Wikipedia:Peer review/Michael Atiyah/archive1

Michael Atiyah

• A script has been used to generate a semi-automated review of the article for issues relating to grammar and house style; it can be found on the automated peer review page for August 2008.

This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review as preparation for WP:FAC. It could probably do with some feedback from non-mathematicians.

Thanks, R.e.b. (talk) 14:40, 15 August 2008 (UTC)

WillowW comments

OK, R.e.b., you know that I like you, and I have nice memories of our work together on Emmy Noether. So please don't take it amiss if I give you my personal opinion: the article is not close to being ready for FAC. I feel the chief problems are these two:

• I fear the present article is unintelligible to almost every reader. I cringe at saying this, since my own articles are rarely intelligible. But I do know some basic math and physics, including some index and fixed-point theorems; and I wrote photon, including the gauge-symmetry and quantum-field-theory parts. But this article is light-years beyond that level, and I have to admit that I understood basically nothing of your description of his work. If that's true for me, then imagine what it would feel like for our English-literature friends, Awadewit and Scartol. Please don't write us off from the beginning. You can sacrifice some of the details at the top-level article and incorporate them later into more technical daughter articles.

• With the exception of the biography section, the article reads like a collation of lists: list of collaborators, list of publications, list of awards, etc. Please understand that we readers don't need such lists; we can always get them from online publication databases, or from Atiyah's CV and his Conflict of Interest forms. ;) We don't need a list of every problem Atiyah has ever worked on, or every publication he's issued. Rather, we need you to make sense of his work for us, to organize his publications into themes and story-arcs and narrative. Motivate the problems, set them in the context of other work and great trends in physics/math, that sort of thing. To help create space for that narrative, you might consider farming out some lists into daughter articles, e.g., those of his collaborators, students and publications, as we did (in part) for Emmy Noether.

I sympathize, I really do, and I hope you don't think I'm being unnecessarily harsh or critical. Sometimes I'll ask my better educated friends here (from grad students to professors) to review a geometry or physics article that I've worked months on, articles that I've always striven to make intelligible and which can't be that complicated, if I can understand them. :) And yet, despite my mightiest efforts to explain and the wealth of my excellent thesaurus, my friends often give up and say, "it's way over my head." Examples would be the Laplace-Runge-Lenz vector or the problem of Apollonius, both of which I'm sure must seem trivially simple to you. Your task is a quantum leap or two in complexity beyond those — but I feel that we have to at least try to make our articles readable. Experts don't need — and I daresay won't read — a Wikipedia article on their own subject; it's for everyone else's benefit that we're writing, don't you agree?

With sincere best wishes and hopeful prospects, Willow (talk) 08:11, 16 August 2008 (UTC)

Geometry guy adds

I would agree with Willow's assessment here. Luckily I got to copyedit the Biography section before her review :-) as it was also a bit of a list (of job titles and places). I got a bit stuck after that, but Willow's suggestion to develop daughter articles sounds like a good way forward.

There is one issue I would like to add in the light of "Rather, we need you to make sense of his work for us". I would modify this to say "Rather, we need you to use reliable secondary sources to make sense of his work for us" (where "you" is really anyone who wants to help improve the article: I'm in!). In my view, the current weaknesses of the article are ultimately caused by its heavy reliance on primary source material, i.e., Atiyah's papers, recollections and remarks. This is illustrated (for example) by the large number of quotes attributed to Atiyah. These are not, for the most part, notable, and certainly not what makes Atiyah notable.

It is a crying shame that there isn't (to my knowledge) a decent biography of Atiyah (i.e., a researched, authoritative book). So we shall have to make do with Mactutor and the various mini-bio's that are available. We also need to bring out the human side more. For instance, Atiyah has been quite politically active: see e.g., his 1995 Royal Society Presidential address (available on JSTOR) for his views on nuclear weapons.

However, R.e.b. has gathered a lot of good and useful material here, and I am optimistic it can be forged into a great article in time. In doing so, we need to remember that whatever the motivation for bringing this article to FA standard, it is first and foremost an encyclopedia article, and should be written with that in mind. Geometry guy 10:11, 16 August 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. This confirms what I'd been suspecting about the article: the sections are either boring lists, or incomprehensible. (I'd been sort of hoping that reviewers at FAC would be too busy counting citations to actually read the article and notice this.) As far as I know there aren't really any serious secondary sources on Atiyah or his work (only a few eulogies in journal issues in his honor and so on), and his life outside his mathematical work seems to have been uneventful. It is clear from your comments that fixing the problems with the article will require someone who has complementary skills to mine. R.e.b. (talk) 14:18, 16 August 2008 (UTC)

Willow returns

Be comforted, R.e.b.; the lists aren't boring, and incomprehensible things are often fascinating — or at least so I get told. ;) If you truly care about bringing this article to FA, then I for one — and I think G-guy, for two — will help you give your dream a "local habitation and a name", if not the bronze star. What are friends for? :)

On the other hand, you'll have to be patient with me. When I took on the Universe last year, I said, "I'm all too apt to take on more than I can handle..." But this article is way more scary to me than the Universe, so I'll need time to get up to speed, and I can't promise to be ready even by April of next year. For one thing, I need to find a new job and a new place to live.... :(

I wouldn't despair about the secondary sources. I'm less strict-minded than G-guy on that. I believe we can avoid WP:NOR and still give a compelling, sweeping narrative of Atiyah's work without parroting someone else's work. On the other hand, I'm admittedly a creature of faith, faith that sometimes overreaches itself. Still, I feel we must try, in all good faith, and hope that you feel likewise. :) Willow (talk) 23:59, 16 August 2008 (UTC)

After meditating awhile on your comments, I've decided that the sections on his work probably wont be a problem. The folks at FA presumably expect math to be incomprehensible and just check it for spelling errors and citations, and wont notice (or care) that it is even more incomprehensible than usual. On the other hand, the sections about Atiyah himself are really boring and need some serious rewriting; at the moment they are little more than a dump from his CV. The 2 books by Yau might have something useful in them; I havn't looked at them yet.

I don't feeling strongly about FA status so don't go out of your way to help unless you really want to. The only reason I'm thinking about it is that it would be amusing to have the article, with some serious math, on the front page for his birthday, but it's not a big deal. (And it would be nice to have a change from those endless main page articles on obscure songs and video games.)

I'm sorry to hear about your job, though I'd be surprised if it takes long to find another. You presumably already know about What Color is Your Parachute?; if by some chance you don't, go and get a copy. R.e.b. (talk) 00:55, 17 August 2008 (UTC)

Thanks so much for your thoughtful and kind words! :) I'll try to be helpful to you when the time comes, but I probably won't be able to do anything useful for months. But if you'll allow me some friendly and well-meant advice, please try to make the article more narrative, more story-like, even on the math parts. I'm worried that you'll have trouble at FAC otherwise; not all those reviewers are mere reference-counters and dash-spacers, and some may insist that you make the math comprehensible. :P Willow (talk) 04:25, 17 August 2008 (UTC)

PS. I think my parachute has no colour of its own, like a mirror. :( It seems to reflect whatever I'm dreaming of. Willow (talk) 04:25, 17 August 2008 (UTC)

In accordance with Ricardo's law of comparative advantage, I don't do narrative. R.e.b. (talk) 15:28, 17 August 2008 (UTC)