Counting floats

March 2018

Hello, and thank you for your contributions to Wikipedia. I noticed that you recently added commentary to an article, Real number. While Wikipedia welcomes editors' opinions on an article and how it could be changed, these comments are more appropriate for the article's accompanying talk page. If you post your comments there, other editors working on the same article will notice and respond to them, and your comments will not disrupt the flow of the article. However, keep in mind that even on the talk page of an article, you should limit your discussion to improving the article. Article talk pages are not the place to discuss opinions of the subject of articles, nor are such pages a forum. Thank you. ~ ToBeFree (talk) 18:40, 2 March 2018 (UTC)

I have now added your edit to the talk page, see here: Talk:Real number ~ ToBeFree (talk) 18:44, 2 March 2018 (UTC)

Welcome to Wikipedia. Everyone is welcome to contribute constructively to the encyclopedia. However, talk pages are meant to be a record of a discussion; deleting or editing legitimate comments, as you did at Wikipedia:Reference desk/Mathematics, is considered bad practice, even if you meant well. Even making spelling and grammatical corrections in others' comments is generally frowned upon, as it tends to irritate the users whose comments you are correcting. Take a look at the welcome page to learn more about contributing to this encyclopedia. Thank you. Jasper Deng (talk) 01:56, 5 March 2018 (UTC)

Re: RefDesk

I apologize for the phrase "this guy"; no offense was intended. (Although I am somewhat bemused by your offense, given your decision to sign your messages with a name of unambiguous gender and linguistic origin. Separately, it is indeed the case, as ToE wrote, that in certain portions of North America "guy" has a gender neutral role, but I understand that this is not universal.) About "crank", I do not apologize at all. --JBL (talk) 21:54, 6 March 2018 (UTC)

Ok then we are making progress. Now could you please ask user Thinking of England (ToE) to explain how his religious slight would contribute to the discussion about floats? ... and I quote : "If you insist on believing that God has ten fingers, so be it." Since I have never brought God into the discussion it was uncalled for. It was obviously intended as a vicious take-down where I am shoved back into the flat Earth religious zealots crowd. Isn't that a bit of a stretch ? What next, anti-Cantor truthers ?

As far as my decision to "sign my messages with a name of unambiguous gender and linguistic origin" as you put it, I was taking a clue from the various user names the others assumed : ToE, Bubba73 doesn't give away much of the person's origin behind it either Although if I may permit myself a bit of a stereotyping I live in the land of "Bubba"-s, no, forget it.

Finally, not to sound like a broken record, but can anybody finally tell me where Pi is situated on the number line ?

If not I will make the final decision and y'all will have to live with it.

I see you segregated me into my own little talk page, I take it as a complement. I must have some dangerous ideas after all, we don't want to corrupt other yet undecided folks ( the non-cranks )

Counting floats (talk) 23:26, 6 March 2018 (UTC)

I hope you will forgive me for indenting your response, as is the norm here. This is your personal talk page; it is the appropriate page on which to write a personal message. Apparently you did not understand what I meant by "sign your name," but you have identified yourself as "Tamas Varhegyi" in numerous posts here, and it is that to which I refer. (Our article: "Tamás is a Hungarian, masculine given name.") Your ideas are not dangerous, they are just deeply confused, but the grandiosity is typical of your type. I don't think anyone here cares what your "final decision" is, so long as you don't try to insert it into articles; and if you do, people will only care to the extent that it is a bother to revert nonsense. --JBL (talk) 23:48, 6 March 2018 (UTC)

Counting floats, we've told you many times that pi is located at... pi. I've also explained multiple times why your conception of the real numbers is not correct (I would even go as far to say that it is not even wrong). You clearly did not or do not want to read the entirety of my comments. If you don't want to learn, we won't take out the time to teach you. It may sound harsh to say that, but we will not waste our time talking to deaf ears. Hence why JBL used the label "crank", to express his frustration, even if that was a bit uncivil. If you want to be taken seriously, you must (not just should) start with a construction of the real numbers, and use mathematical rigor. Argumentum ad nauseam will not sway anyone, so merely repeating your ill-informed assertion after we have rejected it will not be productive.--Jasper Deng (talk) 00:19, 7 March 2018 (UTC)

Actually, User:Jasper Deng, I don't really agree that it's necessary to drill down to one of the formal constructions (though it does make things more definite). Those constructions are formalizations of an intuitively accessible structure that predates them. The great 19th-century analysts (Dedekind, Cauchy, Bolzano, Weierstrass, etc) discovered how to express that structure formally, but they did not invent the structure.

I think it is possible to get the ideas across at an intuitive level, to make it clear why these are the Platonistically correct ways of looking at the reals, understood as a line that you can't pull apart into two pieces without breaking it somewhere. You can't prove things in a mathematical sense, but you can explain and convince. However, it does require an interlocutor willing to listen and consider, and it does seem clear by now that we don't have one here. --Trovatore (talk) 08:01, 9 March 2018 (UTC)

@Trovatore: My point is that if Counting floats is to make a proposal/proposition that is to be taken seriously by mathematicians, then she had better argue for it from first principles. She clearly wasn't satisfied by explanations like the use of Dedekind cuts, and acted as if she was correct and we had to accept her idea. Well, I am pretty sure we would not accept a redefinition of the real numbers like that one without due consideration of first principles.--Jasper Deng (talk) 08:59, 9 March 2018 (UTC)

Oh, nicely done. True, we would not. My concern was that you were suggesting to third parties that the formal constructions were of the essence in discussions of the real numbers.

Which you may actually believe, and that's fine, but I don't. I think the formal constructions are valuable because they capture a deeper underlying concept, and that it's possible to argue about why (or even whether) they do in fact capture it. That sort of discussion may be illuminating to third parties even if not to Tamas, which is why I think it is not such a terrible thing for it to appear at the refdesk. --Trovatore (talk) 09:19, 9 March 2018 (UTC)