Portal talk:Mathematics/Archive2007

Math and Measurement?

The top of the portal indicates that 'measurement' was used in the development of mathematical ideas. I am a bit confused becasue I have always considered math to just flow from axioms and, when you get right down to it, don't have to have anything to do with the real world. Please enlighten me.CaseKid 04:01, 5 January 2007 (UTC)

Good morning, CaseKid! I suppose you're referring to this sentence:

It evolved, through the use of abstraction and logical reasoning, from counting, calculation, measurement, and the systematic study of the shapes and motions of physical objects.

The short answer to your question is that this sentence is about the history of mathematics. It describes the major processes in human intellectual history that have motivated the development of modern mathematics. If you examine the history of mathematics carefully, you'll notice that people like Archimedes and Newton and even Euler tended to take the idea that mathematics is all about the real world very seriously. Even Gauss was probably a mathematical realist – he famously carried out careful measurements of the internal angles of immense triangles (using surveying instruments) in an effort to determine whether Euclidean geometry applies to the real world. The view that you're espousing – that math just flows from the axioms – is called formalism. You can read about many other philosophical approaches to mathematics in this article.

Most historians of mathematics trace formalism back to Hilbert. Formalism is certainly the dominant philosophy of mathematics today, but other views are still extant. My own opinion is that mathematical realism, or Platonism, was the dominant view among mathematicians up until roughly 1800, when the discovery of non-Euclidean geometries led people to question axioms (well, one axiom – the parallel postulate) that had been taken for granted for thousands of years. Formalism has its roots in the ferment of 19th-century mathematics, and Hilbert is just the guy who enunciated a formal program for mathematics most clearly. DavidCBryant 12:49, 5 January 2007 (UTC)

Featured Article Archive

When was the last time someone updated the Mathematics Featured article archive? It needs to be updated but I don't know how to do it.--Anthonynow12 14:05, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

Interlingua

There is a Portal about Mathematics in Interlingua. Please add [[ia:Portal:Mathematica]] --190.10.0.110 01:50, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

Done. -- Fropuff 02:00, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

Did you know? / Poincaré conjecture

The page reads "... there are 7 unsolved mathematics problems whose solutions will earn you one million US dollars each?". Surely, given Perelman's proof of the Poincaré conjecture, there are now only 6? ArzelaAscoli 17:21, 5 March 2007 (UTC)

Good point. Since, however, we don't yet know whether Perelman will be awarded the money, the page should be edited to reflect the current situation of 6 + ?. Charles Matthews 17:30, 5 March 2007 (UTC)

Doesn't the sentence in the Did you know section mean that perelman declined his proof of the conjecture?

Help!

Somebody do something with the picture of the month! Engusz from huwiki! 21:44, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

Well, I did--but I must have done something wrong--the change didn't appear. Can an administrator set this straight?--Todd 22:12, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

ok, this time it worked--I wonder now what I changed before....--Todd 22:17, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

News section?

What about introducing a news box from the world of mathematics, just as on the Wikipedia frontpage? --cslarsen 15:34, 15 April 2007 (UTC)

It's a great idea and one I've definitely thought about before. What we would need is a dedicated person or persons to update and maintain it. It would be a lot of work to keep it up to date. I would be willing to help design the box and incorporate it into the portal if anyone is interested. -- Fropuff 03:54, 16 April 2007 (UTC)

Function(s) Topic

There is a link: [1] about it, but i can´t see a "Function(s)", topic at the portal.
Fsmaia 11:31, 12 June 2007 (UTC)

hey is someone there —Preceding unsigned comment added by 169.139.224.140 (talk) 14:39, 20 October 2009 (UTC)

Picture of the Month for July

When I checked the page we didn't have a picture of the month. I don't know how the process of selecting on works, but seeing as the page looked bad without one I pulled one out of the archive until a new one could found. Aiden Fisher 10:55, 2 July 2007 (UTC)

I have found an new picture that has been rated as a featured picture and added some text that was associated with it. Aiden Fisher 23:18, 2 July 2007 (UTC)

Recent changes to Walsh function

On June 12th, an anonymous editor made some canges to Walsh function, which may or may not be valid. I don't know enough about the field to know if they are or not. Could somebody who understands the subject matter please take a look at Walsh function and make sure it's not just some subtle vandalism? Thanks. -- RoySmith (talk) 18:58, 9 July 2007 (UTC)

It appears that the anon reverted himself, so I guess this is a non-issue. By the way, math related discussion better go at WT:WPM which is watched by more people. Cheers, Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 02:17, 10 July 2007 (UTC)

maths

we all know maths is 1 of the most toughest subjects in a students life and some times claims to be the waterloo.but however children hate maths it is the subject which will be useful wherever we go after our school lives.maths is a realy important part of our studies and we should never neglect it. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 213.42.21.155 (talk) Grammar, also. --Paul Carpenter 20:19, 13 October 2007 (UTC)

Spheres

In the "Did you know" on the Banach-Tarsch Paradox, shouldn't "spheres" be "balls"? (A sphere is the set of points a fixed distance from a center, whereas a ball is the set of points whose distance from the center is equal to or less than a fixed value.) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Nology (talk • contribs) 19:11, 25 September 2007 (UTC)

'Ball' is the correct mathematical term, yes, but given the informal tone of that sentence ('cut up and reassembled') I think 'sphere' is more appropriate: it's intended for people who might not know the Bourbaki ball/sphere distinction. Algebraist 17:04, 28 September 2007 (UTC)

that you cannot knot strings in 4-dimensions? You can, however, knot 2-dimensional surfaces like spheres. (a sphere is 3 dimensional). —Preceding unsigned comment added by 65.182.30.26 (talk) 07:12, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

Panjer Recursion

hi! could you please have a little look at Panjer Recursion. i wrote this article new and i dont know how these mathematical articles here are usually written. maybe i made other format/style/math errors thanks! --Philtime 15:21, 15 October 2007 (UTC)

Please make your request at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mathematics instead of here. -- Fropuff 16:23, 15 October 2007 (UTC)

The article of the week is vandalized...

...and I don't know how to fix it. Randomblue 13:06, 19 October 2007 (UTC)

Fixed. The edit link in the box'll get you to the article. Gscshoyru 13:12, 19 October 2007 (UTC)

Eigenfactor

besides http://www.eigenfactor.org is this a terminus mathematicus? -- Cherubino 18:48, 19 October 2007 (UTC)

Article of the week

The article of the week is not being shown. Don't know how to fix it. Goldencako 00:57, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

Did you know Millennium Prize Problems

I admit I don't fully understand the situation, but my belief is that Grigori Perelman solved the Poincaré conjecture. If this is true, then the 'Did you know...?' section is incorrect as it says that '...there are 7 unsolved mathematics problems...'. I don't want to change it myself, for fear of being wrong, but I thought I should voice my concerns. asyndeton 22:08, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

The proof seems correct, but as far as I know, the Clay institute has not officially validated it yet. The standard is pretty high, given the amount of money involved--I suspect it won't be much longer before the "7" can be changed into a "6". —Preceding unsigned comment added by Tdvance (talk • contribs) 18:17, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

OK thank you. It says in Poincaré conjecture in the picture's caption that Perelman proved the answer was 'yes' so I'll change that and all should be well again. asyndeton 18:22, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

Article of the Week Archive

On the Math Portal's main page, the Article of the Week section used to have a link to its archive (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Mathematics/Featured_article_archive). The link is no longer there, and the archive no longer gets updated! I recommend we bring back the link to the archive and keep it updated. Thoughts? 198.162.158.16 20:16, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

THE CHUNK METHOD Xb times xc=72 this is th so called Chunk method in which they teach us here at the ITT tech. Ammy X i dont know expactly how this works but some how the girl that thinks 1 times 0 is 1 came up with this new and revolutionary formula. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Dvineone1 (talk • contribs) 12:49, 31 October 2007 (UTC)

Vandalism efforts

Encyclopaedia Dramatica has a page promoting the vandalism of wiki maths equations. A page they linked, Runge–Kutta methods, has already been hit a little. The edits are supposed to be subtle so people won't recognise it as vandalism. Just a heads up to make sure the edits are correct. :( Rothery (talk) 10:27, 17 November 2007 (UTC)

Stalled move request

Two weeks ago I proposed to move Lists of mathematics topics to Portal:Mathematics/Lists. The request stalled for reasons explained at the WP:RM page (5th bullet of the linked section). More elaborate explanations for the stalling exist, most of them linked from the indicated WP:RM page section.

Basicly I ask the people of the Mathematics portal (and the mathematics project) to weigh in whether they think it a good idea to accept the "list of lists" page as a sub-page of the portal, hoping this would get the situation afloat again. The actual move proposal is discussed at Talk:Lists_of_mathematics_topics#Requested_move.

One of the issues is whether the mathematics "list of lists" page should lose its "featured" status. If it is kept in main namespace, I think it should, for WP:V and WP:NOR reasons (e.g. the only external sources are mentioned in the intro, second paragraph, but explaining they are deliberately ignored for no other apparent reason than wiki organisation). If the list is moved to portal namespace that reason for de-featuring ceases to exist (although featuredness should possibly be reiterated as a portal page). --Francis Schonken (talk) 10:54, 24 November 2007 (UTC)

PS, I proposed Portal:Mathematics/Lists as new page name by analogy to dozens of "list of lists" pages in Portal namespace --Francis Schonken (talk) 11:00, 24 November 2007 (UTC)

Picture of the month

I'm a little concerned about the current picture of the month, Image:Joconde.gif. Looking at the picture I was surprised to see that the outer box started at the hair line rather than the top of the head. Trying to track down the source via the common page it seems to come from [2] my Spanish is poor but this looks like it might be a bit of original research. --Salix alba (talk) 14:15, 25 November 2007 (UTC)

$2(a-{\tfrac {b}{2}})^{2}+(a-{\tfrac {1}{2}})^{2}+{\frac {(b+1)^{2}}{2}}+a^{2}+{\frac {17}{4}}>0$

Featured article - algorithm

I'm sort of new here, but I've noticed that "Algorithm" seems to be the featured Math article pretty often. Is that normal/good? I'm not even sure how featured articles for portals are selected. Just an observation. Helios Entity 2 (talk) 22:04, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

Since 6 November, the featured article has been chosen randomly using Portal:Mathematics/Random portal component. The possible choices are at Portal:Mathematics/Selected article/1-Portal:Mathematics/Selected article/39. More can be added by creating a new precis at Portal:Mathematics/Selected article/40 and changing the 39 in line 12 of Portal:Mathematics itself to 40. Algebraist 03:11, 28 December 2007 (UTC)