User talk:DavidCBryant/Archive 1

This is an archive page for User talk:DavidCBryant. Please do not alter it. dcb

My first message

Nobody has sent me a message yet, but I figure I may as well set this page up now. If anyone wants to send me e-mail, just <mailto:davidbryant@att.net>. DavidCBryant 15:52, 24 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Hello DavidCBryant, and welcome to Wikipedia! I hope you like the place and decide to stay. This is not an automated message :) Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

The five pillars of Wikipedia
How to edit a page
Help pages
How to write a great article
Manual of Style
Also feel free to make test edits in my sandbox.

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you need help, please leave me a message!
Enjoy your first message! ^_^ -- ShakingSpirit ^talk 15:52, 24 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Electron config context

Hey, I removed the context tag, since the page has been expanded and worked on a lot since i put it up. I don't remember exactly why i put up the context tag, but one usually does that if the page isn't "accessible" to people who don't already have a background in the subject. Links, and background information provide the context. But yea, it looks good now. Fresheneesz 22:03, 24 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Applied mathematics

Anyone can provide ratings for mathematcis articles - see Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Wikipedia 1.0 for details. Just make sure you copy your comments across to Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Wikipedia_1.0/Applied mathematics. You might also find Areas of mathematics useful (and in need of expansion). Tompw 13:52, 26 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Schumpeter

I poked and prodded this generally excellent article a little bit today. I need to go back and poke it a little bit more. DavidCBryant 13:29, 29 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Passive voice

Just so you know, your recent edit at Gödel's incompleteness theorems — the one with the edit summary "/*First incompleteness theorem */ I hate the passive voice. And truth is timeless." — did not remove any instances of the passive voice, and indeed introduced three new ones.

(Personally, I'm not anti-passive-voice, so don't mind; I just thought you might like to know.)

—Ruakh_TALK 05:01, 1 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Well, I do hate the passive voice. But I also hate a clumsy sentence. Despite my prejudice, I will use the passive voice to make a sentence run more smoothly when I must. ;^> DavidCBryant 11:11, 1 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

That's a very enlightened prejudice you have. :-) —Ruakh_TALK 14:06, 1 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Generalized continued fraction

Hello David.

No problems with you editing CGF as you see fit. To me, continued fraction means having ones on the numerators and positive integers on the denominators, but the generalized in generalized continued fraction should mean that all restrictions are off. I've been meaning to learn about (generalized!) continued fractions in complex analysis for some time now, so I'm very much looking forward to seeing some new stuff on GCFs!

best wishes, Robinh 22:02, 2 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

OK, I'm off and running with this one. DavidCBryant 00:31, 3 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Hi again David. The new content looks great. Keep it up! I'll have a detailed read When I Get A Minute (tm). Best wishes, Robinh 08:16, 18 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Happy St. Nicholas Day

I hope you will be pleased by this edit to Continued fraction.

One of the hardest things to learn on Wikipedia is that it will not be obvious to other editors that you want X in order to have Y. Sometimes editors who reject X will also want Y; sometimes they will like Z which is about as good as Y; often they have assumed in their turn that Y is in the article already, and that therefore you must want Y' and Y'', which you think would be going too far.

Cranks never do learn to do this, but assume that since it is obvious that X implies Y, all the objectors to X must be evil Y-haters. This is half of Assume good faith. The other half is: treat cranks like gentlemen anyway (something I fail on), you'll feel better. Septentrionalis 03:34, 6 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you, PMA. I appreciate your candor and good will. But I'm not sure you understand where I'm coming from, yet.

I actually do know quite a lot about continued fractions. Besides the very limited use (representation of a real number in canonical form) the headline article says is their most important function, continued fractions have a plethora of uses in real and complex analysis. They are very widely employed to construct computer algorithms. They have served as the inspiration for many ideas in abstract algebra (integral domains, for example), and are even finding a niche in modern cryptography (Lucas sequences).

I'm going to add quite a lot of material about continued fractions to Wikipedia. Since I'm a very careful mathematician who tries to avoid contradiction and ambiguity to the greatest extent possible, it seemed that the logical place to start this project was by clarifying the basic definition in the headline article. Now I'll just have to get that done via a more circuitous route. DavidCBryant 19:21, 11 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks ...

... for tidying up after me. I have never read all the guidelines either - I guess there are so many, and life is short! I really ought to get round to deleting that page anyway, I only created it when writing the first draft of a requested article (I think, from memory). Have a good day yourself! Madmath789 18:06, 11 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Quarters vs. "terms" at Caltech

The use of "terms" in place of "quarters" is near-universal now at Caltech, both in popular usage and in the official calendar. See, e.g., Caltech Today or the Caltech Academic Calendar 2006-07 (PDF).

Mhartl 17:22, 26 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Philosophy of Math

Thanks for the reply on the Math Portal talk page. I suppose that the discovery of Pi was initially from measurement (it it would belong in the "here is how math was developed" intro). Sometimes, in my hubris, I forget that physics is just one portion of "Applied Mathematics". CaseKid 07:24, 6 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Exponentiation

Just having somone else follow the page for a few days will be helpful, so that it is clear that the new version of the article is accepted by someone besides myself. CMummert · talk 23:08, 14 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I appreciate your desire to avoid contentious topics. I feel the same way - I would rather finish recursion theory than spend my time on exponentiation. I don't really enjoy it, but someone I respect asked for help and so I am spending some time on it. The difficulty is that I need other editors to watch the page so that it is apparent whether I am speaking from the consensus opinion or not CMummert · talk 01:59, 16 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The example you put on my talk page is more of an example that the exponent rules don't hold for noninteger exponents. In my opinion, the issue at exponentiation is just that the article should reflect the common practice, which is not entirely self-consistent, rather than reinventing everything somehow to make it consistent. Similarly, the existing common notations should be used and described rather than inventing new notation. Bo Jacoby also argues about a hypothetical completely naive reader who doesn't know what π is, or what sin(x) is, etc. So long as you don't take anything personally, the discussion on the talk page has been pretty reasonable.

Anyway, thanks for watching the page and commenting from time to time. CMummert · talk 15:28, 21 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Hi

Thanks for your note on my talk page. You inspired me to hack up a hovse userbox. --Trovatore 08:48, 15 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

My user page

Thanks for the spell-check. Michaelbusch 21:54, 15 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Re: Quick on the trigger

Hi! Sorry about that... Occasionally I go through Special:Newpages and I guess my stub sorting instinct got the better of me. Hope that it didn't cause you to lose your edit or anything... GregorB 13:48, 20 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Re: my edit to E

Sorry, I misread the formula; I see why it is correct now. Ben Standeven 01:34, 21 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Complex argument (continued fraction)

I am sorry about my delay in getting back to you on this. I think that the article is correct and well written, but I am not convinced that it adds much. The continued fraction for logarithm in this case is almost identical to the continued fraction for arctangent. Your main point seems to be that it is somehow unseemly to use inverse trigonometric functions (due to their geometric origins) when working with complex numbers. I do not see why. Our article inverse trigonometric function deals mostly with derivatives, integrals, series, etc. rather than geometry. JRSpriggs 05:58, 25 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Complex numbers

Sorry that I could not come back to you earlier sicne soemone else vandalized meanwhile (for the first time) my user talk page. Nevertheless, one policy I try to follow is WP:AGF and in this case here I see no reason for the opposite since someone tried to fix a perceived lack in the article which maybe is now clearer than before. This page is indeed a strange case but the only connection so far is the one user created a welcome page for the other. Take care. Tikiwont 16:22, 25 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

About vandalism

Hello, David. You posted me a note to use the Undo button to revert vandalism. Well, as I'm not very computer-literate, could you please indicate me where it is, to make my life easier, and avoid unfortunate situations like this? Of course, wiping out the image was completely unintentional, sorry for that. Orthologist 23:41, 30 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Probability notation

Hi,

as far as I know, $\mathbb {P}$ & $\mathbb {E}$ are standard notation for prob. and expectation (resp.). Of course, Pr & E are also common, as well as Prob & M etc., but are you sure you want all the probability articles to use your notation? That looks like much work, and not necessarily very productive.

Best, Sasha

Friedman

Thank you for your long answer and apparently it took you such a long time, it's very nice of you. Now I have understood the philosophical difference between Friedman and the Austrians. However, only one question I cannot understand, and that is: as you said the Austrians focus on the science of human action and individual will to maximize utility, but how would that be "deductive logic"? since the definition of deduction is "inference by reasoning from the general to the specific". Using individual human action to economy sounds more like reasoning from specific to general. Can you explain it for a little bit? Sorry for any ignorance, as I am still a student who hasn't take economics class. Thanks! Wooyi 01:19, 13 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Elliptic functions

Hi. Thanks for your comments. I didn't know about the page for Apostol. I've been meaning to add the book by Chandrasekharan for some time now....do we have any details about the author, other than his book?

best wishes, Robinh 14:56, 13 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Well, I guess he's from India (Bengal?). :) I'll have to dig around a little bit on that, because I've never seen any of his books. Oh – I take a special interest in Apostol, because he has been on the faculty at Caltech for such a long time. I never took a course from him, but I did have to buy his calculus books. DavidCBryant 16:13, 13 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I did a little bit of digging around, Robin. He's Komaravolu Chandrasekharan, an emeritus professor at "ETH" in Zurich, where he has apparently spent almost his entire career. He was born in 1920 [1] and has published books mostly in German ... the English titles I found include "Introduction to Analytic Number Theory" (ISBN 978-3540041412) and "Elliptic Functions" [ISBN 978-3540152958]. I also noticed that he's written about Andre Weil and Armand Borel for the AMS. That's about as far as I'm going to get right now, but I'd say he's a notable living mathematician who deserves to have a Wikipedia page, just based on the fact that he also edited Hermann Weyl's collected papers (Gesammelte Abhandlungen: Band 1 bis 4 [ISBN 978-3540043881]). DavidCBryant 16:58, 13 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Advertising

Hi Mr. DavidCBryant,

I added my original contents for the world to view. How your calling it Advertising?

It is all my social contributions only. Your behaviour is uncivilised and not religous too. I made product differntiation only and all are relevant only. regards, Manik762007 The preceding unsigned comment was posted by Manik762007 at 13:20, 14 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Re: Parametric statistics

Go head, my bad :P Kareeser|^Talk! 21:29, 14 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks

Hi, Thanks so much for educating me. Sorry for my ignorant behaviour. Manik762007 06:03, 15 February 2007 (UTC)Manik762002[reply]

special characters

I got your message. Even in your message, the character ⊆ shows up as a small square. And both of the tables you referred to show a large percentage of the squares (I'd seen one of them before). And I asked about this problem at the help desk a week or two ago and they told me to change them to the math method, which I did in Empty set and one other article. Now I see that you changed Empty set back, and the characters are back to the boxes. Bubba73 (talk), 15:00, 15 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

You're right. I did change it back. You got bad advice at the help desk. I'm trying to help you get a better set of fonts installed on your machine. Give me a little time and we can solve this problem without mucking things up for thousands of other people and placing a greater burden on Wikimedia's graphics servers. DavidCBryant 15:21, 15 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I responded on my talk page. There must be thousands of users in the same boat I'm in. Bubba73 (talk), 15:42, 15 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Well, maybe. I haven't seen too many complaints about ⊆, though. It's a pretty well standardized symbol. DavidCBryant 15:53, 15 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

That's strange, there should be many people with my setup. That character shows up as the small square, and I estimate that more than half of the ones in those tables you mentioned are that way too. One thing - they are OK in Mozilla Firefox, but not in IE. Bubba73 (talk), 19:45, 15 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I wonder if other people might be having the same problem. If you go back a few days on set, under basic properties of union and intersection it said "is a subset of" instead of any symbol. Then someone put in the symbols. That is a symbol I can't read. I wonder if other people have the same problem is why it said "is a subset of" instead of using a symbol in the first place. Bubba73 (talk), 19:53, 15 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I think this problem is tougher than it ought to be. I just jumped through a lot of hoops with my Windows setup (IE 6.0). I installed a compatibility package from the MIT instruction page, and verified that I had the proper fonts installed in Windows to display a large variety of MathML characters. I double-checked all my compatibility settings in IE's "Internet Options" dialog box. And now, what do I get?

I get fairly good performance out of Firefox under Windows, and really crappy performance out of Internet Explorer. I've done some reading, and it appears that IE can't find a good glyph unless it's included in the basic font selected from the "Internet Options -- General -- Fonts" tab. So that means the only way to get good translation of MathML symbols under Internet Explorer is to find a really complete Unicode font all in one big file, and install it, and then select it as the default font for everything. The only fonts I know of that fill the bill are shareware. I'll let you know if/when I come up with anything that works better. Oh -- I'm sorry. I thought this would be easy to resolve, but it isn't. Mozilla and Linux have a much more flexible system for handling glyphs from multiple font files than Microsoft does, apparently. DavidCBryant 21:45, 15 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Well...you're probably right

Yes I typically do try to read the articles closely (unless super obvious), but it just so happens I'm probably too gullible (which i am told is not yet an entry on wikipedia). I had second thoughts about Mild constant, and thought about just labeling it as a straight stub because it is kinda out there. My real debate however was whether it qualified for the physics or math stub. The reasons I was debating that is because I viewed it as a physical constant however fishy, so I was thinkin' things like, "If i came upon Plank's Constant what would i do?" The thing about constants is that a truckload of math is used to find them (as is indicated in the edited article), but they're used a truckload in physics. I put it under math because it didn't seem like it was to the physics ready stage. Anyway, all this to say, I probably thought about it TOO much. I also didn't know the hoax tag existed, I kinda looked around for a pseudoscience tag, but didn't find one. Thanks for keepin' me honest. D-rew 04:35, 16 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks again! D-rew 16:40, 16 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I didn't know about the "hoax" tagging procedure, either. I was just going to ask for a "speedy delete". But when I read the instructions for that set of tags, I learned about the "hoax" category. So then I had to go read about WP:PROD, and then I (finally) understood enough to apply the right tags.

Working on this stuff is fun, but there certainly are a lot of procedural rules! DavidCBryant 16:52, 16 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Is there a list of all the tags? Cause I've been intermittently putting them on articles when I've seen it done on similar articles before, but it's all been sort of a trial & error method, kinda like the rest of Wikipedia I guess. I'm just glad most people don't get mad when you make a mistake, man would I be in trouble.

Also, I added this on the thread on my talk page about the talk page gaffe, but might as well add it here so you see it. "Is it kosher that I went on your talk page and fixed it? I know user pages have some taboos about editing around other people's stuff. Hope i did the right thing, and thanks again for the help." D-rew 17:28, 16 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Personally, I don't mind if you edit little things on my User page, or on this page. Like moving this discussion from the top of the page to the bottom? Thanks for doing that. I think the big deal for most people is actually altering what somebody else said. Fixing up a little spelling mistake here and there is probably OK (depends on who you ask). Changing someone else's comments (or even your own, after a significant amount of time has passed) so the meaning and import of those comments is altered? That's definitely a no-no. :-(

I haven't found a comprehensive guide to all the templates used to tag articles. So far I've been a lot like you – I discover these things by trial and error, more or less. There might be a table of "WP" shortcut names somewhere … that would probably lead one to all the important tags in the Wiki-universe, because people only make up the shortcut names for heavily used articles. I'll look around for something like that and let you know what I find, D-rew. DavidCBryant 17:58, 16 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Missing topics in mathematics

Thanks for you comments in the missing topics page - Skysmith 22:47, 16 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

You're welcome. Thank you for digging up some truly odd names from the history of mathematics. I had never heard of Evangelista Torricelli before I started digging around yesterday. DavidCBryant 12:38, 17 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Well

I like your new quote =->. It's just that honestly everyone has honestly been very kind whenever I've made a gaff or didn't know how to do something, which is contrary to most of my other internet experiences. D-rew 23:18, 16 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Hello

Thanks for the message. Yeah I'm a Rudd, currently a senior. We just recently had our own house wiki set up, so I've been going crazy playing with it, and then dabbling a little with real Wikipedia. Do you know if there is a banner for current Caltech Students somewhere out there? If not, how can I make one? Thanks. Ctetc2007 14:06, 20 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

notation nitpicking

Also, notice this difference:

N-1

N − 1

Michael Hardy 21:13, 19 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

sorry I didn't catch all the poorly coded stuff in complementary sequence the first time through, but after putting in about 75 or 80 of those non-breaking spaces (to make the big long vectors look better) I just got tired.

Actually, the non-breaking spaces are not the essence of what I was saying; I was pointing out that

in non-TeX math notation, one should italicize variables (but not parentheses or other punctuation and not digits);
a stubby little hyphen doesn't always look like a minus sign;
spaces (sometimes non-breaking, but that's not the most important part) should precede and follow "−", "+", "=", etc. (But in things like "−x", where it reverses positive and negative, rather than representing a binary operation, there should not be a space.)

All this makes it consistent with the style conventions used by TeX. Michael Hardy 20:44, 21 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Michael, I think those are all good rules. I do my best to follow them at all times. The problem is that there are a lot of other editors who aren't nearly as fastidious about the appearance of articles as you and I are.

Here, take a look at generalized continued fraction. I'm just about finished working on that article (the history section needs a little more information, and I should insert one more section about further generalizations involving operators, and "fractal fractions" that branch out in more than one direction, but I haven't gotten around to it yet). Anyway, if you inspect the notation in that article I think you'll see that I've got a pretty good idea of how to code things in both TeX and HTML. There might be a few hyphens where there ought to be an −, but most of it is fairly clean.

I wasn't really annoyed by your comments on the math talk page. I thought it was a little bit funny. So I tried to make a joke – sometimes my wife calls me a gorilla, or an orangutan, or maybe even a baboon. The only point I was trying to make is that since Wikipedia is being written entirely by volunteers, a certain amount of sloppiness is to be expected. I did put in about 30 minutes cleaning up one section of complementary sequence. Then I had to go do something else. If you thought it looked bad when you came along, you should have seen it before I put a half-hour's effort into it.

Anyway, I'm generally sympathetic to the idea that standards for style, and idiom, and overall presentation should be high. Some of the poorly written articles (often contributed by people who speak English as a second language) really make me grit my teeth. I can be a hothead, too. But most of the time I'd rather just make a little joke to let off steam, instead of getting angry. DavidCBryant 21:30, 21 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Inductive symbol

The primary reason I removed the {{prod}} tag was that I was unconvinced by the proposed deletion reason (Non-notable concept (no ghits).) The article is not about the words inductive symbol, but about a five-pointed symbol, which is, obviously, non-googlable. As for whether this article is a hoax or not, I haven't seen enough evidence to decide. (The article could easily be proved not to be a hoax, but it would be more difficult to prove that it is a hoax.) I have added the deletion discussion to the list of Australia-related debates in the hope that some Australians will contribute information. Spacepotato 00:12, 28 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Well, we do have one opinion from an Australian math guy:

I'm from Australia and I've never come across it. darkliight^[πalk] 06:35, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

I also notice that you haven't voted on the AfD that followed the PROD. Not that you have to. But if you really want the article to stay, why not vote? Oh – it probably seems like no big deal to you. The other day I hit an article that was definitely a hoax. The hoaxer was a guy who has been banned from Wikipedia indefinitely, and who hits us from time to time by making new accounts from different IP connections. I put a PROD tag on it, the author of the hoax removed the tag, and then I had to spend about four hours (all together) going through the AfD process, and doing more research to be sure the debate would go the right way, etc. Four hours is a lot of time to be wasting just to prove that a hoax truly is a hoax.

Please keep watching this one. I'll bet the Australians, if they respond at all, will say they never heard of it, ever. DavidCBryant 01:35, 28 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

If it is a hoax (which I suspect that it is), then no one will have heard of it. So they will not be able to say that they know anything about it one way or the other. Thus we must put the burden of proof on the people who claim notability it to provide citations. No one has done so (yet). JRSpriggs 11:12, 28 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

recent prod

Obviously she is borderline at best, based on the small number of WoS references I found to her papers, such references, not biographical articles, appear to be the standard in science, and accepted in AfD when they are impressive enough. --see the AfD debate. To call it to the attention of the subject people, I should have listed it on AfD myself, not just deprodded, and I apologize for my laziness.DGG 19:38, 1 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Well, apologies aren't really necessary, DGG. I've gone through this process with a few articles already. The PROD is quick and painless for the originator. The AfD takes a lot more work, both for the originator and for the community taken as a whole. All I want is for people who remove PROD tags to make some effort to weigh the merits of the cases for and against deletion. The standard I set for myself is that I'm willing to argue the case for keep in an ensuing AfD debate. If not, I just leave the PROD tag alone. DavidCBryant 19:49, 1 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Christina Sormani

Thanks for notifying me. Re your comment, I removed this article from proposed deletion because it was earlier proposed and contested. As per our policy, proposed deletion is only for uncontested deletions. Spacepotato 23:11, 1 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Funny quote of the day

FYI, I thought your remark about factorization so funny I posted it on my page ... linas 00:22, 3 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, Linas! So am I famous, or notorious? ;^> DavidCBryant 00:27, 3 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Thank You

Thank you for reinforcing my errors. But please understand, even though it is not an excuse, I did not intend to vandalise anything - I was truly trying to help the community, but... Ended up doing the opposite. Any further advice I can be given about how to properly edit articles would be a huge help to me.

I hope you understand, Megazodiac 14:34, 3 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

69.233.150.38

Hi! Being fairly new to WP, is there anything that I can/should do to help with instances like 69.233.150.38? Thanks! -- Whereizben - Chat with me 16:21, 5 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

OK, that was the guy who de-PRODded six articles in just about two minutes. I don't think there's anything much that you can do when an article's PROD tag is removed, except to propose it for deletion under WP:AFD, if you really feel strongly about it. That and try to reason with them. The other day DGG de-PRODded an article I had tagged. So I wrote to him, and he said he thought this particular person (an associate professor at NYU) is already "notable". But when I nominated the article using AfD, DGG actually did some research and changed his vote to (neutral), instead of "keep".

I've noticed a couple of people (including Spacepotato) who apparently monitor the list of articles proposed for deletion, then run around removing the PROD tags to make the deletion process more difficult. I guess I have to assume good faith. But some of these guys sure seem to be gaming the system.

If I figure something out (like what to do about it), I'll let you know, Whereizben. In the meantime I'll just try to grin and bear it. DavidCBryant 17:26, 5 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the great explanation, and sorry I took so long to get back with you. I do appreciate it though, and understand that there probably is not much else to do except for deal with it and to try to reason with people. If you ever do dream up something though, let me know! Have a great day. -- Whereizben - Chat with me 18:40, 8 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

complex numbers ordering

Let $c_{1}=a_{1}+b_{1}i,c_{2}=a_{2}+b_{2}i$

You can verify that $c_{1}\leq c_{2}\Leftrightarrow a_{1}\leq a_{2}$ or $a_{1}=a_{2},b_{1}\leq b_{2}$ is an order relation.

Maybe the guy who wrote it in the first place had something else in mind, but the formulation wasn't good. --Rcog 00:04, 6 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I think the original author meant to include a statement to the effect that C can't be ordered in the same way the real numbers can be. Your ordering doesn't preserve familiar relationships, like positivity. For instance,

1 + 2i > 0 and 1 + i > 0, but (1 + 2i)(1 + i) = −1 + 3i < 0.

I noticed the same thing when I looked at this article a while ago (although I thought of a different definition of ordering, using Cantor's mapping of the complex plane into the real number line). Maybe we can think of better wording to make the point that any order relationship imposed on C cannot have the familiar order properties of the real numbers under multiplication and addition? I think that's important, but I'm not certain how best to say it. DavidCBryant 00:27, 6 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Complex_number#Real_vector_space feel free to rephrase :-) -- Rcog 05:51, 6 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

OK, it's buried deeper in the article. Maybe that's the only place it belongs.

When I started working on this stuff, there was almost nothing in the article complex plane. So I spent about six weeks adding verbiage. You have sharp eyes, Rcog. I'd appreciate it if you could look that article over, to be sure it doesn't have any silly little gaffes in it. Thanks! DavidCBryant 11:46, 6 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Well ... school keeps me busy. I won't be doing an extensive review anytime soon, but I'll still be hanging in the math section, so if I see anything odd ... -- Rcog 01:50, 14 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Hey

Thanks for the intro, David. I'll check out those articles and check out the math talk page. Nice to meet you. R00723r0 21:05, 6 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Talk Page Etiquette

I'm sorry; thank you for telling me, however. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by R00723r0 (talk • contribs) 23:23, 6 March 2007 (UTC).[reply]

No problem. I had a little trouble learning what that little "+" sign is for when I first signed up myself. DavidCBryant 23:26, 6 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Carl Jockusch

I'm not planning on editing the page further. I'm not sure what a "PROD" is - does that just mean marking it a stub? (I should probably have marked it a stub when I created it - I'll fix that now.) I simply created it as I wanted to name him as one of the co-originators of the Low Basis Theorem which is a fairly important and useful theorem in mathematical logic (it is used in computability theory, model theory, reverse mathematics, and algorithmic randomness, and probably elsewhere) and didn't want a redlink. I didn't realize I needed to assert he was notable - if he wasn't, I wouldn't have made the page in the first place, as there would be no reason to have a page for him! Althai 23:36, 7 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for writing back, Althai. I didn't know he was associated with an important theorem. It's probably best to add a little more to the article to make that clear. I'll take care of it if you don't get to it first. DavidCBryant 00:04, 8 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Berger code

Hi David. You're right, Berger codes are like parity-checking: they can only detect errors, and no correction is possible. I made the correction (:-)), thanks. I don't know much else about Berger codes, I just read something and wrote that stub, since there was a red link in Error detection and correction. So, I'll leave future improvements to someone who knows better -- unless I find some useful info somewhere, of course. Oh, and thanks for your welcome! Bye, Mitchan 21:27, 8 March 2007 (UTC) PS: I thought this article would go unnoticed, but it seems not so... :-)[reply]

Thanks for fixing that up, Mitchan. I noticed your article because it showed up on the new math articles list. If you're interested in helping to review new articles about mathematics, you might want to look at it once in a while. DavidCBryant 22:00, 8 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Help:Formula

You might want to take a look at the above page with regard to MathML. Note it's possible to change what your served via wikipedia preferences Nil Einne 19:47, 11 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Incidentally

Any idea what your going to call the fourth archive yet? Nil Einne 19:49, 11 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I hadn't really thought about it, Nil. Maybe "Go ahead, punk – make my day"? ;^> DavidCBryant 22:43, 11 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Euler's continued fraction formula

Hi David, I am not sure if you are still monitoring the Euler's continued fraction formula page - I've posted some comments there. Best, Arcfrk 03:21, 15 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry to be so slow to respond, Arcfrk. I've finally researched the matter, and have responded on the article's talk page. DavidCBryant 17:58, 4 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

"Stirling's theorem"

(Referring to the comment you made on my talk page) I was curious why you thought I didn't know of the Stirling's approximation page. In the Stirling's theorem page that I created, I actually linked to the Stirling's approximation page. I just wanted to let you know that the reason I had created the page was because it was originally on the Requested Articles page (even though the Stirling's approximation article existed), and so I was under the impression that the page I created was desired in addition to the Stirling's approximation page. Anyway, I don't think it matters too much when there already is information on the subject. Tachikoma's All Memory 02:09, 20 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

OZ equation

Hi!

Thanks for creating my talk page! I was just more concerned with adding information than examining the Wiki-community! The Ornstein-Zernike equation is widely used in the field of physical chemistry (or chemical physics if you like ;-) ). I categorized it in thermodynamics and integral equations (which it is). The last category is purely mathematical in nature so perhaps I should also add a physical chemistry category tag there. Thanks for your comments! Joriskuipers 12:40, 20 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Vandalism project help

I was hoping you could take a look at our results on the vandalism study project (which is now finalized) so that you could help us write up our conclusions. If you want to help check out [2]. Thanks Remember 22:56, 24 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]