Talk:Wilhelm Jordan (geodesist)

This article is rated Stub-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale.
It is of interest to the following WikiProjects:

Biography: Science and Academia

	Biography portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Biography, a collaborative effort to create, develop and organize Wikipedia's articles about people. All interested editors are invited to join the project and contribute to the discussion. For instructions on how to use this banner, please refer to the documentation.BiographyWikipedia:WikiProject BiographyTemplate:WikiProject Biographybiography articles
	This article is supported by the science and academia work group.

Geography Low‑importance

This article is within the scope of WikiProject Geography, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of geography on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.GeographyWikipedia:WikiProject GeographyTemplate:WikiProject Geographygeography articles

Low This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale.

WikiProject Geography To-do list:

Here are some tasks awaiting attention:

Article requests : See Requested articles/Social sciences/Geography, cities, regions and named places and Missing articles about Locations
Assess : Tag related article talk pages with {{WikiProject Geography}}. To help assess the quality and importance of geography articles, please see: Unassessed geography articles and Unknown-importance geography articles.
Cleanup : See Geography articles needing attention
Deletion sorting : Listed at Geographic related deletion discussions
Geographical coordinates : See Articles missing geocoordinate data by country
Infobox : See Geography articles needing infoboxes
Map : See Wikipedia requested maps
Notability : See Geography articles with topics of unclear notability
Photo : See Wikipedia requested photographs of places
Stubs : See Geography stubs

dubious list of achievements

I think the list of Dr. Jordan's achievements are likely incorrect. The concept of stability of a numerical procedure did not exist during his life, so it could not be the reason for the invention of the Gauss-Jordan method. Gaussian elimination had long been used to solve the normal equations without difficulty, so it is wrong to say his work enabled the use of least squares to solve the geodetic angle adjustment problem. For example, least squares was used before 1858 on the Ordnance Survey of the British Isles. Finally, I have paged through volume 1 of the 1895 edition of his book and I do not see Gauss-Jordan elimination there, so it is not clear to me that he was the originator. By the way, Gauss certainly was not. Jfgrcar (talk) 05:42, 18 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]