Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mathematics/Archive/2021/Jul

RfC of interest

This RfC may be of interest to members of this group. Beyond My Ken (talk) 04:03, 1 July 2021 (UTC)

Bold or italic for terms to be defined

Is there any guidance or established consensus on whether to put terms that are defined in bold or in italic? The model theory article, for instance, mainly uses boldface, but not where terms are wikilinked, while the featured article group (mathematics) uses italic. I am sorry of this had been discussed in the past or if it is included in the relevant Manuals of Style; I could find it in neither place. Felix QW (talk) 15:05, 1 July 2021 (UTC)

The advice at MOS:NOBOLD and MOS:WAW suggest italics is preferred. My personal advice is not to do wholesale changes just to change a formatting issue like this. (But if you're making other, substantive changes to an article, and you incidentally bring the formatting into accordance with MOS, that seems fine.) --JBL (talk) 15:12, 1 July 2021 (UTC)

Thank you very much! That was exactly the sort of advice I was looking for! Felix QW (talk) 15:17, 1 July 2021 (UTC)

To editor Felix QW: However, this is a recommended practice to use boldface for the target of a redirect (this helps readers that follow the redirect to find the target). This may explain why some terms are defined in bold and some other in italic, in the same article. D.Lazard (talk) 16:11, 1 July 2021 (UTC)

Indecomposability (constructive mathematics)

Please look at Indecomposability (constructive mathematics) and its talk page. Clearly the anonymous user who started the discussion on the talk page is right that the page as written now cannot be understood without some context that mmost people do not have and that the article does not provide. I am rusty in this stuff. Michael Hardy (talk) 23:42, 3 July 2021 (UTC)

I have changed "constructive mathematics" into "intuitionistic logic" in the article title and in the first sentence. This does not provide much more context, but clarifies that this article does not belong to the standard logic. Also, this is supported by the titles of all sources. D.Lazard (talk) 07:59, 4 July 2021 (UTC)

Tilings and polyhedra

Currently dual tiling redirects to dual polyhedron, which has some relevant images but does not treat the topic in its main text. I'm inclined to think we would be better off with either a new article, or changing the redirect to dual graph. I've raised the matter here rather than on the respective talk page, because it touches on quite a few articles.

There's an analogous problem with our templates, which I've raised at Template talk:Infobox polyhedron. — Charles Stewart (talk) 08:33, 5 July 2021 (UTC)

It seems there are two sections that talk about dual tessellations/tilings: Dual_graph#Infinite_graphs_and_tessellations and Tessellation#Voronoi_tilings. I guess the redirect target would depend on whether one is concerned about topological dual graph aspect or the geometric dual tiling aspect of a dual tiling. A separate article explaining both may be a good idea. --{{u|Mark viking}} {Talk} 09:50, 5 July 2021 (UTC)

Proposal

I propose expanding List of fractals to include more information so that it looks like this and then moving the page to Table of fractals. Thoughts? Please respond here. ➧datumizer  ☎  19:09, 5 July 2021 (UTC)

Torsion of a curve: Are the "Definition" and "Alternative description" intended to be equivalent?

Would anyone here know the answer to this question? —2d37 (talk) 09:24, 9 July 2021 (UTC)

Proposed merge of Angular measurement to Angle

There is a merge discussion at Talk:Angle#Merger of Angular unit into Angle#Units. — Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 18:12, 9 July 2021 (UTC)

Questionable short descriptions

I have not followed closely the appearance and evolution of short descriptions, but I know some of you do. Those who care might want to check out the contributions of User:Hashirkashif123, who has been adding or editing a lot of short descriptions in articles related to mathematics. I would not say that all of their contributions are bad, but a significant number seem questionable. --JBL (talk) 13:46, 7 July 2021 (UTC)

This user has edited approximately 150 short descriptions in three days. All those that I have looked at are either nonsensical, or definitively wrong or violate the style rules of short desciption. Apparently, Hashirkashif123 did not read the warnint that I have posted on their talk page. They must be stopped. I'll post at WP:ANI. D.Lazard (talk) 14:04, 7 July 2021 (UTC)

D.Lazard was successful, and they have been blocked indefinitely. --JBL (talk) 21:01, 7 July 2021 (UTC)

As the edit tags show that Hashirkashif123 was using a mobile app, I suspect this may have been a case of WP:THEYCANTHEARYOU. (For anyone else who tried to find the report at ANI and couldn't: it was Special:Diff/1032450732 and the resolution was Special:Diff/1032480581.) —2d37 (talk) 00:19, 10 July 2021 (UTC)

I've only (relatively) recently become aware of WP:THEYCANTHEARYOU with regard to mobile app editing. This seems like a MAJOR PROBLEM. Does anyone know if this is being addressed? Paul August ☎ 00:40, 10 July 2021 (UTC)

No, because it requires work from the Wikimedia developers and they can't hear you either. The inability to communicate with mobile users has been flagged as a problem as far back as 2015 [1] but it keeps getting marked as low priority with nothing done, or worse in some cases like the one I linked closed as intentional behavior rather than being considered a bug. Maybe if we started implementing a policy of blocking mobile users on first offense, rather than trying unsuccessfully to communicate with them, someone might take notice? —David Eppstein (talk) 01:36, 10 July 2021 (UTC)

I've gone through Hashirkashif123's contributions, and unless I'm a terrible judge of character, it really did seem to me that there wasn't ill intent... I think the ban might have been unfair. As for David Eppstein's solution, I've seen (in just a month or so here) my share of fools who I know should be banned at first offense, and I'm largely in favor of starting a fire to call the firefighters. I just hope that targeting mobile users specifically isn't setting fire to the orphanage. Horsesizedduck (talk) 18:22, 11 July 2021 (UTC)

Inverse limit

See Talk:Inverse limit#Difficult to use and incommensurate with parallel articles — since February, User:Mgkrupa has been making hundreds of edits to this article, making it more technical to the point of unreadability and causing multiple other editors to complain. I have reverted back to the February version, but I suspect the dispute is not over. Please participate in the discussion or on the article, especially if you are interested in both category theory (not really my thing, but I won't judge you for liking it if you do) and the accessibility of our mathematics articles. —David Eppstein (talk) 02:01, 12 July 2021 (UTC)

Ooof. My eyes glazed over. However, this skirts an issue that has long fascinated me: what would it take (would it be possible) to make at least some WP articles be "review" articles? By "review", what I have in mind are the 20-40 page articles you might find in "mathematical reviews", or as classroom handouts written by the prof (e.g. the assorted PDF's that can be found online, emanating as "lecture notes" from assorted universities). Currently, this is impossible in WP for only one reason: there is not enough manpower available to actually read through and pick apart a long article. For example, I have no doubt that I could "easily" understand this version of inverse limits, although my "easy" understanding might take several 8-hour days of careful reading and cautious thinking. That's a whole lot of effort. It's free time I don't have (aka time I don't want to devote to this). A secondary concern is that there is no particular "seal of approval" that would indicate that two outside experts did cautiously and carefully vet the article. Without this, we'd risk having the usual OR and fringe-science issues get further magnified, making maintainability even harder, while eroding trust.

However, there does seem to be a nascent effort in this direction. See Category:Wikipedia articles published in peer-reviewed literature. I support that effort. Thus, I would like to suggest that mgkrupa should take the long version, reinstate the easier-to-understand introduction, submit the finished product to an appropriate journal (where?????) and wait for a comprehensive reply. Then would could have a long and through article that would provide details, and would be acceptable as quality content.

The gotcha here is the actual process: the details: what journal? The Wiki Journal of Science? Is their editorial staff well-connected enough to find suitable peer reviewers? What, exactly, is the relationship to WP? I'd like to see this stuff work. The effort seems daunting, but the results, done right, would be worth the effort. 67.198.37.16 (talk) 19:12, 13 July 2021 (UTC)

The correct link for the WikiJournal of Science is this. There have been a few articles published that are relevant to this WikiProject: [2], [3], [4], [5]. Some of these have been tied to Wikipedia, others have not. Since it's open peer review, you can assess directly whether the reviewers were appropriate. (In the case of the affine symmetric group, they clearly were.) --JBL (talk) 19:24, 13 July 2021 (UTC)

Orientation (mathematics)

Orientation (mathematics).

I have qualms about the present state of this article. What is the relationship to chirality? Michael Hardy (talk) 16:02, 15 July 2021 (UTC)

"Orientation" has two different meanings in mathematics. So Orientation (mathematics) must be a redirect to the dab page Orientation#Mathematics. The first meaning corresponds to the common language meaning, and is described in Orientation (geometry). It can take infinitely many valiues, parametrized by Euler's angles. The second meaning can take only two values, $+$ and $-,$ and is related to chirality, but is much more general, as chirality refers only to the orientation of the three-dimensional Euclidean space. This concept of orientation is the subject of Orientability. Apparently, the editors of Orientation#Mathematics and Orientation (geometry) ignore this distinction.

I'll try to fix this mess by creating a redirect Orientation (space) to Orientability, and fixing the disambiguation pages. D.Lazard (talk) 16:47, 15 July 2021 (UTC)

Draft:Sparsity matroid

Could someone here please take a look at it, and either accept it themselves or advise me what to do or say. DGG ( talk ) 23:22, 16 July 2021 (UTC)

I think it's a notable topic, although possibly I'm biased because it overlaps some topics in my research. There's a fair amount of overlap with Dense graph#Sparse and tight graphs, but that's not really a problem for having a separate article. I'm not sure "sparsity matroid" is the right title, though, as it's really about (k,l)-sparseness and (k,l)-tightness, and only some subset of combinations of the two parameters give matroids. Maybe split off the current redirect sparse graph into a separate article? Some copyediting is needed (e.g. references after punctuation). —David Eppstein (talk) 23:40, 16 July 2021 (UTC)

Also Draft: Bose integral, though I suppose it must be covered elsewhere, in which case we need a redirect. DGG ( talk ) 06:40, 17 July 2021 (UTC)

I can do both of these. — Charles Stewart (talk) 06:50, 17 July 2021 (UTC)

Hilbert space referencing

Hilbert space is a Good Article on an obviously-important topic, and to me the writing looks in good shape, but the referencing is a little patchy, with some parts of the article not clearly sourced to any reference. If anyone here cares to work on better referencing for the article, that would be helpful, and possibly save the article from undergoing a Good Article Review. —David Eppstein (talk) 18:37, 17 July 2021 (UTC)

I provided references for some of the quantum-mechanics statements using the books I currently have near at hand. XOR'easter (talk) 17:41, 18 July 2021 (UTC)

List of computer algebra systems

There have been recent attempts to add links to drhuang.com to several mathematics pages. As the site does not look either especially helpful, nor otherwise good to have, and as I've had concerns about promotionalism, I've tended to remove these when I come across them. The recent attempt to add such a link (together with a new, little-known CAS) to List of computer algebra systems has been especially determined, with some edit-warring to keep the material. It is possible that it is appropriate and WP:DUE to add something. I'd appreciate some additional sets of eyes on the page. Russ Woodroofe (talk) 16:02, 18 July 2021 (UTC)

I have also removed some of these links. The assertion of their authors that it is a computer algebra system is unverifiable, as no indication is given on the used algorithms, and no citation by external sources are provided. So, this software does not pass any of our criteria for WP:Verifiability and WP:Notability, and the link to its web page must be removed for these reasons, and also WP:ELNO. D.Lazard (talk) 18:08, 18 July 2021 (UTC)

Draft: Reilly formula

An admin says that a page I submitted a while ago, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:Reilly_formula, will be accepted if I "add a sentence or wo of background about Reilly, and information about where he published the formula." I'm not editing wikipedia any more but thought somebody might like to add it. Gumshoe2 (talk) 22:18, 17 July 2021 (UTC)

@Gumshoe2: Is it okay for this article to have an external link section? senate.universityofcalifornia.edu/in-memoriam/files/bob-reilly.html--SilverMatsu (talk) 04:21, 21 July 2021 (UTC)

Cayley–Menger determinant - request for verification

Please see and verify this edit: special:diff/1033122327. That's not my area but the change looks somewhat ...strange to me. --CiaPan (talk) 18:26, 21 July 2021 (UTC)

Seems plausible to me - At least in the spherical case the inline citations speak of a sphere of radius R, and that should have curvature 1/(R^2). Felix QW (talk) 18:55, 21 July 2021 (UTC)

Order dual

Until about a year ago, the article Order dual was a redirect to Duality (order theory). Then User:Mgkrupa wrote an article on a different subject (as usual, something about topological vector spaces). I believe that all links to Order dual are from within the topological vector spaces walled garden that Mgkrupa constructed (so that no incoming links are intended to go to Duality (order theory)), but I would be grateful if someone else could double-check that. (This was prompted by this edit.) --JBL (talk) 16:20, 24 July 2021 (UTC)

I changed it back. Let me know if there are any issues and I'll try to resolve them. Mgkrupa 17:44, 24 July 2021 (UTC)

Also, all of the links that were leading to Order dual were functional analysis related (and have since been appropriately updated) with the exception of: Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mathematics, Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/List of mathematics articles (M–O) , Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/List of mathematics articles (O), and Talk:Order dual. Mgkrupa 18:09, 24 July 2021 (UTC)

I've updated the redirection page Order dual so that it now redirects to the disambiguation page for term "order dual", which is appropriate since there are several concepts that go by that name. Mgkrupa 19:08, 24 July 2021 (UTC)

Thanks, this name shuffle seems like a good resolution. --JBL (talk) 02:05, 28 July 2021 (UTC)

Recent creations of questionable notability

I stumbled across the recently created stub Mathematics and nursing, and it seems that the author (new user Nicolasatasan) has been producing a bunch of articles on individual mathematics competitions (Spanish Mathematical Olympiad, etc.) and other topics of dubious notability relating to mathematics. (Might Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Nicolás Atanes be related? I'm not sure.) Without wishing to overly discourage a brand-new editor (WP:BITE), perhaps others might like to take a look. --JBL (talk) 02:05, 28 July 2021 (UTC)

There probably is a notable topic here. I've tutored a couple of nurses through the mathematics part of their course. One of the most important aspects is dosage calculation, they have to work out the right dosage for a given body weight, and they have to get this right 100% of the time. See for example nursing dosage calc. Plenty of online and offline references for the topic. --Salix alba (talk): 09:47, 28 July 2021 (UTC)

I am skeptical that the right title for an article about dosage calculations is "Mathematics and nursing". In any case, the creator turns out to a banned sock-puppet (related to the AfD I mentioned) and so the articles have been deleted per WP:CSD#G5. --JBL (talk) 15:13, 29 July 2021 (UTC)

@JayBeeEll: It is probable that far more is involved than dosage calculations but that the creator of the article didn't know how to explain that. Michael Hardy (talk) 19:47, 31 July 2021 (UTC)

Laws of Indices

The page Laws of Indices has existed as a redirect to Exponentiation since 2005. Bcp67 just added a disambiguatory hat-note (apparently there's also a horse by the same name) and then D.Lazard removed the hat-note and retargeted the redirect to the horse. A quick pop into a search engine suggests that in some versions of English (not mine) "indices" may be synonymous with "power" or "exponent"? (So that "Laws of indices" means the same as "Exponent rules".) Does anyone know what versions of English that might be? Should there be a disambiguatory hat-note on the horse article pointing to Exponentiation? --JBL (talk) 19:59, 29 July 2021 (UTC)

I think this case is similar to f(x). I haven't thought enough about the relationship between the two cases, so it might be a pseudo. Apparently, the disambiguation page isn't working well this time either. Would they like to redirect to the disambiguation page and then display it in hatnote of a article Exponentiation? By the way there seems to be power (horse).--SilverMatsu (talk) 21:32, 29 July 2021 (UTC)

It feels more like number theory to call the x part of $a^{x}$ a index. see Primitive root modulo n.--SilverMatsu (talk) 00:02, 30 July 2021 (UTC)

Yes, this terminology does appear in number theory. See not just Primitive root modulo n but also Index calculus algorithm. I don't know the history, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn that this is an archaic term gone out of fashion. Mgnbar (talk) 00:44, 30 July 2021 (UTC)

When I was working as a school teacher in England (which was two years ago), colleagues did indeed refer to exponent rules as the "laws of indices". I believe this terminology is used at least in Britain in secondary (pre-16) and vocational education, with the modern mathematical terminology used in academic sixth form (16-18). See e. g. https://qualifications.pearson.com/content/dam/pdf/GCSE/mathematics/2015/specification-and-sample-assesment/gcse-maths-2015-specification.pdf Felix QW (talk) 08:25, 30 July 2021 (UTC)

I would suspect that a significant number of pupils would search for it on Wikipedia, perhaps more than for the Irish racehorse.Felix QW (talk) 08:49, 30 July 2021 (UTC)

I have no opinion whether the term "Laws of indices" should be mentioned in WP. If it is mentioned, WP:LEAST implies that Laws of indices should be a redirect to an anchor (note also that the present title is miscapitalized). This is for making this redirecting to an anchor easier that I have not moved Laws of Indices (horse) to Laws of Indices. By the way, Exponent rules was also a redirect to Exponentiation, where the term was not defined. I have added an anchor, and redirected to it, but I am not sure whether these three rules is the complete list of rules that are called "exponent rules". For example, I ignore whether $x^{-a}=1/x^{a}$ should also be included. D.Lazard (talk) 09:21, 30 July 2021 (UTC)

I've created Laws of indices (little i, plural) Law of indices (little i singular) and a redirect to Exponentiation#Identities and properties. These terms used very frequently in the UK mathematics GCSE curriculum, see for example bbc bitesize. It is definitely a valid search term. Page views are pretty low, less than 5 a day. So I'm not sure if adding redirect notices is worth it. --Salix alba (talk): 10:00, 30 July 2021 (UTC)

I've redirected Laws of Indices to Exponentiation#Identities and properties and put a hatnote at the top of Exponentiation. Michael Hardy (talk) 20:47, 31 July 2021 (UTC)