Talk:Mathematics/Archive 1

Mathematics is one of the strongest areas in the Wikipedia, but we obviously still have a ways to go. Of particular strength is the Probability and Statistics area.

I would disagree here, but then you'd make me fill in the P&S stuff I thought was missing (like more detail about the Bayesians, the Doomsday paradox, more history of gambling and statistics-as-rhetoric, resampling... Damn, I guess I just volunteered. --LDC

Agreeing with LDC...there are strange errors and lapses in clarity in Probability and Statistics that I began to correct, but there is so much material I gave up. Further

Now for my *opinion* - I feel that the other Math pages have been both a more co operative efforts and attempts to single out interesting and fundamental material rather than an attempt at writing a text book by one author. This will naturally result in occassional failure to link and sis correct'''. Further certain areas of math are almost impossible to explain here, due to the lack of symbols, ability to show diagrams and graphs, etc. How does one properly explain the Integral without being (mathematics)|Field]] and more. I am a teacher in this field and realize that pure high level theory will not do. But, say, in Vector Space adding the matrices took hours, and now I suppose I should mark-up, the maybe 100+ subscripts in this entry, which became available after this was wriiten. Well not today...friends...:-).

''emacs regular expressions are your friends...  Don't know what to do with the &lt;pre&gt; matrices though...Gareth Owen'' I don't either because if you remove them you lose the alignment. If you leave them you can't put in subscripts. Just another little obstacle.RoseParks

But more math talk would help and that I will try to add. Math is a subject, that after a certain level, you do not read, but you rework it through, and try examples. This makes math somewhat different than other subjects. "Reading" a math text can take literally hours per page. Knowing math involves a unique set of skills, because you can not progress until you have integrated the material you are studying into your brain to the extent that you can "use" it in the next development. This is really hard to explain and I am in a hurry. I will return and try to do better. I am not saying here that math requires higher level skills than another subject, just different ones. RoseParks

Just notice that I did say "insofar as this can be done." :-) --LS

I am a student studying to be a mathematician. gifs for mathematical expressions is rather unappealing. This present scheme is developing problems. I just entered Linear Algebra under Structure and Space, I think. This should be more like a diagram where you can show subjects that cross two fields. I give up. RoseParks

Since this is your own project, just bear in mind that whenever you say "I give up," what you really mean is "I don't have the time and energy to do personally what I think needs to be done, and I'm not going to try to persuade other people to do it." That's understandable, sure. But note, you caving a great deal of time for this--other than that, well...:-). I CALL ALERNATIVE SCHEMES TO ORGANIZE THE MATH PAGES!!!

Alternative schemes, makes sense to me, but in any case, can we make sure that the table isn't so wide? It's wider than my screen.

By the way, when you say, "I call alternative schemes..." you seem to be inviting public support for a radical change to the Mathematics page. Y'know, the best way to get that support, I'll bet, is just to change the Mathematics page and invite comment/further changes. --User:LMS

I'll have additional comments in a few minutes addressing several comments on this talk page, but for the moment I'm requesting that anyone hold off adding to the Mathematics or Talk pages until I've done some more editing. Please give me about half an hour ... ok, I'm done.

1. I've reorganized the Mathematics page, changing the table to a more conventional layout, primarily because the table wouldn't resize (it scrolled off the right hand side of edit the page.

2. Signing pages. I understand the desire to "track down" pages one has a vested interest in for further work. I offer a couple alternatives to signs there.

3. Editing "owned" pages. As a former coworker used to say, "Get over it!". Yes, I'm reluctant to modify pages that someone else has put a lot of wo revision--that's one of the key features of Wikipedia.

4. Wikipedia is not a textbook, it's an encyclopedia.ematics, so the tone, depth, and in-line "handholding" gloss should be appropriate for that level of reader.

5. Presentation. Wow. This discussion has been going I don't have the time right now to do that, but if no one else does it first, I'll try to merge and summarize the comments to date.

Ok, flame away. --loh (2001-06-20)

I added this to the main page, then decided to put it here!

Oh please. Applied math pays the bills, anate that without a thorough steeping in Lie Groups and Lie Algebras, you ain't going anywhere fast in mechanics. So the rigor is there, always has been, but the problems we can solve are getter more and more interesting!

An Applied Mathematics page already exists (I didn't know that when I reformatted the table). I'll add that link, but perhaps someone who knows more about tloh (2001-06-22)

There is a link to "computation" lost al

I stuck that link there when I ad the article. I had no idea where to put it -- User:Simon J Kissane

I'll put it under Finite Math for Taxonomy of mathematical discipline
 * On the other hand, wiki doesn't doenn diagrams.