Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mathematics

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higher polytopes

I question the value of articles like Heptellated 8-simplexes. Is there a good reason not to bundle all the simplices (and their truncations sensu lato) of dimension ≥5 into one article? Ditto for the hypercubes, cross-polytopes, demicubes; but perhaps not the E-families (forked Coxeter-Dynkin diagrams with branch lengths 1,2,n). —Tamfang (talk) 22:35, 10 April 2025 (UTC)

I agree and I've been WP:BLARing multiple such articles recently. They have a lot of content but very little in the way of adequate sourcing. As I wrote on some other recent ones, the only source that covers the actual topic of the article, Klitzing, appears to be neither reliable nor intelligible. —David Eppstein (talk) 22:39, 10 April 2025 (UTC)

That's a pity, as it's hosted on my personal site. —Tamfang (talk) 03:10, 12 April 2025 (UTC)

No comment. Geometrical articles have that similar thing. Dedhert.Jr (talk) 01:26, 23 April 2025 (UTC)

... Rectified 7-orthoplexes, Truncated 7-orthoplexes, Truncated 7-simplexes, Cantellated 7-simplexes, Runcinated 7-simplexes, Stericated 7-simplexes ... are there others? —Tamfang (talk) 04:05, 24 April 2025 (UTC)

… Cantellated 6-simplexes, Stericated 6-simplexes, Runcic 5-cubes, Steric 5-cubes —Tamfang (talk) 05:55, 26 April 2025 (UTC)

Why is the title of that article plural? WP:MOS requires the singular except when there is a special reason to make it plural. Michael Hardy (talk) 23:59, 11 April 2025 (UTC)

Creating a page for Rotatopes

There are already several pages on wikipedia for n-dimensional geometry, namely the page on n-cubes, n-spheres, and polytopes. I recently wrote a draft for a page on rotatopes which in short are n-dimensional shapes that are created from translation and rotation about an axis within the shape. The only sources on rotatopes however are wikis which are usually not considered reliable. Was wondering if anyone here had any advice on how to get this page added. Ncgtr (talk) 23:22, 18 April 2025 (UTC)

My only advice is: get multiple different research groups to reliably publish work on rotatopes, so that it would no longer be the case that "the only sources on rotatopes however are wikis". Wait several years for their work to be peer-reviewed and published. Then, once it becomes clear through those publications that the topic has become notable, rewrite the draft to be based only on those publications and not on unpublished work or wikis. By doing all this, it should become possible to get the draft accepted as an article. —David Eppstein (talk) 01:12, 19 April 2025 (UTC)

Parabolic subgroup of a reflection group

Would someone who understands group theory and more specifically understands reflection groups please look at this article and offer an opinion as to whether it meets the good article criteria? This is the longest-pending Good Article Nomination, having been nominated about eight months ago. My assumption is that it has not been reviewed for the obvious reason that most of the editors who review Good Article Nominations are not mathematicians. Neither am I. But a chemist and computer scientist should know where to look for mathematicians. The instructions say that any uninvolved and registered user with sufficient knowledge and experience with Wikipedia may review the nominated article against the good article criteria. I am sure that some of you all have "sufficient knowledge and experience". Robert McClenon (talk) 22:27, 19 April 2025 (UTC)

I'm not someone with "sufficient knowledge or experience with Wikipedia" so I'm not qualified to review this article, but I am a human who tried to read the thing and here is my ignorant & uninformed take. This is a super dense and technical read. My head started spinning after the first few sentences. There is a page Wikipedia:Make technical articles understandable that I think you, or anyone else who is editing this page, should really take a look at. It offers advice like "Does the article make sense if the reader gets to it as a random page" and "Imagine yourself as a layperson ... Can you figure out what or who the article is about?" I think the answer to both of these questions is clearly "No".

There is also this quote: "When the principle of least astonishment is successfully employed, information is understood by the reader without struggle." For me, everything was a struggle and I think I know a fair bit about math. I imagine that writing a review takes a lot of time & energy, and if the reviewer has to expend even more effort to understand what they're reading, that might be why this article hasn't been reviewed yet. I can't comment on the definitions and equations, but having maybe some explainers for the non-specialist readers would probably be useful. Adding more illustrations could help. Maybe some context for why the reader should care about reflection groups or subroups.

The page I linked to above says:

"Most Wikipedia articles can be written to be fully understandable by the general reader with average reading ability and motivation. Some articles are themselves technical in nature and some articles have technical sections or aspects. Many of these can still be written to be understandable to a wide audience. Some topics are intrinsically complex or require much prior knowledge gained through specialized education or training. It is unreasonable to expect a comprehensive article on such subjects to be understandable to all readers. The effort should still be made to make the article as understandable to as many as possible, with particular emphasis on the lead section."

Yet you wrote on the talk page that the "appropriately broad audience" should be "advanced undergraduate mathematics majors and beginning PhD students in mathematics" which I take to mean that it was written with upper division math & PhD students in mind, rather than "make the article as understandable to as many as possible." Basilelp (talk) 01:31, 2 May 2025 (UTC)

I hope someone doesn't mind comparing, but we do have three GAs of Mobius strip, Free abelian group, and Dehn invariant, which is technical and somewhat less conceivably understandable yet visually structured. Unlike algebra, to me, they probably require the notations consisted of weird symbols and variables as the way of shorthand, like abstract algebra; you might want to read History of algebra, thought there is another one. I think the same reason for higher fields of mathematics as in mathematical analysis and topology. Dedhert.Jr (talk) 11:19, 2 May 2025 (UTC)

Bachelor's thesis

This edit at List of NP-complete problems replaces a reference to a published book with a reference to a bachelor's thesis, that contains the claim that the book doesn't actually contain a proof of the given result. Thoughts? --JBL (talk) 20:25, 20 April 2025 (UTC)

My feeling is that bachelor's theses are generally unreliable. And the version of the Yato ref that I can find online [1] (the master's thesis rather than the journal version?) certainly does contain a proof. —David Eppstein (talk) 22:13, 20 April 2025 (UTC)

Yeah that's odd; maybe the two different versions are the source of the confusion. For the moment I have reverted. --JBL (talk) 00:33, 24 April 2025 (UTC)

Good article reassessment for Mathematical economics

Mathematical economics has been nominated for a good article reassessment. If you are interested in the discussion, please participate by adding your comments to the reassessment page. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status may be removed from the article. Z1720 (talk) 16:23, 21 April 2025 (UTC)

I doubt that mathematical economics is part of mathematics. That is, it is not in the scope of this project. JRSpriggs (talk) 19:56, 21 April 2025 (UTC)

Mathematical economics is a branch of applied mathematics, the same as mathematical physics. The posting is relevant. --{{u|Mark viking}} {Talk} 20:13, 21 April 2025 (UTC)

As long as the fields are related to mathematical approaches, it is part of mathematics, I suppose. Dedhert.Jr (talk) 07:52, 22 April 2025 (UTC)

Yeah, I'd only be irked if this weren't brought up at WT:ECON, which it was. Gracen (they/them) 15:28, 22 April 2025 (UTC)

The Geocentric model is not in the scope of this project even though it uses mathematics to describe epicycles. The application of mathematics has to be at least approximately true to qualify for our consideration. JRSpriggs (talk) 17:17, 22 April 2025 (UTC)

I'd much rather we get notifications of vaguely-related GARs than that we be overly restrictive and not be notified when it actually is relevant. —David Eppstein (talk) 17:23, 22 April 2025 (UTC)

Speaking of GARs, especially mathematics, there are already several discussion talks about whether one should delist immediately if not appropriately considered to have the green badge according to WP:GACR, or fix the article switfly before GARs takes it away. I think they are seperated. Dedhert.Jr (talk) 01:24, 23 April 2025 (UTC)

Now the article is in good condition. Dedhert.Jr (talk) 01:33, 23 April 2025 (UTC)

Moreover, I don't think "at least approximately true" is the correct guideline for whether the mathematical aspects of a topic are of encyclopedic interest. If there were people doing astronomy in the present day using epicycles and deferents, I think it would behoove Wikipedia to have the mathematical aspects of such topics appropriately described, and regardless of how true they are, I think you can agree that there are people using mathematical models in economics. Sesquilinear (talk) 20:05, 22 April 2025 (UTC)

Strongly agree with David. We all love a good WTM notification. Tito Omburo (talk) 22:33, 22 April 2025 (UTC)

Template:Unsolved

The {{unsolved}} template (which makes a sidebar box describing an open problem and is used in many of our articles about or containing open problems) has been nominated for deletion. I had to change the discussion banner to be invisible on the articles that it appears in because it was severely breaking the formatting, so to make up for the loss in visibility I am posting here. Please contribute to the discussion at Wikipedia:Templates for discussion/Log/2025 April 22. —David Eppstein (talk) 17:16, 22 April 2025 (UTC)

Root-finding algorithms

A new user created Bernoulli's method and wisely added the Template:Root-finding algorithms at the bottom of the article, but didnt add Bernoulli's method to the template. I don't understand what type of algorithm it is and I don't want to misfile. Could someone add to the appropriate division? Please and thank you. jengod (talk) 15:41, 23 April 2025 (UTC)

Before adding an article to a template, one must verify that it has a decent form. This is not yet the case, since the article asserts that a sequence of real numbers conveges to the largest complex root of a polynomial (I have tagged the assertion with {{clarify}}). So, please wait before adding the article to the template. D.Lazard (talk) 16:59, 23 April 2025 (UTC)

I added language to sufficiently address this concern and then included the article in the template.

I also included Python code to the article.

There was some discussion on the Talk:Bernoulli's method regarding adding the hatnote back in. I was hoping to get a consensus here before reverting that change. Basilelp (talk) 16:25, 29 April 2025 (UTC)

I think it would fall into the polynomial methods. It finds the one root r (if there is just one) with the largest absolute value. Then one could divide the polynomial by (x - r) and apply it again until the polynomial has been factored. However, the convergence would only be linear; so it would be inferior to many of the other methods. JRSpriggs (talk) 17:23, 23 April 2025 (UTC)

Missing source in Addition

I could not find the source for the citation of Kaplan about the identity element of addition in Brahmagupta's Brahmasphutasiddhanta. Maybe someone can give a hand? Dedhert.Jr (talk) 04:21, 24 April 2025 (UTC)

An older version of the article has the following under Further reading: Kaplan, Robert (2000). The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero. Oxford UP. ISBN 0-19-512842-7. Pagliaccious (talk) 14:31, 24 April 2025 (UTC)

Here's the diff: addition diff Pagliaccious (talk) 14:39, 24 April 2025 (UTC)

Thanks for the given source here. Dedhert.Jr (talk) 09:31, 25 April 2025 (UTC)

Large numbers IP

This is related to Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Mathematics/Archive/2025/Apr#Knuth's_up-arrow_notation: the same person who was making questionable edits to Knuth's_up-arrow_notation has now moved on to Conway chained arrow notation and Graham's number (where in the later case they've been reverted by Mr swordfish). Also pinging @Sesquilinear and ArglebargleIV:. --JBL (talk) 18:12, 27 April 2025 (UTC)

I've reverted the changes to Conway chained arrow notation. They have to start explaining changes to avoid reversion, that's for sure. ArglebargleIV (talk) 15:24, 28 April 2025 (UTC)

This (reverted by Cluebot) just seems like straight-up vandalism, not even plausibly on-topic. They don't seem to have edited in 24 hours, let's hope that's all there is to it. --JBL (talk) 23:43, 29 April 2025 (UTC)

Quite unsourced. Better tone and style required. Dedhert.Jr (talk) 01:20, 30 April 2025 (UTC)

math.GM papers flagged

Arxiv papers belonging to math.GM are now flagged by WP:UPSD. There's about 16 of them used on Wikipedia as of writing.

If someone could go through them and prune/purge/yeet them as needed, that would be great. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 20:35, 29 April 2025 (UTC)

At least one of the flagged sources is for math.gmp, math.gmu.edu. Tito Omburo (talk) 21:30, 29 April 2025 (UTC)

That's just the search, not the flagging. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 05:02, 30 April 2025 (UTC)

math.GM papers are not automatically bad. Sometimes they're there because they say something valid that does not fit well into the categorization scheme of arXiv, for instance because it is at the lower level that we would want to use to source claims on Wikipedia rather than at the higher level of current mathematics research. Is there some way of tagging these as not being bad to prevent gnomes from blindly yeeting them without thought? —David Eppstein (talk) 21:37, 29 April 2025 (UTC)

See WP:UPSD#RSCONTEXT, e.g. add a comment next to the source. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 05:04, 30 April 2025 (UTC)

Or better, in one case I found a published version in a mathematics magazine and replaced the citation with that [2]. —David Eppstein (talk) 06:59, 30 April 2025 (UTC)

Not at all clear to me that math.gm papers are any less reliable than any other paper that's only been published on arxiv Gumshoe2 (talk) 16:31, 30 April 2025 (UTC)

All the proofs of the Collatz conjecture are there: [3] [4][5][6]... Tercer (talk) 21:04, 30 April 2025 (UTC)

Kunerth's algorithm

I believe that Kunerth's algorithm should be deleted. In particular, I don't believe the page should be fixed. I created a topic on the article's talk page. I would welcome more discussion about it there.

Here are a few reasons why I believe it should be deleted. There are only two non-forum references I can find online, not written by the article's creator and main contributor. The first source is the original 1880 paper written by Kunerth. It is written in German, a language that neither me nor the article creator can read. The second is a 1920 textbook. The claims of the textbook contradict the claims of the wikipedia article. The wikipedia article is also incomprehensible (in the words of another user).

(Also, I'm not active an contributor to Wikipedia so if there is a different way I should go about things, I welcome the feedback.) byhill (talk) 21:18, 30 April 2025 (UTC)

Your first approach (WP:PRODding it) was the natural way to proceed; since the PROD was contested, the next approach is to use WP:AfD -- there is a button two-thirds of the way down that page that you can push that will take care of most of the fidgety bits. You should probably take a look at Wikipedia:Guide to deletion first. --JBL (talk) 21:58, 30 April 2025 (UTC)

Thank you. I'll look into this process byhill (talk) 22:55, 30 April 2025 (UTC)

Nomination of Kunerth's algorithm for deletion

A discussion is taking place as to whether the article Kunerth's algorithm is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

The article will be discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Kunerth's algorithm until a consensus is reached, and anyone, including you, is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.

Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article until the discussion has finished.

byhill (talk) 04:42, 1 May 2025 (UTC)

Need some help with Church–Turing thesis refs

I am trying to correct & adjust articles with Harv warnings and Harv errors and right now I am working on fixing up Church-Turing thesis...
Way back in 2009 an editor who is not presently active on Wikipedia (so I can't ask them what they meant) added ref-content to this article which included the phrasing "Davis's commentary before Gödel 1934 in Davis 1965:40". That content has morphed into the present ref/text which is causing a "Harv warning":

Davis's commentary before {{harvnb|Church|1936}}{{ambiguous|date=March 2025}} in {{harvcolnb|Davis|1965|p=88}}. Church uses the words "effective calculability" on page 100ff.

Anyway, I'm not sure what was specifically meant in the first edit and what is now meant in this latest iteration. I found the source material at Martin Davis' The undecidable; basic papers on undecidable propositions, unsolvable problems and computable functions and at that book's Page 88 but I'm not a mathematician and in general the phrasing and text is confusing/beyond me/not my jam/etc. I am hoping some of you Mathematics enthusiast-editors could look in on the article and fix this ref. Thanks, Shearonink (talk) 16:18, 1 May 2025 (UTC)

I think refs 22, 23, 24, & 25 all seem to be related to cites from the Martin Davis book. Any help WikiProject Mathematics Participants can give to this article greatly appreciated. Shearonink (talk) 16:24, 1 May 2025 (UTC)

Harv warnings and errors are a consequence of a poorly supported citation technology.

A proper citation would be:

• In 1936, the Church thesis was introduced in a paper by Alonzo Church.

Most of the History section is unsupported by secondary historical references and maybe WP:OR. Johnjbarton (talk) 17:12, 1 May 2025 (UTC)

Why would you put the first footnote in the middle of the sentence like that? It looks terrible; does the citation not support that it was introduced by Church? --JBL (talk) 17:25, 1 May 2025 (UTC)

Also using rp to separate the footnote from the page number in the footnote and to format the page number as a cryptic superscript number that readers have to guess means pages is a terrible idea. —David Eppstein (talk) 17:33, 1 May 2025 (UTC)

We have no great way to connect page numbers with content. Embedding the page number in the ref tag makes that ref tag unsuitable for reuse. The harv/sfn approach is horrible to create and demonstrably unmaintainable (see above). {{rp}} is a bit ugly, but it is much easier for editors to use and I think readers get the hang of it quickly. Its a tradeoff.

Of course I realize that these things are a matter of surprisingly strong personal preferences. Johnjbarton (talk) 17:48, 1 May 2025 (UTC)

I would far rather see harv/sfn short footnotes with page numbers than inline superscript page numbers. Re maintainability: I think you merely haven't noticed the unmaintainability of rp when it gets detached from the footnote it was supposedly attached to; when harv/sfn stops working you get an error message but when rp stops working you merely get these anchorless superscript numbers floating around that have lost their meaning. —David Eppstein (talk) 17:58, 1 May 2025 (UTC)

You are correct I have never seen a detached rp and indeed I see many harv/sfn error messages. Johnjbarton (talk) 21:28, 1 May 2025 (UTC)

Which is to say, when there is an issue with harv/sfn it is self-fixing because your attention is brought to the problem, but when there is an issue with rp then even the rp advocates will never notice and never fix it. —David Eppstein (talk) 22:29, 1 May 2025 (UTC)

I think we should excise all superscript page numbers from Wikipedia to the extent possible. They seem like the most visually ugly and reader hostile citation style anyone ever came up with here, and I agree are also a pain to edit around. –jacobolus (t) 01:31, 2 May 2025 (UTC)

The first footnote attributes the claim that the thesis was "introduced" to the secondary ref, Davis. Both refs could go at the end if it really bothers you. The primary ref to the Church paper could be omitted, but it is historic. Johnjbarton (talk) 17:38, 1 May 2025 (UTC)

References

Prod or AfD Geometry and topology

I stumbled upon Geometry and topology which seems to be some oddball OR. I mean, these are both huge topics, and both often overlap in a large variety of contexts, but I don't see any way of turning this into an encyclopaedic article. Of course, I could prod this, but this is such an ungainly topic that I thought I'd bring it to general attention, here. I'd vote to delete, but I don't want to force/drive the issue. 67.198.37.16 (talk) 01:11, 2 May 2025 (UTC)

I would agree to delete, it reads a bit like a ramble by a student. Gumshoe2 (talk) 06:12, 2 May 2025 (UTC)

I suspect there could be an encyclopedic topic on the overlap between these fields but this article isn't it. —David Eppstein (talk) 07:39, 2 May 2025 (UTC)

I'd suggest that we just change the article to a redirect to Geometry & Topology, as a likely search term etc. Russ Woodroofe (talk) 09:08, 2 May 2025 (UTC)

But people prefer to use ampersand instead of "and", no? Dedhert.Jr (talk) 11:04, 2 May 2025 (UTC)

Meh, WP:REDIRECTSARECHEAP :-). Russ Woodroofe (talk) 13:44, 2 May 2025 (UTC)