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evaluation map[edit]

Currently, Evaluation map is a redirect to Initial topology#Evaluation. However, I think it may also refer to Apply#Universal property. What would you suggest I do? SilverMatsu (talk) 05:26, 18 February 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]

It may also refer to Polynomial ring#Polynomial evaluation or Polynomial evaluation, or also to function evaluation. (By the way, the definition given in Apply#Universal property seems to be nothing else that an abstract version of that of function evaluation).
So, the current target is certainly not a primary topic (I do not understand why is map is called an evaluation map). I'll rename Evaluation map as Evaluation map (topology), and create a dab page for evaluation map. D.Lazard (talk) 10:09, 18 February 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]
Thank you for creating the dab page. Also, I agree with clarifying the page name. By the way, I accessed the Apply#Universal property via the wiki-link in the Exponential object. --SilverMatsu (talk) 15:38, 19 February 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Drawing polyhedron[edit]

I would like to draw any polyhedron or group of polyhedron modeling on computers or laptops. Stella is the first software I searched on Google (as far as I remember), but some of the polyhedrons in this software have silver balls representing their vertices, so I prefer to find another one. Are there other recommendations for apps or software? Dedhert.Jr (talk) 12:13, 19 February 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I like https://prideout.net/blog/svg_wireframes/ — it generates images in vector rather than bitmap formats, which I think is better for Wikipedia illustrations when possible. It can do shading and lighting effects but I usually use it with a plainer style in which all faces are the same color and somewhat transparent, as in for instance File:Triaugmented triangular prism (symmetric view).svg and File:Translucent Jessen icosahedron.svg. —David Eppstein (talk) 19:50, 21 February 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]
Perhaps I would say that this is difficult to create using Python, and I can't do Python. But I think I will give it a try in the future. Dedhert.Jr (talk) 15:18, 23 February 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]

any, every, some[edit]

It is clear that in standard English usage, the words "every" and "some" as used above are respectively universal and existential quantifiers.

"Any" can be a universal quantifier, as in:

"Any fool can see that."

(But "Anyone can be elected chair of the committee" doesn't mean the same thing as "Everyone can be elected chair of the committee.)

"Any" can also be an existential quantifier, as in:

I thought that there are three contexts in which "any" is an existential quantifier:

those being the three exhibited above.

But then in the article titled Causality conditions, I found this:

Here, "any" is used as an existential quantifier, and it is not clear to me that it is one of those three kinds. Thus my list appears to be incomplete.

A grammar question rather than a math question, but one to which mathematicians are in more desparate need to pay attention than is perhaps anyone else.

What should be added to this list? Michael Hardy (talk) 18:51, 21 February 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]

In the above quotation, "any" is a universal quantifier. D.Lazard (talk) 19:02, 21 February 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]
You can still see "any" here as a universal quantifier, in the sense that "for all of these weaker causality conditions, a manifold satisfying said condition can fail to do so if <rest of sentence>." I would argue that the existential quantifier here is actually hidden in "can", in the sense that "a manifold satisfying said condition can fail to do so if..." is shorthand for "there exists a manifold satisfying said condition that fails to do so if..." GalacticShoe (talk) 19:09, 21 February 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]
Because pushing a negation through a flips it to a and vice-versa, examples involving negation — including "not", "fails", "never", etc. — can be argued about endlessly. It seems to me that math textbook authors solve this problem by stating each definition and theorem as clearly as they can, relying on the proof to clarify the exact meaning of a theorem in a pinch, and tolerating looser talk in discussions between theorems. Mgnbar (talk) 19:30, 21 February 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]
The correct phrasing is "for any (every) said condition, there exists a manifold satisfying it that fails to do so if...". So the hidden existential quantifier does not refer to the same thing. D.Lazard (talk) 19:36, 21 February 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]
The meaning of the expression "a manifold satisfying any of the weaker causality conditions defined above" is a manifold which falls into one or more of the classes defined by the previous causality conditions; as previously stated in the article, if it falls into one of them, it also falls into the previous classes, as they are nested with stricter conditions listed later. But the manifolds of particular interest for that section are the strongly causal ones (the immediately preceding condition). My understanding based on the article's text is that "stably causal" means a strongly causal manifold which remains strongly causal under any possible perturbation of a chosen (arbitrarily small) magnitude. Or another way of saying this: if a manifold is "stably causal", then there exists some specific size of perturbation for which every smaller perturbation of the manifold preserves the strong causality property. From what I can tell the perturbations of other kinds of causality-condition-satisfying manifolds are not at issue (beyond the initial mention, for context, that for each of the earlier conditions there exists some manifold satisfying it which can be perturbed into not satisfying it by an arbitrarily small perturbation). –jacobolus (t) 19:41, 21 February 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Some months ago, the was consensus that "any" should be avoided (in order not to require the reader to be familiar with discussions like the above one), see MOS:MATH#ANY. - Jochen Burghardt (talk) 20:10, 21 February 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Rephrasing this particular passage is more complicated than the examples given there, as it expresses a somewhat tricky logical claim. I don't think this one is really ambiguous in context, but it could be rephrased as e.g. "For each of the weaker causality conditions defined above, there are some manifolds satisfying the condition which can be made to violate it by arbitrarily small perturbations." –jacobolus (t) 21:43, 21 February 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]
Jacobulus last suggestion is perfect. To answer Micheal Hardy's original question, there is yet another sense of any: in this case, it's "menu choice": "pick any one item from this menu". Menu choice is similar to exclusive-or, but is not truth-valued, it is object-valued. Menu choice shows up as a fragment of linear logic (for example, the quantum no-cloning theorem, which says "you can only have one of these") but also in vending machines "for a dollar you pick one item" and in mutex locks in computing (one user at a time.) Menu choice is a really cool tool in foundational logic. 67.198.37.16 (talk) 07:34, 4 March 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Original research on Wikipedia[edit]

Hello, I am a mathematician from the German Wikipedia. There we had recently a user that basically "misused" the German Wikipedia to publish his own "research" (if you can call it even that...). Basically the user computed a LOT of things with Wolfram Alpha and published all his computations in the German Wikipedia to a point where the articles became unreadable. He even invented his own names for functions and the user - according to his own words - does not have a formal degree in mathematics. In my opinion most of the stuff was not even relevant for an encylopedia. In the end a lot of his entries were deleted and after a heated discussion the user got banned. Long story short the user was/is also active in the English Wikipedia (see Special:Contributions/Reformbenediktiner). I am not so familliar with the English Wikipedia policies but I know that original research is also not allowed, so I thought I should maybe notify people here and they could at least have a look at some of the affected articles like for example Theta function, Rogers–Ramanujan continued fraction, Fubini's theorem#Example Application, Jacobi elliptic functions, Rogers–Ramanujan identities etc. If you see some math in color, that was probably done by this user. In the German Wikipedia the user did not use any source material and just computed things with Wolfram Alpha. Whether it all was correct or not, I am not even sure. It would be good if people would have a look at the affected English articles as well and give their judgement.--Tensorproduct (talk) 19:42, 22 February 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]

FYI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Reformbenediktiner PatrickR2 (talk) 19:48, 22 February 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]
Thanks for this report. I just removed a lot of this from Poisson summation formula (two long and almost entirely unsourced sections). Probably the others listed above and the contributions of this user need similar scrutiny. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:28, 22 February 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]
Yes, unfortunately every post by him needs scrutiny. In the German Wikipedia eventually almost all of his math edits were removed. Many users asked him many times to provide sources but he kept on editing without providing any source. It seems to be the same here as Jacobolus' example below shows--Tensorproduct (talk) 21:18, 22 February 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]
Example discussion: Talk:Lemniscate_elliptic_functions#Sources? –jacobolus (t) 20:49, 22 February 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]
Thanks for letting us know. Bubba73 You talkin' to me? 21:03, 22 February 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]
Here was another recent discussion: Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Mathematics/Archive/2023/Jul#Theta_function. --JBL (talk) 18:58, 2 March 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]
Huh. I spotted the stuff at theta function, and scratched my head a bit about it. I would be happier if much or most of this was removed, or maybe moved to a distinct article. Many of the relations are cool-looking! Yes, it is not uncommon for stuff similar to this to be published in journals. However, the cutting edge academic journals & books will say things similar this in the intro: In 1837, Kummer listed three identities for hypergeometric functions; this was extended to 50 by 1880, and 240 in 1920 and a general algorithm to generate a countable number of such identities was given in 1960. However, it did not list all of them, and neither did algorithms x,y,z proposed in 1980 and in this paper we explore the structure of algorithmic generators ... and so you realize these guys are talking about a kind-of fractal splattered all through this landscape of inter-related identities, and how to best understand/describe that fractal. (As far as I know, there aren't any articles on WP that even scratch the surface of this topic, and it would be cool if there were... but, whatever.) The problem is that the enthusiastic amateur is unaware that he's dong the algebraic equivalent of publishing cool-looking zooms of the Mandelbrot set. Yes, its still cool looking. But is not where the action is, and it is a clutter and distracting, if you were reading the article to find something else, e.g. look up some factoid about riemann surfaces, and that factoid is now buried in reams of wild identities. 67.198.37.16 (talk) 08:13, 4 March 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Edit warring and content disputes on Hindu–Arabic numeral system[edit]

Are any other folks interested in the history of number representation willing to wade into an ongoing content dispute / edit wars at talk:Hindu–Arabic numeral system? Sorry to drag anyone into what has become a bit of a mess, but this and related articles are in my opinion pretty mediocre (incomplete, poorly organized, poorly sourced, misleading, ...), but efforts to make even modest improvements are getting hit by instant reversion, and discussion gets repeatedly diverted away from content disagreements toward unproductive meta conversations. –jacobolus (t) 19:16, 25 February 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Merge?[edit]

On pl wiki, User:Epsilon598 suggested AM–GM inequality, QM-AM-GM-HM inequalities and Generalized mean may need a merge. Thoughts? Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 02:07, 26 February 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Actually, Pythagorean means should also be at least linked to the others. In Polish all of these inequalities are usually called simply "inequalities among means", which is also used in at least one of these articles. This name is not nearly as fitting in English as it is in Polish, but would be my first guess. Epsilon598 (talk) 02:45, 26 February 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]

List of Johnson solids[edit]

The reviewer has gone AWOL during the nomination of List of Johnson solids. I welcome someone who is in favor of replacing the reviewer and providing comments for the sake of improvement. Dedhert.Jr (talk) 13:36, 26 February 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Is Wolfram Mathworld reliable?[edit]

Related to the previous discussion, is Wolfram Mathworld reliable? I took the reviewing Talk:Arithmetic/GA2, and I claim that Wolfram Mathworld is not reliable sources, but the nominator claimed the otherwise. Now I'm very confused. Dedhert.Jr (talk) 07:12, 2 March 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I believe it's been discussed here before, although I can't find it now. In my opinion a mathworld source is better than no source, but not much beyond that. (I think that was also the general consensus from previous discussion.) Gumshoe2 (talk) 17:01, 2 March 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]
It seems to never have been discussed at WP:RSN, but it has been discussed here many times, including the following:
I would say that these threads indicate a consensus among math editors that MathWorld is a usable but mediocre source, reliable for basic factual questions, but questionable as an indicator of notability and questionable when it comes to issues of terminology. --JBL (talk) 18:57, 2 March 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]
Mathworld usually doesn't make outright false mathematical claims, but has a tendency to repeat (or invent?) dubious historical/naming claims. –jacobolus (t) 19:40, 2 March 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]
I agree with the above two comments. It is not so unreliable that it must be immediately removed and replaced by a [citation needed] tag, as some sources are, but it is so frequently error-riddled that it is almost always better to use a different source. For a Good Article review, in particular, I think that better sources should be used. For Arithmetic, I replaced one MathWorld source by a much better one (a chapter in The Princeton Companion to Mathematics) and removed the other one as it was redundant and used only to source some alternative terminology, the sort of thing MathWorld is worst at. There still remains a MathWorld external link, of dubious value according to WP:ELNO #1. —David Eppstein (talk) 19:37, 2 March 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]
It seems Eric Wolfgang Weisstein created and maintains MathWorld, which is licensed by Wolfram Research. It is not self-published and from Weisstein's credentials, I don't see a good reason for categorizing this as an unreliable source. Are there any obvious points from WP:RS that suggest otherwise? Phlsph7 (talk) 13:39, 6 March 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]
It's not the worst ever source (Weisstein doesn't write outright nonsense and usually cites some other sources), but I'd put it on par with some professor's blog, course notes, math overflow answers, or similar: content written by someone with expertise in the general topic, but not vetted or carefully fact-checked. It's much less reliable as a source than e.g the articles by O'Connor and Robertson at MacTutor, and even those are often not a perfect reflection of the current scholarly consensus. Where possible it's best to compare multiple recent sources by subject-specific expects. –jacobolus (t) 15:19, 6 March 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Notability of John H. Wolfe[edit]

The article John H. Wolfe has gone through a PROD, but still has issues as it is based on one secondary textbook claim that his work on model-based clustering matters. It was created directly by a novice editor (Stat3472 33 edits). The article model-based clustering supports him as the inventor, but whether this is big enough for notability is unclear. Comments on that talk page please. Ldm1954 (talk) 09:57, 2 March 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]

≙[edit]

There is a discussion about the ≙ character that needs attention from mathematical editors at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2024 March 2#≙. Thryduulf (talk) 12:35, 2 March 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Mental calculation[edit]

Does anyone feel like cleaning up Mental calculation? It's roughly as disorganized as one would expect. XOR'easter (talk) 18:35, 3 March 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Brouwer–Hilbert controversy[edit]

Should this article be renamed to Grundlagenstreit? This is the name often given in the literature to this debate. I do not know much about it but it seemed odd when I was looking for it. See for example Brouwer's biography ReyHahn (talk) 10:01, 4 March 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]

For me, naming an obscure topic from 100 years ago using an unfamiliar non-English word (German?) is the same as deleting the article.
Maybe "Grundlagenstreit, the Brouwer–Hilbert controversy"? Johnjbarton (talk) 15:45, 4 March 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]
Maybe the term Grundlagenstreit should be included in the lede; it seems common enough in writings about the topic. XOR'easter (talk) 16:18, 4 March 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]
Apparently Grundlagenstreit means "foundational debate", and was related to Hilbert's book Grundlagen der Geometrie. Seems fine to me to create a redirect and mention the name in the lead section (doesn't need to be bolded in my opinion). –jacobolus (t) 16:30, 4 March 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]
No, but theree should be a printworthy redirect from Grundlagenstreit to the article. -- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 16:28, 4 March 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]
Thank you all, I prefer to keep it bold but that can be discussed. As for the main topic I consider this  Done.--ReyHahn (talk) 21:06, 4 March 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]
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