Jump to content

Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mathematics

Page contents not supported in other languages.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Debaditya2000 (talk | contribs) at 07:53, 19 March 2019 (→‎Infobox edits (thankfully not about FLT)). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

This is a discussion page for
WikiProject Mathematics
This page is devoted to discussions of issues relating to mathematics articles on Wikipedia. Related discussion pages include:
Please add new topics at the bottom of the page and sign your posts.

Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/WikiProject used Template:Wikipedia ad exists

Infobox mathematical statement

There is a sparsity of mathematical infoboxes and I think that one for mathematical statements (broadly construed, e.g. theorems, conjectures, propositions, lemmas, etc.) could be very useful on many particularly important mathematical articles. I've drafted a very simple one. Would other editors here welcome such a infobox? Feedback on its usage as well as its implementation (e.g. possible additional fields) would be very welcome as this is my first attempt at an infobox template! MarkH21 (talk) 06:17, 5 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I for one think that the sparsity is a good thing, and that adding more of them would be filling a much-needed gap. Infoboxes are inane. They're fine for filling out the details of inane subjects, like the teams a footballer has played on, but they are inherently a way of reducing material to a 5-second soundbite for readers who don't even have the attention span for a single full sentence at the start of the article. That's a bad fit for articles on technical topics in mathematics. —David Eppstein (talk) 06:31, 5 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Sure, I don't disagree with those statements! However, I do think that this would be a neat way of packaging a lot of the info for some major mathematical topics. Also, many of the articles for these problems are indeed technical and this would be a way to package basic information to a curious non-mathematician without requiring them to read through the history or current status. I'm sure many non-specialist readers look at articles about RH or P=NP precisely to get this kind of information quickly! MarkH21 (talk) 06:47, 5 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]
And indeed for important problems like P vs. NP you may find the Unsolved Problems box being used. --JBL (talk) 13:47, 5 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I've never seen that box used where the field given is mathematics (and in this case it's "Unsolved problem in computer science"). This is also an extension of that box, so if that merits use then shouldn't this? — MarkH21 (talk) 18:09, 5 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]
If you look at this you can see everywhere it is used, and find a bunch of math articles that way. For example, from the first 50 (and disregarding theoretical CS questions whose solutions will necessarily be mathematical in nature) uses I find these ten or so about mathematics: Sophie Germain prime, Hilbert's third problem, Sierpinski number, Collatz conjecture, Twin prime, Catalan's constant, Magic square, Catalan's conjecture, Mersenne prime, Perfect number. If that percentage is representative, then there are perhaps 50 or 60 total uses for mathematics. I was surprised to find it not used on RH, actually. --JBL (talk) 20:02, 5 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I see, although this is still not very widespread usage even for major problems (e.g. all 6 of the other Millenium Problems). Regardless, I see this infobox as an extension of the "Unsolved problem" box. Justification for the latter's existence and usage is pretty much also justification for the former's. — MarkH21 (talk) 19:56, 6 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Historically this Project has not been terribly enthusiastic about infoboxes, nav templates, and similar things, which can easily get spammy/crufty. That said, yours is plausible, and the RH example looks pretty good.
The "open question" field could get pretty controversial in some cases. Is the continuum hypothesis open, for example? Admittedly that particular problem is mostly concentrated in logic articles, and your format allows for explanation of the situation. But it might be good to explain that a problem being "open" doesn't necessarily mean the question is particularly in doubt (it would be shocking if, say, the Goldbach conjecture were false). Where one would explain that, I'm not sure. --Trovatore (talk) 06:38, 5 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Note that I just changed a few of the parameters and I changed the example since my first comment here. Sure, it could be controversial, in which case one could use something like Contested or just omit the field altogether until consensus is reached. A non-logic example would be the abc conjecture. I'm not sure evidence for/against validity would be a viable infobox field though.
Do note that many of the parameters are included for flexibility and that are optional. The example in the documentation includes all of them just for demonstration. MarkH21 (talk) 06:42, 5 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Heaven's blessings on the sparsity! Any single creation of such a box creates additional pressure an degrading substantial articles on math topics by stuffing real estate with boxes full of trivia, instead of structural content. I agree to the realm given above where these boxes may find a useful application, and I assume that there is nothing I can say beyond all the arguments already stated in the raging war against these infoboxes in serious articles. Maybe time has come where WP wants to degrade to trivia in boxes, I won't comment this. Diotimalives, Cassandra is dead. Purgy (talk) 07:51, 5 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I am in total agreement with David Eppstein and Purgy; the fewer of these things I see, the better. The kind of information that can be put into these sound bites is generally trivia, and while this may be useful in those articles where readers may be interested in trivia and trivialization of the subject, this just doesn't work in mathematical articles, not if you are trying to be intellectually honest. We work very hard, although not always successfully, at trying to make the lead accessible to a general reader and these infoboxes represent a repeat of that function in a highly formalized and abbreviated way. I don't think that this can be successfully carried out due to the inherent structural difficulties.--Bill Cherowitzo (talk) 16:49, 5 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I agree in general! But I do think that this particular usage would be helpful. I personally have looked up mathematical problems before just to remember who and/or when certain problems were posed and/or proven and the "simple answer" is not always obvious from the lead. I think that this particular usage would involve very little real estate and maintenance.
When the instance may not be "intellectually honest", then it can be expressed that way, the parameter can be omitted, or the infobox not used at all. — MarkH21 (talk) 18:09, 5 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I'm a bit late, and I'm not sure if I'm replying to anyone directly, but here goes anyway. I don't think I share quite the same level of disdain for infoboxes as some of the commenters above, but I do think that this one goes too far. They're good for examples of mathematical objects which have some standard bits of associated data – I think ones like {{Infobox probability distribution}} and {{Infobox graph}} work well. But for theorems, conjectures, etc., it mostly seems to be for information that's usually already in the article lead anyway, so I'm not sure much is really gained by having this. –Deacon Vorbis (carbon • videos) 19:17, 5 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Perhaps would the new "implied by", "generalizations", and "implications" parameters (that I just added be) useful as logical connectors between different theorems, axioms, etc.? I do think that such an infobox here could be revised to be appealing to most. — MarkH21 (talk) 19:31, 5 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I've thought about this some more, and I'd like to respond to the points brought up. The heart of the opposition seems to be that any infobox is a trivialization of the subject. However, the infobox neither detracts from the material of the articles for the knowledgeable nor expert reader, who may glance past the infobox just as one would for any biographical article. Meanwhile, the majority of articles on mathematical statements are too technical for the general reader (or even knowledgeable reader) to whom we should strive to make the articles more accessible. In particular, while basic details such as its history and its logical connections to other statements perhaps should be easily accessible in the lead (although I disagree for many cases), the fact of the matter is that they usually are not.

An implementation of the template, in great moderation and keeping the MOS purpose in mind, should add value to these articles – particularly for the general reader casually looking up math on Wikipedia. — MarkH21 (talk) 10:34, 10 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Bumping thread for 21 days. Referred to in a TfD listing –Deacon Vorbis (carbon • videos) 05:41, 24 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Draft:Bredon cohomology (2nd nomination)

There is a long-standing dispute flaring up again over a short, one-sentence-fragment draft at Draft:Bredon cohomology which needs input from editors familiar with mathematics topics. The crux of the issue is that the only editor interested in keeping the draft has not worked on it in five years, and nobody else who has interacted with this has the knowledge to edit topics of this complexity. If someone could help us work out what this draft is and where it should go, your efforts will be greatly appreciated. Thanks. Ivanvector (Talk/Edits) 16:29, 1 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I've removed some more spill-over from that debate. The page has been worked on enough that it's been promoted to an article, but it's a very short stub. More help there is still appreciated. Ivanvector (Talk/Edits) 17:18, 1 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Entropy influence conjecture

If the new article titled Entropy influence conjecture should be kept, then it needs work. In particular, it's not all that clearly stated, and no other articles link to it. Michael Hardy (talk) 16:55, 2 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

It almost makes sense to me, but since when does a "Boolean" function map to {-1, 1}? — Arthur Rubin (talk) 03:27, 3 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
This conjecture showed up on Terrence Tao's blog, where it is explained much better. This article might be usefully merged into the section Analysis_of_Boolean_functions#Basic_results, with associated results. --{{u|Mark viking}} {Talk} 03:39, 3 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
The value of a Boolean function could be any two things, but as I understand it it's pretty standard for those two things to be -1 and 1 instead of 0 and 1 when you're going to do Fourier analysis on the function. —David Eppstein (talk) 06:58, 3 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
That the codomain is {0,1} is the convention that I know, but (1) it's still into a set of just two values and (2) it makes it possible to write instead of the more complicated Michael Hardy (talk) 21:46, 3 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I've cleaned the article up a bit and linked the article from one of its originators (Gil Kalai) so that it's at least not an orphan anymore. Unsure if the article meets notability standards as it's not a terribly well-known problem but it should be a bit better now at least. It could certainly be merged into Analysis of Boolean functions as suggested by Mark viking (talk · contribs) (I would support that). — MarkH21 (talk) 07:38, 12 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Glitch prime?

I just stumbled on this video by Numberphile talking about a thing he called "glitch prime". I was surprised to see we don't have an article on that (or at least a redirect to an equivalent concept. Basically they're numbers, when expressed in a base, are an odd number of digits where all the digits is the maximum number in the base, and the middle digit is one less (e.g. 11011 in binary, 22222122222 in ternary, 99899 in base ten and so on), which also happen to be primes. I could be explaining this wrong, but that was my takeaway.

Not really sure if that passes any sort of WP:N standards, of if it's a 'thing' in math, but I was surprised not to have an article on them. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 13:37, 5 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Headbomb: I looked around briefly, but found very little. These are listed at oeis:A265383, but there's not much fanout in terms of what they link to. I'm not 100% sure, but my suspicion is that there just isn't enough out there to clear WP:N and sustain an article. –Deacon Vorbis (carbon • videos) 14:41, 5 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I don't see notability for their own article. They are a form of List of prime numbers#Palindromic wing primes which are a form of near-repdigit primes. Neither has an article. If they did (notatibility is very questionable) then "glitch prime" could have been mentioned there. PrimeHunter (talk) 15:49, 5 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Would a redirect to that make sense then? Or worth having a subsection in that list article? Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 19:02, 5 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I don't think they are notable enough for List of prime numbers. OEIS has thousands of prime number sequences. A redirect makes no sense if the target gives no indication of the meaning. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:30, 6 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Also, this is WP:OR, as the author of the video does not cite any source. So, this does not belong to WP. D.Lazard (talk) 12:31, 6 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@D.Lazard: The OR policy forbids an author from publishing their original research in Wikipedia. It absolutely does not forbid referencing a source that is itself engaged in original research. (Otherwise it would be forbidden to cite published mathematics research papers in WP.) --JBL (talk) 17:46, 6 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
In WP:OR, original research is defined as The phrase "original research" (OR) is used on Wikipedia to refer to material—such as facts, allegations, and ideas—for which no reliable, published sources exist. This is precisely the case of "glitch primes". D.Lazard (talk) 18:07, 6 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
The Numberphile video is a published source; possibly you believe that it is not reliable, but that is a totally separate issue from WP:OR. --JBL (talk) 18:11, 6 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
In WP:OR: Self-published material, whether on paper or online, is generally not regarded as reliable. In WP:SPS: Self-published expert sources may be considered reliable when produced by an established expert on the subject matter, whose work in the relevant field has previously been published by reliable third-party publications. An anonymous blogger, such as nunberphile, cannot fit this definition of a self-published expert. So, the fact that this source is not reliable is the result of Wikipedia's definition of "reliable". It is not a belief nor an opinion. D.Lazard (talk) 18:53, 6 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Numberphile is not an 'anonymous blogger', and neither is Simon Pampena [1]. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 18:56, 6 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

old Drafts found

Draft:Robust geometric computation Legacypac (talk) 03:19, 6 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Draft:Proto-value Functions. Robert McClenon (talk) 22:39, 6 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

We already have an article on Proto-value functions, created in 2011. (This is the same topic but with different capitalization of the title). Both the draft and the article were created by User:GNrun. The article looks keepable; the draft should be disposed of in whatever way is correct. EdJohnston (talk) 23:06, 6 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I have tagged Draft:Proto-value Functions as a duplicate of an article. It will be available for comparison against the article for six months and then will self-destruct. See G13 rather than Mission Impossible. Robert McClenon (talk) 19:07, 7 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I have added these two drafts to Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/List of math draft pages. -- Taku (talk) 23:18, 6 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I am interested to see that there is a list of drafts. I will occasionally add the name of a draft here to permit the updating of the list by someone whose math knowledge is a little better than mine, which consists of having forgotten all of the higher math that I learned in college and still remembering first-year calculus because I learned it in high school. Robert McClenon (talk) 19:07, 7 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I have moved Proto-value functions to Proto-value function. I left it as an orphaned article, i.e. no other articles link to it. I don't know which other topics should link to it. Michael Hardy (talk) 16:41, 9 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

New Draft Found

Please categorize Draft:M* search algorithm Robert McClenon (talk) 01:37, 8 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The list was Taku's excellent idea. If other wikiprojects did this more good drafts could be improved. Legacypac (talk) 06:51, 8 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Is Ngo best described as "Vietnamese-French" or "Vietnamese" in the lead?

Please see the discussion here. --173.79.47.7 (talk) 23:01, 6 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The article "Compositional data"

This article doesn't seem to have much content to me. Is this not just giving examples where all data points lie on a simplex? It also happens to be almost entirely contained in Aitchison geometry (which seems to just define some operations on the simplex and a few isomorphisms, although perhaps their significance in statistics is greater than I can tell).

Seems to me like at least one of the two articles should be merged into the other or to Simplex#Applications (which itself needs some work). See the talk page discussion at compositional data and talk page discussion at Aitchison geometry that I just started. — MarkH21 (talk) 06:21, 12 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Compositional data is currently a very very stubby article. It currently has _nothing_ on the normal distribution of logits, along with their variance matrices and singular-value decompositions of them, etc. Obviously if one is to be merged into the other then Compositional data is the one that should survive. Michael Hardy (talk) 05:50, 13 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

It is also obvious that if two of these are merged, then Aitchison geometry would be merged into Compositional data and not into Simplex, since analysis of compositional data is the purpose of Aitchison's work. Michael Hardy (talk) 17:03, 14 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Got it, thanks for the help! I may go ahead and do that if there is no objection. Would you be able to add the content that you mentioned? — MarkH21 (talk) 22:27, 14 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@MarkH21: I'm not sure the article titled Aitchison geometry shouldn't exist. Possibly when Wikipedia's coverage of the topic of compositional data analysis becomes somewhat complete it will be obvious that it should. Michael Hardy (talk) 05:48, 15 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
My understanding is that Aitchison geometry is a set of transformations and a structure on a simplex used to study data that lies on a simplex (i.e. compositional data), right? It's the sample space of compositional data and seems to be better served as a section of the article on compositional data. It doesn't seem like the article compositional data (which is 15 years old!) and Aitchison geometry will each be expanded so greatly in the near future that Aitchison geometry should be a standalone article. But when it does, we could split Aitchison geometry into its own article?
This is just my (non-expert) opinion, but I think both article would be improved in their current (and foreseeable) state if we made Aitchison geometry a section of compositional data. — MarkH21 (talk) 18:49, 15 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
For now that's probably the best way. But if the article gets expanded a lot later then a separate article may make more sense. Michael Hardy (talk) 17:38, 18 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for your input! I've done the merge now, made some other revisions to the writing, and added some links to the article / pointing at the article. — MarkH21 (talk) 07:04, 19 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Draft:Color and mathematics

So I don't know what should be done with this draft. The article title seems too vague, which is of course fixable and the topic itself seems legitimate (but I don't have a background to review the article itself myself). -- Taku (talk) 01:44, 15 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

It looks like original research to me. Some of its content may of course have been published somewhere, but if you find those publications and turn that content into an article meeting Wikipedia standards, you'll have something so different from the draft that it will be effectively a completely different article.
That said, I see no urgency to delete these. --Trovatore (talk) 02:43, 15 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
A vector space for color vision is not itself Original Research, but this draft probably needs revision to make clear what's derived from what. XOR'easter (talk) 02:50, 15 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
"Original research" is of course a term of art here; it doesn't mean that it's particularly original or makes any research contribution. The content seems pretty simple and I don't see anything obviously wrong (not that I've been over it with a fine-tooth comb), so it's quite likely that any particular statement in it is more-or-less sourceable. But it's not clear that the exposition as a whole corresponds to anything in sources. --Trovatore (talk) 18:07, 15 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
As far as I understand, this draft may be viewed as a tentative for describing the mathematical background of color space. So, the draft could be merged in color space, for making a section called "mathematical background" or "mathematical definition". But, for that, a lot of work is needed on the draft as well as on the target article. D.Lazard (talk) 10:09, 15 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
(Thank you all for the responses). Following D.Lazard’s suggestion, I have put a merger tag; and, *hopefully*, someone knowledgeable can take care of the draft. Yes, the content looks fine; but I’m just not well equipped with the knowledge (or will power) to judge the content so simply moving it to mainspace seems wrong. —- Taku (talk) 09:14, 18 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Infobox edits (thankfully not about FLT)

I am about to run off to work so can't deal with this properly, but attention is definitely needed with respect to the edits to mathematician infoboxes by this user: Debaditya2000 (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log). There have been some reversions (e.g. by D.Lazard at Paul Erdos and by me at Andrey Markov and Alexander Grothendieck), but there are many more. Courtesy ping: @Debaditya2000:. --JBL (talk) 13:26, 18 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The same editor has also created Kolmogorov's theory of 1941, which deserves clearly to be nominated for AfD. It would better to be nominated by an editor who knows turbulence theory. D.Lazard (talk) 14:14, 18 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
PS: this article has been made a redirect to Turbulence by another editor, while I was writing my previous post. D.Lazard (talk) 14:18, 18 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
All infoboxes edits by this user have now been reverted. D.Lazard (talk) 15:56, 18 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Hello, many of you reverted my edits for as one of you said, because I didn't summarize, I consider my goal is not only to summarize but also to unify as much information as possible on the main page with the associated pages, but also to keep it comprehensive, i.e. "summarized". As far as my conception of "known for" is concerned, I don't have a narrow minded approach towards the concept of 'known for" that I presume one of you have, a mathematically ignorant person may or may not "know" a person or his name because of his direct "contributions" to knowledge. Also, to back up my argument, I'll also mention you 3 few "good","protected" and a "featured" article that have the same format of representation of "known for" field that I tried to edit in my editing of Paul Erdős' article. Please have a look at the following articles: Richard Feynman, John von Neumann and Paul Dirac. The 3 aforementioned articles are rated "featured, "good" and "semi-protected" respectively also have a lengthy collapsible list. Also, to avoid super-lengthy infoboxes, I added collapsible lists, as it'd hence, be intuitively understandable to the reader that the associated field may contain long/medium sized information. My request to you people would be not to revert the articles and to allow my previous edits, as it'll both unify and summarize the articles' infoboxes. Debaditya2000 (talk • contribs) 1:47 pm, Today (UTC−4)
I'm afraid there is a general consensus that collapsible lists are not appropriate in articles. If you want to try to override that consensus in the articles you are editing, work on those articles' talk pages. I haven't checked your edits, and haven't analysed your comment here to see if there are other things you want which are contrary to established consensus. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 05:20, 19 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
If there is a general consensus, then it should apply to every list and if, there is a general consensus on something which is contradictory of the established well written articles' (as I gave a few references earlier) formats then I think it is plausible that having collapsible lists are no violation, of Wikipedia policies, rather it's fundamentally within it, which is sharing as much information as possible. I repeat, when there is an inclusion of a collapsible list, it is intuitively understandable to the reader that the associated field may contain long/medium sized information. However, the list itself doesn't make the infobox too long, as there is an option to shorten or open a list, which is absent in general, non-collapsible ones. I think I have provided enough justification, so I shall continue to do what I think is needed to for the article for it's betterment, in accordance to Wikipedia policies with reference to "Good/Featured/Protected" articles. Thank you.Debaditya2000

Notice of RfC on Infobox inclusion at FLT

Apologies for bringing up an old issue. Just posting a notice that an official RfC has been posted for the FLT infobox debate: Talk:Fermat's Last Theorem#Request for comment (RfC) on inclusion of Infobox mathematical statement. Hopefully this can lead to the debate being effectively and peacefully closed in either direction. — MarkH21 (talk) 07:32, 19 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Mathematics&oldid=888454064"