Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mathematics

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Contents 1 Template:Define 2 Self-referential function 3 XKCD / "In popular culture" 4 Category:Relations 5 Aise Johan de Jong 6 Pentation etc. 7 Calculating residues 8 Minimal subtraction scheme 9 Help 10 Bow and arrow curve 11 Help at Kepler Conjecture 12 Citation formatting, discussion in Talk:Matroid 13 Third set of eyes requested

[edit] Template:Define

I am glad to see that we actually have as a template; it's currently up for deletion, but I hope that will blow over. If others find this as intuitive (for non-mathematicians) as I do, let's use it more widely. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 00:58, 25 June 2009 (UTC)

First, the template doesn't seem to be in a wide use. Second, how does one use it? In practice you usually have some formulae or more likely identities that contain def equal somehow in middle. There is no many opportunities to use this template. The deletion therefore seems to be a natural choice. -- Taku (talk) 10:38, 25 June 2009 (UTC)

If you want to put such definitions in-line, it's a natural choice; I think that this is one of the templates that is rare because nobody knows about it. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 19:42, 25 June 2009 (UTC)

But TeX shouldn't be used inline, and it looks dreadful: x15. Algebraist 19:47, 25 June 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Self-referential function

Is anyone interested in trying to salvage something from the fairly new article self-referential function ? At present, the first sentence of the article "Cantor's diagonalisation produces a function that makes reference to itself" is simply wrong; the definition "A self-referential function is a function that applies to itself" is hopelessly vague; and the references are not actually related to the contents of the article. See Talk:Self-referential function for further discussion.

We already have fine articles on self-reference, recursion and functional equation. There may be a useful article to be written on self-referential functions, but the current article is not close to it, in my opinion. Gandalf61 (talk) 09:24, 25 June 2009 (UTC)

I removed the text about the Cantor function, which is unrelated to the references and is also wrong; there is no self-reference there.

It looks like this title should simply redirect to the article on recursively-defined functions. The second reference given (of two) uses the term in this way. The first is in theoretical physics, which is concerning. — Carl (CBM · talk) 12:18, 25 June 2009 (UTC)

It's also concerning that the link is both broken and to the statistics department of the government of Malaysia. Algebraist 12:48, 25 June 2009 (UTC)

After removal of irrelevant content the article was left as a stub with a disputed and probably incorrect definition - so I have been bold and replaced it with a redirect to self-reference. Gandalf61 (talk) 07:54, 29 June 2009 (UTC)

[edit] XKCD / "In popular culture"

It seems that inevitably some people like to add an "In popular culture" section to an article whenever the webcomic xkcd happens to make even a passing reference to it. Thus Paul Erdős (Talk), Erdős number (Talk), even Proof that the sum of the reciprocals of the primes diverges, etc. Since this is likely to keep coming up at mathematics articles, I was wondering if we could have a policy page or some centralised discussion to point people at?
For what it's worth, my opinion is that mere incidental mentions are not worth recording, but nontrivial uses in popular culture (even on xkcd) might be. (XKCD comic.) No doubt there are others who think that all "in popular culture" mentions are cruft. Shreevatsa (talk) 17:46, 26 June 2009 (UTC)

We already do have a guideline on this: WP:TRIVIA. This also provides a good retort whenever this sort of thing comes up. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:03, 26 June 2009 (UTC)

It's a big stretch to call an xkcd mention as being a somehow significant "popular culture" mention. Obviously a number of people that like to edit Wikipedia have a somewhat distorted view of what constitutes "popular culture" (I've noted for a while that the article on Crucifixion seems to devote more space and importance to mentions of crucifixions in anime as compared to those in classic artwork and literature). xkcd, as great as it is, is basically a niche webcomic that is only now starting to emerge more into the mainstream. The most defensible insertion would be into Erdos or Bacon number articles...topics which are inherently about popular culture (although the former is more limited to the geek crowd). --C S (talk) 21:20, 26 June 2009 (UTC)

It's likely to be the only mention in nontechnical work of the reciprocals of the primes; but an external link may be a better solution. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 23:17, 26 June 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Category:Relations

I emptied it, rather than leaving it set for a merge back to Category:Mathematical relations, because the creator of the category mangled other categories some of the articles were in, such as Category:Closure operators. I had hoped that the cfm I created would have been sufficient, but then I noticed removal of other appropriate categories. If this was improper, please let me know. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 10:17, 27 June 2009 (UTC)

Not to endorse that; but I notice that Category:Set theory requires a fair amount of work placing articles into appropriate subcategories. Charles Matthews (talk) 13:51, 29 June 2009 (UTC)

I can see that. Can someone provide a current category tree for categories which should be subcategories of Category:Set theory? I don't want to kick articles down one level, requiring further sorting.... — Arthur Rubin (talk) 02:16, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Aise Johan de Jong

We don't have an article about Aise Johan de Jong (notable for resolution of singularities in characteristic p; a Cole prize winner). I'm not so much into biography articles, but if somebody is, he's certainly deserving an article. Jakob.scholbach (talk) 12:59, 27 June 2009 (UTC)

de Jong didn't resolve singularities in positive characteristic; that's still open, though there's been recent progress. What he did was find a way around it using a type of morphism he called an alteration. Ozob (talk) 02:29, 2 July 2009 (UTC)

In the meantime, prior to creating an article, any biographical details can be added to:

Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/missing mathematicians. Charvest (talk) 13:59, 27 June 2009 (UTC)

I didn't know that page; doesn't it duplicate the list of mathematicians at Wikipedia:Requested articles/Mathematics? (I mean, it does doesn't it?) -- Taku (talk) 18:10, 27 June 2009 (UTC)

Hmm. A merge seems to be in order. Should all the requested mathematicians be put into the missing page or should the missing page be put into the requested page. And are all the requested names notable ? Charvest (talk) 18:18, 27 June 2009 (UTC)

The Requested articles list is longer, but has attracted less information; it would be better to merge into Missing mathematicians, which has a format which encourages notes. I don't know whether they're all notable, but I'm shocked to se Vinogradov on both - how did we miss him? Septentrionalis PMAnderson 23:03, 27 June 2009 (UTC)

We do need an article for A. I. Vinogradov. N.B.: don't confuse him (as I have done) with Ivan Matveyevich Vinogradov. CRGreathouse (t | c) 21:36, 28 June 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Pentation etc.

Family of successors to Tetration are being created....

• Pentation
  • Proposed merge into Hyperoperation, substantive material which might be merged is disputed
• Hexation
  • on AfD; I don't see any substantive material
• Heptation
  • redirected to Hexation, when I remember. There hasn't yet been substantive material.
• Octation
  • on AfC, but as a redirect (!)

Any assistance in keeping this in order would be appreciated. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 02:29, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

• There's also an AfC for heptation: Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/Heptation. — Charles Stewart (talk) 12:34, 30 June 2009 (UTC)
• I've closed the hept* and oct* AfCs as neologisms. — Charles Stewart (talk) 11:32, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Calculating residues

Hi. I made an edit to the section of Residue (complex analysis) on calculating residues, and I'm posting here requesting a few more pairs of eyes look at it and make sure I didn't introduce any errors or anything. -GTBacchus^(talk) 18:24, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Minimal subtraction scheme

I would be grateful for some expert opinions on the example I propose to add to Minimal subtraction scheme. Comments at the article talk page would be welcome. A.K.Nole (talk) 20:08, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Help

Hi, I'm posting this on the Maths Wikiproject talk as we need editors who are knowledgeable about Mathematics to evaluate the following discussion and check out the editors and articles affected. Please follow the link below and comment if you can help.

Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/Incidents#Block_review_-_uninvolved_admin_request.

Thankyou. Exxolon (talk) 18:30, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Bow and arrow curve

Bow and arrow curve has been proposed for deletion. Opinions? Michael Hardy (talk) 03:57, 2 July 2009 (UTC)

Could someone have a look at Diffequa contribs ? They seem to be odd. --El Caro (talk) 12:57, 2 July 2009 (UTC)

One possibility is that there is some textbook that gives these as examples. — Carl (CBM · talk) 13:10, 2 July 2009 (UTC)

At first I assumed it was just innocent exploration, but the claim that the bow and arrow was named by Euler pushes into hoax territory. If Euler had really named this thing, Google would know about it. Melchoir (talk) 18:26, 2 July 2009 (UTC)

What are the appropriate terms in Latin and German? I'd search for those in Google Books, with "Euler" as the author's name.

In German:

"Bogen" = bow

"Pfeil" = arrow

"Bogenschiessen" = archery

"Bow and arrow" has some plausibility, since the line y = x is part of the graph, and a curve crossing that line is as well. It's not implausible that Euler wrote about these curves and someone later called them by that name. Michael Hardy (talk) 19:22, 2 July 2009 (UTC)

Hmm, no dice there either. Melchoir (talk) 22:28, 2 July 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Help at Kepler Conjecture

A persistent anon keeps editing Kepler conjecture to add a supposed counterexample attributed to Archimedes Plutonium. I have reverted twice today already, but anon has just inserted their nonsense for a third time. Please can someone keep an eye on the article and revert and/or semi-protect as you see fit. Gandalf61 (talk) 16:41, 3 July 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Citation formatting, discussion in Talk:Matroid

There's a discussion in Talk:Matroid re citation formatting that probably applies more broadly to mathematics articles on Wikipedia in general. —David Eppstein (talk) 06:22, 4 July 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Third set of eyes requested

Could someone please have a look at Talk:Dirac delta function#too many directions? Sławomir Biały (talk) 20:42, 4 July 2009 (UTC)