Talk:Joseph Wedderburn

Work: confusion

I noticed that the second paragraph of this section is incoherent. It says

"A corollary to this theorem yields the complete structure of all finite projective geometry. In their paper on "Non-Desarguesian and non-Pascalian geometries" in the 1907 Transactions of the American Mathematical Society, Wedderburn and Veblen showed that in these geometries, Pascal's theorem is a consequence of Desargues' theorem. They did so by constructing finite projective geometries which are neither "Desarguesian" nor "Pascalian" (the terminology is Hilbert's)."

You can't use the construction of a non-D non-P geometry to show that D[esargues] implies P[ascal]: it's contrary to logic. Veblen and Wedderburn say here at the outset that it's already known that D and P are equivalent for finite geometries; in fact the D-implies-P part apparently uses the commutativity of finite division rings. In this 1907 paper Wedderburn and Veblen just give (very interesting and ingenious) examples of finite geometries which don't satisfy D and hence don't satisfy P.

So this paragraph needs rewriting, but it ought to be done by someone with expert knowledge (not me).

[The paper is Trans. Am. Math. Soc. 8 (1907) 379, and the commutativity of finite division rings is in Trans. A.M.S. 6 (1905) 349 and in a nearby paper of Dickson.]

On another topic, does anyone else feel that "a significant algebraist" (in the introduction) is rather a patronising description of this mathematician? It can be read that way.

Ambrose H. Field (talk) 22:43, 14 February 2011 (UTC)

It could be called spam to say Wedderburn was significant. There is nothing to be gained from a long dispute on this point. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.155.53.143 (talk) 18:17, 13 March 2014 (UTC)

External links modified

Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified one external link on Joseph Wedderburn. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:

• Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20150310072127/http://www.princeton.edu/~mudd/finding_aids/mathoral/pmc21.htm to https://www.princeton.edu/~mudd/finding_aids/mathoral/pmc21.htm

When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.

This message was posted before February 2018. After February 2018, "External links modified" talk page sections are no longer generated or monitored by InternetArchiveBot. No special action is required regarding these talk page notices, other than regular verification using the archive tool instructions below. Editors have permission to delete these "External links modified" talk page sections if they want to de-clutter talk pages, but see the RfC before doing mass systematic removals. This message is updated dynamically through the template {{source check}} (last update: 18 January 2022).

• If you have discovered URLs which were erroneously considered dead by the bot, you can report them with this tool.
• If you found an error with any archives or the URLs themselves, you can fix them with this tool.

Cheers.—InternetArchiveBot (Report bug) 20:21, 27 April 2017 (UTC)