Talk:Marie-France Vignéras

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Why were my edits deleted?

Apologies if I did something inappropriate in editing this article (I've never edited a Wikipedia page before; rather, I am a professor of mathematics working in the same area as Vignéras), but I do not understand why the edits I recently made were deleted.

My edits were all to the article's third sentence.

The first edit simply corrected the date given in the sentence. The result being referred to was published in an article in 1980.

The second edit corrected the way the result was phrased. I've written dozens of papers in spectral geometry, and saying "... with identical spectra" comes across as being somewhat imprecise and sounding very weird. It would be much better to say "isospectral non-isometric". Indeed, in her paper Vignéras herself states her result this way.

The third edit was to delete some second hand references to the result and replace them with a reference to the paper proving the result. None of the secondary references had anything to do with Vignéras being "known" for having proven this result. They appeared to have been chosen arbitrarily from the many mathematical papers citing her result. That is, they all contain a statement along the lines of "The first examples of isospectral, non-isometric Riemann surfaces were constructed by Vignéras (see [Vignéras' article citation])."

Hi, thanks for contributing! I have seen some comments on social media regarding this article which led me here. I'm not a mathematician so can't assess by myself whether "isospectral" is the correct definition, however, I can find a secondary source with this phrasing so I'm going to support your edit and revert to your phrasing on this. That source does give a date of 1978 so I've kept to that–but I'm not a topic expert so I'm willing to believe that's the wrong decision if you disagree. In general Wikipedia likes to cite secondary sources that can give an opinion on the importance of a discovery, but there's certainly no reason not to cite the primary source. Blythwood (talk) 22:37, 27 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

- Thanks for your message! That really clears things up. I believe that in 1978 she published an announcement of the result. But the result being referred to (the isospectral non-isometric Riemann surfaces) was definitely proven in an article of hers published in 1980. In fact, according to MathSciNet (a database containing virtually all math papers published in reputable journals), the 1980 article has been cited 76 times and his her fifth most cited article. Some secondary sources that quote the 1980 date are [1], [2], [3], [4], etc.

Thanks–that all seems to be in order so I'm going to take your side on this. (All feels very like the topic I've come to specialise in on here, the history of printing and fonts, where long production processes mean a design sketched out in 1917 might not reach the public until 1923–you have to be very skeptical of dates in reference books unless they explain exactly what they mean by them…) Blythwood (talk) 23:16, 27 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]