Keller  to discuss.
-- Dominus 16:51, 15 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Obviously, given that the links have turned red, the result was delete both. --KSmrqT 09:59, 22 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  More deletions 

message: I come here by way of a mathematician Johann Christoph Wichmannshausen, who is up for deletion and is in the Mathematics Genealogy Project.  I am unfamiliar with the importance of this genealogy tree, but I notice that a number of academics provide their "genealogy" on their personal website, so my initial assumption was that people higher up in the tree should be considered notable by default.  Is that reasonable?  Are there some rules of thumb that can be used to assist in determining WP:N using the "Mathematics Genealogy Project" data? John Vandenberg 00:36, 22 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Mathematics Genealogy Project and an Afd 

message: Talk:Indian_mathematics#Request_for_comment:_Reliable_Sources_for_Indian_Mathematics  Feedback is requested for a problem on the Indian mathematics page, where two users have a disagreement about what constitutes reliable sources for claims in the article. 05:29, 23 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Request for Comment

message: There needs to be some merging with the articles Faulhaber's formula, Power sum and Power Sum. I don't know that much about mathematics to clean those up. --Montchav 11:22, 24 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks. I made Power Sum redirect to Power sum. No information was lost since the text at Power Sum is contained at Faulhaber's formula which is linked from Power sum. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 16:18, 24 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  [[Power sum]] and [[Power Sum]] 

message: Many articles about special classes of natural numbers are categorized in :Category:Integer sequences, apparently solely because the numbers in the class form a sequence. See for example Practical number, Vampire number, or Square-free integer. I think it would be better to have a :Category:Number classes with subcategories :Category:Base-dependent number classes and :Category:Divisor-based number classes (and, of course, appropriate cross-references between "class" and "sequence" categories). Several articles currently in :Category:Number theory would also be moved to the subcategory, leaving only very important or well-known classes such as Prime number or Perfect number as direct members of :Category:Number theory.
Any reasons why this would be a bad idea? Any better suggestions for category names? Category names are cumbersome to change, so it would e best to get them right from the start. –Henning Makholm 20:39, 24 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: As far as I can see, the articles concerned are about sequences of integers - so why not just leave them in :Category:Integer sequences or the sub-category :Category:Base-dependent integer sequences ? Any more complex or subjective classification scheme will be poorly understood (how do you distinguish between a "sequence" and a "class" ? how you define "important or well known" ?), and you will quickly get articles appearing in the "wrong" sub-category or being put in the top level category by default. Gandalf61 14:28, 27 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  I don't see why the distinction should be complex subjective at all. If one can determine from the definition of the class whether a given number is a member of it without needing to know anything about what the other members are, then it is only a sequence in the trivial sense of being a subset of the natural numbers. This is true for all of the three examples I gave. Why should someone who wants to learn about square-free numbers have to look in a category about sequences to find it? Expecting users to be able to think "sequence" when what they have in mid is just a property with no inherent sequential features, now that is complex... –Henning Makholm 03:20, 28 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Categories for number-theoretic properties