Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mathematics/Archive/2017/Dec

Mathematics proposal at the Community Wishlist

Please see m:2017 Community Wishlist Survey/Reading/Functional and beautiful math for everyone. The current goal is to create as strong a proposal as possible. (Actual voting comes later.) There were extensive discussions at the German Wikipedia about this earlier, and I would be happy to see participation from this group as well. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:18, 7 November 2017 (UTC)

Someone should mention the sentiment like one expressed at User:Deltahedron. I tend to agree that the fundamental problem is that of logistic (e.g., developer resource allocation). —- Taku (talk) 20:58, 17 November 2017 (UTC)

Voting is open, and I believe that m:2017 Community Wishlist Survey/Reading/Functional and beautiful math for everyone is the only proposal directly about mathematics on the list. Editors here may also be interested in some of the other proposals, such as improved maps (m:2017 Community Wishlist Survey/Miscellaneous/Kartographer improvements). There are 15 categories listed at the top of m:2017 Community Wishlist Survey, leading to the several hundred proposals. Please vote for your favorites. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:37, 1 December 2017 (UTC)

Mathematics articles readibility

Omniscience

Mathematics on Wikipedia USED TO BE easily readable, it has become programming language or question mark text-boxes which is obviously meant exclusively for initiates.

Mathematics on Wikipedia USED TO BE easily readable, it has become gobbledeegook which is obviously meant exclusively for initiates or it has become link-less text boxes with a question mark in the middle. Leaving this comment seems to be the best i can do to sort anything out (if it is in any way sortable).

Yours Sincerely:COULDHAVETOLDMESOONER (talk) 17:30, 25 November 2017 (UTC)

Comprehensibility

My apology, I complained about your mathematics renditions but it turns out that if i download the article as a PDF it comes through just fine. This does however lead me to complain about your ‘Help’ pages which send me from ten to ninetynine different directions both all at once and sequentially AND let me assure you that your “reference desk” page most emphatically does Not function anything “like a library’ reference desk”.

Sincerely: COULDHAVETOLDMESOONER (talk) 19:32, 26 November 2017 (UTC)

PostScript

…that is using Your 'Download as PDF', Not My 'Save as PDF'. — Preceding unsigned comment added by COULDHAVETOLDMESOONER (talk • contribs) 19:41, 26 November 2017 (UTC)

• Such general comments are not likely to be useable by anyone, even if they were interested. If there are specific improvements that you wish to propose (and face it, Wikipedia will never be a finished work), you are welcome to contribute and engage as a contributor and editor of those articles on their talk pages. This talk page has a similar purpose with a broader perspective. —Quondum 22:34, 26 November 2017 (UTC)
  • It sounds like the complaints are not so much with article content but with some software bug preventing display of formulas. In which case, yes, many of us are frustrated with how Wikipedia displays formulas, but you should probably try going into your Wikipedia preferences (under Appearances / Math) and trying different options to see whether another one works better than however you have it set up currently. —David Eppstein (talk) 23:28, 26 November 2017 (UTC)

@COULDHAVETOLDMESOONER: From the description of the problem "text boxes with a question mark in the middle" this sounds like a font problem. If you don't have the right set of fonts installed then unknown characters can be displayed by boxes with question marks in them, this especially applies to the special characters used in mathematics formula. To help resolve the problem the article where there were problems and details of hardware and software you are using.--Salix alba (talk): 23:53, 26 November 2017 (UTC)

COULDHAVETOLDMESOONER, could you please tell me what your web browser (including version number) and operating system are? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:39, 1 December 2017 (UTC)

RFC on colons for indentation

An editor has started an RFC [1] proposing to forbid articles to use colons to indent displayed mathematics. — Carl (CBM · talk) 13:43, 3 December 2017 (UTC)

Disambiguation links on pages tagged by this wikiproject

Wikipedia has many thousands of wikilinks which point to disambiguation pages. It would be useful to readers if these links directed them to the specific pages of interest, rather than making them search through a list. Members of WikiProject Disambiguation have been working on this and the total number is now below 20,000 for the first time. Some of these links require specialist knowledge of the topics concerned and therefore it would be great if you could help in your area of expertise.

A list of the relevant links on pages which fall within the remit of this wikiproject can be found at http://69.142.160.183/~dispenser/cgi-bin/topic_points.py?banner=WikiProject_Maths_rating

Please take a few minutes to help make these more useful to our readers.— Rod ^talk 17:03, 3 December 2017 (UTC)

Numerosity theory

Does anyone have opinions on the merits of the article titled Numerosity theory?

Currently no other articles link to it. Michael Hardy (talk) 15:57, 27 November 2017 (UTC)

Policy WP:PRIMARY Asserts: "Do not base an entire article on primary sources." It seems that this applies here; as only the motivations contain inline references, the references [10] and [14] must be checked, and I have not done this check (the other refs are either older than the introduction of this theory, or coauthored by Benci and/or Di Nasso). In any case, this seems a theory that has no non-straightforward theorems, nor applications outside itself. My experiences is that such theories are and remain fringe theories. It is thus normal that no other article link to this article. My opinion is that this article deserve to be deleted. D.Lazard (talk) 17:16, 27 November 2017 (UTC)

I think I agree with that. This article is also written more like a journal article or textbook than an encyclopedia article, and has been left incomplete for months. It does look a lot like the promotion of a fringe theory. Also note the gratuitous citation to J.H. Conway; it's in the references but not the text. Reyk _YO! 17:28, 27 November 2017 (UTC)

The whole "Cantor was wrong and Euclid was right" attitude gives it a very crank-ish feel. The fact that the references are primary sources with a few textbooks thrown in is also a bad sign. Oh, and the line "Now we are ready to introduce our main notion" is followed by two empty subsections and an empty section. Even if the topic were legitimate, the article should never have been moved out of draft space. Even supposing that the topic is legitimate, the article shouldn't have been moved out of draft space. XOR'easter (talk) 17:30, 27 November 2017 (UTC)

I'll give the AfC approver a ping to see what his view of the situation is. Hello there @Joe Decker:. Reyk _YO! 17:33, 27 November 2017 (UTC)

No strong feelings here, AfC is to some extent a messy triage process, and if this is largely a fringe theory, that's not something I'm going to necessary recognize in the moment. Happy to leave myself neutral in this discussion, and if y'all (and AfD) think it's best deleted, well, that would settle the matter more clearly than a single AfC reviewer making a quick call without JSTOR access ever would. Thanks for the ping. --joe decker^talk 00:07, 28 November 2017 (UTC)

Reference 10 (Ehrlich, 2012) does not discuss "numerosity theory" at all, nor does it refer to the papers of Benci et al. Reference 14 (Mancosu, 2009) does, but the author declares himself in full agreement with a correspondent who writes, "For me, what would decide whether Katz's and Benci-Nasso's theories are genuinely interesting would be the depth of the ideas and how they interact with other parts of mathematics. [...] Determining whether [...] Benci-Nasso have contributed something important requires a more elaborate story that goes well beyond the two starting intuitions." So, it really doesn't look like there are enough sources to establish notability or write about the topic in an NPOV way (and without both solid sourcing and careful writing, anything about the mathematics of infinity is going to sound crank-ish). WP:TOOSOON.

Oh, and one edit to the draft was by "Vieri.benci," while several others were by two IPs that geolocate to the University of Pisa, where Benci is a professor. (The other anon IP that contributed is from Telecom Italia.) WP:COI. XOR'easter (talk) 18:09, 27 November 2017 (UTC)

I started looking through the GS citations to Benci and Di Nasso (2003), in the hope of turning up something that could make the notability case or help evaluate the influence so we can write about it in an NPOV way. 60-ish citations isn't terrible, for a contribution of niche interest — the sort of thing that could conceivably be a part of an article on a more broad topic. Lots of self-citations, though, and things marked as "draft" or only available on the arXiv, and at least one paper in Chaos, Solitons and Fractals at the height of the El Naschie period. So, that wasn't too helpful. XOR'easter (talk) 18:21, 27 November 2017 (UTC)

I have prodded this article. D.Lazard (talk) 18:19, 3 December 2017 (UTC)

Adding number articles to the wikiproject

Is it appropriate to add all of the number articles (e.g. 1, 6, 124, etc.) to the wikiproject? I've noticed that many of them aren't in it as of now. Or should I leave them be? The Verified Cactus 100% 23:44, 4 December 2017 (UTC)

No, they belong in a different and more specialized project, Wikipedia:WikiProject Numbers. —David Eppstein (talk) 02:23, 5 December 2017 (UTC)

Recent edits to Multiset, Fuzzy set

User Ernsts (contributions) has recently made a large number of changes to these two articles. I have only glanced through the edits to multiset and found them a little bit concerning, but I didn't want to do a mass-revert without someone else taking a look first. Any thoughts? --JBL (talk) 17:46, 3 December 2017 (UTC)

I don't much care what happens to fuzzy set, but multiset is important. The edits there look to be in good faith and without serious mathematical mistakes, but also overly WP:TECHNICAL and not helpful in better explaining the concept. I don't think they are an improvement. —David Eppstein (talk) 21:28, 3 December 2017 (UTC)

Thanks, David Eppstein. I feel similarly. In particular, there is now a lot of discussion of fuzzy sets in the article multiset, which seems really off-point. I will try to find time to look over the edits and extract any improvements from them and revert the rest, but final exams are coming up, so maybe not right away. --JBL (talk) 19:40, 8 December 2017 (UTC)

Annals of Mathematics Second Series citations (and other similar cases)

Currently (see entry #113), there are a few ways to refer to the second series of this journal.

• |journal=Ann. Math. (2)
• |journal=Ann. of Math. (2)
• |journal=Annals of Mathematics (2)
• |journal=Annals of Mathematics, Second Series
• |journal=Annals of Mathematics. Second Series

This is an abuse of the |journal= parameter, and the series information should be put in the |series= parameter. I'm planning on doing some cleanup on that, but I want this project's feedback on it first. How does the following sound?

• |journal=Ann. Math. (2) → |journal=Ann. Math. |series=2
• |journal=Ann. of Math. (2) → |journal=Ann. of Math. |series=2
• |journal=Annals of Mathematics (2) → |journal=Annals of Mathematics |series=Second Series
• |journal=Annals of Mathematics, Second Series → |journal=Annals of Mathematics |series=Second Series
• |journal=Annals of Mathematics. Second Series → |journal=Annals of Mathematics |series=Second Series

Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 14:41, 7 December 2017 (UTC)

I would always write out the full name rather than abbreviating. The reason for abbreviating is obsolete. If a paper in a journal has three pages of references, it would expand to eight pages or the like if titles were not abbreviated, and if that were done in all papers, it would make each volume thicker and cost more in material and postage. None of that applies to a web-based medium. And abbreviations are not always understood by every reader who wants to know what they say. What is "Ann. Med. Omph. F."? Michael Hardy (talk) 16:22, 8 December 2017 (UTC)

Annual Mediterranean Omphaloskeptic Fantasies. XOR'easter (talk) 17:00, 8 December 2017 (UTC)

Regardless of how you personally feel about abbreviations, WP:CITEVAR applies, and I'm not going to unleash a bot to un-abbreviate things, especially since it could introduce an inconstant style. The question I'm trying to get feedback on is what to put in the |series= parameter. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 18:19, 8 December 2017 (UTC)

The Second Series designation is a historical thing. It was always written Second Series on the cover at the time, so I support the translation in your third example from 2 to Second Series. The other four seem uncontroversial and look good to me. --Mark viking (talk) 19:17, 8 December 2017 (UTC)

Pretty much any solution is fine with me. Sławomir Biały (talk) 19:20, 8 December 2017 (UTC)

Alright, then I'll make the changes. If you see anything that should be different, let me know and I'll re-run the bot. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 00:38, 9 December 2017 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics

This AfD is probably of interest to the crowd here. XOR'easter (talk) 19:54, 10 December 2017 (UTC)

Info-metrics

I am writing regarding the page Info-metrics. The article has been tagged for WP:Notability. I have added several relevant journal articles and textbooks to the article's talk page. The editor who originally tagged the article contends that s/he does not have enough expertise to evaluate the sources. Requesting some help from this project to evaluate the sources and remove the tags. Arnob (talk) 18:24, 12 December 2017 (UTC)

Category:Non-associative algebra

This is about Category:Non-associative algebra and Category:Non-associative algebras.

Category:Non-associative algebra is about nonassociative algebraic structures. It contains things like Quasigroup and Magma (algebra), i.e., articles about algebraic structures for which the binary operation does not satisfy the associative law. Category:Non-associative algebra has Category:Non-associative algebras as a subcategory. I think it would be less confusing if Category:Non-associative algebra were renamed to something like Category:Non-associative algebraic structure. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Tea2min (talk • contribs) 20:40, 12 December 2017 (UTC)

As there is no criterion for deciding which page belongs to either categories, the only way for being not confusing is to merge the two categories into Category:Non-associative algebra. In fact, both categories contain pages that are about structures, and both contain pages about properties or constructions for these structures. Even knowing a little about a lot of these pages, I am unable to find any criterion. D.Lazard (talk) 21:07, 12 December 2017 (UTC)

Well, apparently Category:Non-associative algebra is (or was meant to be?) about any algebraic structures with a binary operation that is not (or is not assumed to be) associative, while Category:Non-associative algebras is (or was meant to be) about non-associative algebras: algebras over a field where the binary multiplication operation is not associative, i.e., Lie algebras, alternative algebras, Jordan algebras, and so on. So, I think there actually is a criterion for deciding which page belongs to which category.

Anyway, if Category:Non-associative algebras were to be merged into Category:Non-associative algebra I think the articles about loops, quasigroups, magmas and so on should be removed. – Tea2min (talk) 06:27, 13 December 2017 (UTC)

New selected picture

I added a new picture for the selected picture at the mathematics portal. If anyone thinks it was a bad idea, please feel free to undo it. Or if anyone has more to say for the text (I didn't have a lot to say about it), please go ahead too. The selected picture subpage is at Portal:Mathematics/Selected_picture/25. –Deacon Vorbis (carbon • videos) 23:06, 17 December 2017 (UTC)

Proposed deletion of Mathematics of radio engineering

The article Mathematics of radio engineering has been proposed for deletion because of the following concern:

Serious concerns on talk page have not been addressed since 2012.

While all constructive contributions to Wikipedia are appreciated, pages may be deleted for any of several reasons.

You may prevent the proposed deletion by removing the {{proposed deletion/dated}} notice, but please explain why in your edit summary or on the article's talk page.

Please consider improving the page to address the issues raised. Removing {{proposed deletion/dated}} will stop the proposed deletion process, but other deletion processes exist. In particular, the speedy deletion process can result in deletion without discussion, and articles for deletion allows discussion to reach consensus for deletion. — Sebastian 01:54, 22 December 2017 (UTC)

Simplification

Wondering peoples thoughts about this? Would there be interest if we could convince them to release it under an open license (drop the NC)? Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 02:24, 17 December 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for the link. We can do color in math formulas, too; see Help:Displaying_a_formula#Color for details. The idea of matching display math and prose colors is a clever one, but one that depends on readers having a color display and using a colorblind-safe set of colors. For blind readers, it may be incomprehensible. It is best practice in WP math articles to explain the meaning of each variable and non-obvious symbols. To me, the real pedagogical benefit of this sort of match-up would be to encourage editors to explain formulas in clear, tight prose, rather than just let the math speak for itself. --Mark viking (talk) 05:11, 17 December 2017 (UTC)

By the way, someone just asked about this at WP:RD/MA#December 15. (I wasn't very convinced this would be a good thing). –Deacon Vorbis (carbon • videos) 06:17, 17 December 2017 (UTC)

Personally, I prefer to focus on a given expression, rather than additionally counting the involved categories (color) and look for the documentation of this encoding. The number of involved symbols does not gain much by an additional dimension of structure, beyond italic, roman, primed, indexed, capitalized, Greek, ... Under all circumstances I would avoid to spend a single dime on licensing this. Feasibly, this is targeted at the budgets of elementary math education. Purgy (talk) 07:16, 17 December 2017 (UTC)

There are a few articles which use colour in maths formula Polynomial expansion separates coefficients from variables. Square root of 5 picks out particular numbers in a sequence and uses the corresponding colour in text. A list of other examples can be found in my sandbox.

It might be possible to do a limited amount of automatic equation colouring by using an extension. The extension would need to scan the article looking for expressions like "let y = m x + c" and the subsequent occurences of y could be coloured. I might have a go at some time. --Salix alba (talk): 08:29, 17 December 2017 (UTC)

That website is CC BY SA NC. Not really sure one can copyright the idea anyway. And they would likely be happy to see us use it.

I did a lot of math in my undergrad and found the color coding to be useful when I say it just recently. Agree one would need to be careful about people with color vision problems. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 06:44, 22 December 2017 (UTC)

Isn't it unfair to be just "careful about people with color vision problems", and ignore all those who experience a degraded presentation caused by some automated coloring? The examples directly linked by Salix alba are certainly promoting the idea, but "coloring the 'y's" after "let y = m x + c" makes me weary. Getting rid of the diametric and incomplete methods in rendering math in WP with different sizes and fonts, and ... would be very much more urgent, to my measures. In no way should this coloring be by default. How much should Wikimedia cash in for even recommending this colorful idea? Purgy (talk) 08:58, 22 December 2017 (UTC)

Please come and help...

There is a requested move at Talk:Polyking#Requested move 5 December 2017 in which an editor has proposed renaming Polyking to Polyplet. Please come and add your !vote and rationale to the discussion. Thank you and Happy Holidays to All!  Paine Ellsworth  ^put'r there  20:58, 23 December 2017 (UTC)

Off by two orders of magnitude?

Your feedback is requested at Talk:Gender dysphoria#Off by two orders of magnitude?. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 11:37, 24 December 2017 (UTC)

I did. Boris Tsirelson (talk) 20:01, 24 December 2017 (UTC)

Ordinal collapsing function

Hi there. Could someone have a look at the newly accepted article Buchholz psi functions? My main concern is to what an extent it should be separate from Ordinal collapsing function. I'm also unsure about the current title, or the validity of this edit. Many thanks! – Uanfala (talk) 21:17, 26 December 2017 (UTC)

Good catch. I think that you are correct that they are the same topic. "Ordinal collapsing function" tries to be a bit more general, but its focus is on the Buchholz psi function. JRSpriggs (talk) 21:26, 26 December 2017 (UTC)

Template mvar

It appears that a recent change to the {{mvar}} template has had the side effect of outputting a sans serif font, so this is no longer an abbreviated version of the {{math}} template. Can someone with the requisite permissions take a look at this? Thanks. --Bill Cherowitzo (talk) 04:35, 28 December 2017 (UTC)

Undone. —David Eppstein (talk) 05:03, 28 December 2017 (UTC)