Talk:Lauren Williams (mathematician)

Macdonald polynomials
I have just reinstated some material on Macdonald polynomials that was earlier deleted by 73.89.25.252. This content, along with the title of Williams' dissertation (reinstated by someone else), was deleted because it was deemed not notable. Per WP:NNC notability guidelines do not apply to content within articles and therefore I reinstated it. Dash77 (talk) 17:19, 2 November 2020 (UTC)
 * Virtually every mathematician listed in an encyclopedia has a Phd, so the thesis title is a sort of certificate without information content. Saying that Total Positivity is one of her areas of specialization, or saying nothing, or mentioning awards earned for her thesis, would all be better than transcribing details from her CV into the page just because they are online.  Has her thesis title been reported in any published articles?


 * Similarly, the technical statement about MacDonald polynomials carries no indication that this is important within her body of work.  She worked on lots of things, what is special about this ASEP characterization of the polynomials?  At the level a short encyclopedia bio covers, it makes more sense to list her as, e.g., an expert on MacDonald polynomials (or whichever other areas make sense to list), rather than giving a chunk of text that even most mathematicians wouldn't understand. 73.89.25.252 (talk) 22:17, 2 November 2020 (UTC)


 * As stated in WP:NNC, notability is a core Wikipedia standard to be applied to decide what is (or is not) a suitable topic for a Wikipedia article, but is not a criterion for deciding what goes in an article once the decision is made to create the article. In this case, the article is rated as either Start or Stub class, meaning in general we should be looking to expand it, not cull down the already rather meager content. There is no particular reason for including this particular paper beyond the fact that Williams has co-authored with Corteel a number of times so including a sample of that collaboration makes sense. Beyond that, however, if there is nothing particularly special about this paper compared to other Williams papers, this article should be expanded by mentioning some of her other work, not by further contracting an article that is already too short. Again--notability is a criterion for deciding that there should be an article in the first place, but once an article exists not every statement in the article needs to be notable. Rewording the text to make it less specialized and more accessible to a general audience, however, may make sense. Dash77 (talk) 22:43, 2 November 2020 (UTC)