Talk:Order of approximation

message: I removed the paragraph on Chomsky as I felt it inappropriate in an article whose main topic is the mathematical sense of 'order of approximation'.
Zero sharp 05:03, 19 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Chomsky

message: While orders of approximation are used for data fitting, they are also used in theory work. The zeroeth order, first order, second order expansions are used when the relevant terms in the expansion series become significant enough to affect theoretical predictions. This should be made more clear. "First order" and "Second order" effects are often used to describe perturbations and deviations from linear models. We should have some text on this. --ScienceApologist 14:03, 2 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Article needs work

message: I'm having a hard time understanding the purpose of this article. It has already been flagged for having no sources, the information in the article seems largely subjective, and if other people are like me then the information that they are actually looking for is in the Taylor Series article. 67.128.198.190 (talk) 20:32, 8 March 2013 (UTC)
thread_title: Is this article necessary?

message: The current article strikes me as trying to merge two separate issues into one:
1. the number of significant digits in the estimation of a quantity.
2. the degree of a polynomial fit.
I suggest it would be far more pedagogical to treat these two issues separately. /216Kleopatra (talk) 21:15, 17 October 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Two separate themes 

message: The discussion started here on the need for a new section with examples of "historic approximations", where order of approximation was very important for some reasons. Suggestions are invited, in addition to the three topics already mentioned. The descriptions should not be too long, as this section is should not substitute for full articles.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by C. Trifle (talk • contribs) 15:43, 26 March 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Historic approximations 

message: The "main/reference article" about the subject, Scale analysis (mathematics), is "didactically horrible"... A merge will not solve the problem.
Articles to use as "reference article" are Big O notation and Curve fitting: the order of approximation is a jargon about "scientific modeling of reality". See curve fitting: can use similar illustrations, and here (the order of approximation article) can also add more generic illustrations, not only linear curves, but any other "fit to model" process (as "progressively more refined approximations" process)... see Scientific modelling.
--Krauss (talk) 08:55, 12 April 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: Your two posts cite a lot of related articles. I may add Approximation, which is also "didactically horrible". I interpret your two posts as the lack of a broad-concept article about approximation, which should be useful and understandable for the layman. I agree that such an article is lacking. Nevertheless, the subject of such an article is much wider than "order of approximation", and writing it under this title would make difficult to find it, for a reader, which is not specifically focused on "order of approximation". If such an article would exist, it would be natural to redirect Order of approximation to it.  But writing it is not easy and would take some time, and we are faced to the problem of what we should do now. I agree the the possible redirects from a disambiguation page are not well satisfactory. This could be improved by adding to the dab page a section "see also" redirecting to the articles you cite. Personally, I think that this is the best short-time solution. D.Lazard (talk) 10:23, 12 April 2016 (UTC)
replies: text:    Hi, thanks.  You're right about "... take some time ... what we should do now"... Hum... Can I suggest something simple but not so immediate? I have experience to do/help and see good results, but is to do step-by-step and with some collaboration — perhaps only you and me, perhaps more people, and no illusion about time for perfect work. We can  "connect" some articles by a semantic-core box, let's do it here?  (... and after people read/change/collab oriented by the box ... we merge articles). --Krauss (talk) 00:05, 13 April 2016 (UTC)
replies: text:   The O in this box should definitely not be calligraphic. This is not the usual notation, which is just a regular upper case O. Sapphorain (talk) 07:13, 13 April 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Important article, only need work 

message: The lack of clarity in the examples could be reduced by drawing a simple graph for each example.• • • Peter (Southwood) (talk): 05:50, 19 April 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: Very good point. If no-one's done it by the weekend, I'll make some SVG graphs. --Slashme (talk) 08:00, 19 April 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: True, but this opens an interesting concept that I did not notice in the article: fallacies of approximation. Two that occur to me are:
* Successive inappropriate approximations to a limit, such as the proof that the diagonal of a unit square equals 2 instead of root 2. This also lends itself to graphical comparisons with valid approximation of circle circumference by inscribed polygons. I see that there is a convenient graphic in Wikimedia at File:Cutcircle2.svg|thumb|Cutcircle2, but I don't see one for the diagonal fallacy. Yet.
* Crossing a chasm in two jumps JonRichfield (talk) 07:22, 26 April 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Draw us a picture