Talk:Vector Analysis

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Mathematics

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Ambiguous title

With the move of this article to "Vector Analysis (book)" the title of the article no longer specifies its content because there are a great number of books with the title Vector Analysis. It is a particular historic book that merits an article, the one by E.B. Wilson based on notes from the lectures of Gibbs. Therefore the move should be undone. Please take a moment, if you see this note, to add you opinion on this encyclopedia issue. By discussion we can compare the merits of the various titles of this article.Rgdboer (talk) 21:20, 14 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I checked whether any other article with this current title existed, so I assumed that no other book with that title had a Wikipedia article. But I get your point; maybe Vector Analysis (1901 book) or Vector Analysis (Edwin Wilson book) would be better? --A r m y 1 9 8 7 ! ! ! 22:07, 14 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Josiah Willard Gibbs should be acknowledged in the title, as well as Wilson, since the contents are essentially due to him and the book is famous because of the repercussions of the contents that reflect Gibbs' insight into what vector theory was appropriate for physics. Thus the original (Gibbs/Wilson) delineation. The word "book" need not appear; the category link does enough to associate it with the book project. For researchers, the title Vector Analysis (Gibbs/Wilson) has the necessary precision.Rgdboer (talk) 20:50, 15 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

As long as the "Vector Analysis" articlespace is not in use and has no links to it, and there are no articles on other books of this title (nor will be anytime soon), it seems appropraite to just can the ugly (and misleading) disambiguator. Srnec (talk) 03:31, 12 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

No qualifier in the title may well lead to confusion with vector analysis. I've added a hatnote, but I'd say we would avoid confusion by moving the page to Vector Analysis (book) (or a more specific title once we have articles on other such books). Huon (talk) 16:09, 8 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

My comments above from 2008 were uninformed. In fact, the current namespace Vector Analysis with capital A is sufficient to distinguish a book title from the Vector analysis article. The comment of Srnec above is appropriate. The current title is in fact non-ambiguous. Users of WP have the hyperlink for usage so other discriminators, like italics and bold, fade in importance. On the other hand, Capital Letters as the A above, play an important role in making distinctions.Rgdboer (talk) 20:46, 8 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Suggestions

The content section of the article is rather thin for a book full of material. Furthermore, most articles on books recount the opinions of reviewers. Presently there are several reviews, listed in References, but not referred to in the article. This book played a very important role in bringing to engineers some of the advances in nineteenth century mathematics. The success of the book proved that, upon occasion, a simplification or dumbing down of sophisticated ideas is justified.Rgdboer (talk) 22:04, 10 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

How many editions?

"It went through seven editions (1913, 1916, 1922, 1925, 1929, 1931, and 1943)."

I'm not sure that's the case. I don't know the full story about the differences between whether another version is a new edition or just a reprint, but my understanding is that all except 1929 were merely reprints.

This is the 1947 printing online: https://archive.org/details/117714283/page/n15/mode/2up and it can be seen on the copyright page "Copyright 1901 and 1929", and under than the dates of 9 printings. There is also, apart from the prefaces to the original work, one "preface to the second edition" and no further.

So it might be worth doing some further research and review whether each of 1913, 1916, 1922, 1925, 1929, 1931, and 1943 is actually a new edition or just a reprinting. --Matt Westwood 08:06, 12 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for making the distinction between a reprint and new edition. — Rgdboer (talk) 03:18, 13 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Gibbs' 1881 work "Elements of vector analysis" available too

As a note, Gibbs' original work from 1881 is mentioned off-hand but unnamed in the article. I had been under the impression it was totally unpublished lost to time. However, there does in fact appear to be a copy of it on Internet Archive (marked 'not published' and 'From the author, June, 1888'): https://archive.org/details/elementsvectora00gibb

It is interesting that in the preface he mentions Clifford's 1878 Kinematic, and Grassmann. --Nanite (talk) 07:48, 19 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Good catch! Link now included in text. Interesting that Gibbs was emboldened to cut up quaternions by Clifford's book. Ideas passed forward. — Rgdboer (talk) 01:55, 21 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]