Talk:Manifold/Archive 5

message: fights a neverending battle for truth, justice, and the Wikipedia way.  The point being that the battle is indeed neverending.
Over in Mathematics Oleg Alexandrov simply reverts anything that is not clearly a major improvement.  But for that to work, the article has to be in very good shape to begin with, which I don't think this article is, now.
Remembering the history of the article, a lot of good work was reverted by a single Wikipedian who found a single source that allowed manifolds to have more than one dimension.  That is now reflected in a sentence somewhere in the article, and we are trying to struggle back to the light. Rick Norwood 21:04, 26 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: What the.... are you suggesting that you'd like this article to only (or even mostly) treat 1-dimensional manifolds?  1-dimensional manifolds are pretty boring, lots of stuff that manifold theory is useful for is completely trivial in 1-dimension.  I'd like to see you find even a single source that doesn't allow manifolds with more than one dimension.  -lethe talk [ +] 21:10, 26 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  There has been a misunderstanding here. Rick meant that the source allowed a manifold to have charts of different dimensions instead of requiring all charts to be of the same dimension. Loom91 06:40, 27 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Oh, I see.  Thank you for clearing that up.  Now that I know what Rick's complain really was, I'll say that I don't see any problem allowing for the fact that we may or may not require the dimension to be constant.  It doesn't really get in the way or anything does it? -lethe talk [ +] 06:58, 27 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Strange visitor from another planet 

message: Paragraph three seems fine to me as is.
I would like to rephrase paragraph four in paragraph form rather than in bullet point form.  The Wiki style sheet does not forbid bullet points, but frowns on them.  Here is how paragraph four reads now:
"Additional structures are often defined on manifolds. Examples of manifolds with additional structure include:-
*differentiable manifolds on which one can do calculus 
*Riemannian manifolds on which distances and angles can be defined 
*symplectic manifolds which serve as the phase space in classical mechanics 
*the four-dimensional pseudo-Riemannian manifolds which model space-time in general relativity."
I suggest:
"Additional structures are often defined on manifolds. Examples of manifolds with additional structure include differentiable manifolds on which one can do calculus, Riemannian manifolds on which distances and angles can be defined, symplectic manifolds which serve as the phase space in classical mechanics, and the four-dimensional pseudo-Riemannian manifolds which model space-time in general relativity."
No change in the words (except the addition of "and") only in the punctuation.
Comments? Rick Norwood 00:45, 28 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Oh definitely.  This should be not controversial, just go ahead and do it.  I would probably support some cleaning up of the language too, what do you think?  Perhaps conflating pseudo-Riemannian structures with Riemannian, and mentioning GR along with Riemann?  -lethe talk [ +] 00:48, 28 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm going to take your advice and do it, and you can fix the Riemannian stuff -- for me, Riemannian manifolds,  Bozhe moi! . Rick Norwood 00:52, 28 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: The wikipedia guidance against bullet points seems excessively pedantic. The justification for this guidance is that it follows normal practice in paper encyclopedias, where a bulleted list uses more paper. On a web page it has no such disadvantage and makes the separation between items in the list much clearer to the reader. I am strongly in favour of the use of bulleted lists rather than free format text, simply on the basis that they are definitely more effective at getting the information across to the reader. Elroch 11:51, 28 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Hmm.. I guess I was wrong about this being non-controversial.  Well, anyway, I didn't like the list in this instance, although I'm not opposed to using bulleted lists in general (check out the article Locally convex topological vector space, which I wrote, where I use itemized lists throughout the entire article.  I think I went overboard.) -lethe talk [ +] 12:09, 28 April 2006 (UTC)

text: I agree that there is a place for bullet points, but that they are not needed in this paragraph. Rick Norwood 12:29, 28 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Paragraphs three and four