Talk:Metric Structures for Riemannian and Non-Riemannian Spaces

Fewer black helicopters?
The unref'd tag was added when the article had no references. So comments like this aren't exactly helpful. Perhaps "now the article has some refs we can remove the tag" would have been a bit more WP:AGF? William M. Connolley (talk) 20:43, 23 May 2011 (UTC)

Incidentally, when I follow ref 1 I get: ''MR1699320 (2000d:53065) 53C23 (53-02) Gromov, Misha Metric structures for Riemannian and non-Riemannian spaces. Based on the 1981 French original [MR0682063 (85e:53051)]. With appendices by M. Katz, P. Pansu and S. Semmes. Translated from the French by Sean Michael Bates. Progress in Mathematics, 152. Birkhäuser Boston, Inc., Boston, MA, 1999. xx+585 pp. ISBN: 0-8176-3898-9. Links to the journal or article are not yet available''. That isn't very helpful. If there is some kind of review hidden behind there, proper page numbers or somesuch should be provided William M. Connolley (talk) 20:45, 23 May 2011 (UTC)


 * WMC, I'm sorry for the edit summary, but I've only seen such a series of criticisms of a series of articles by one editor, when the other editors are retaliating. I wrote the Tkuvho about my concerns about his tone, as you know, and I think it's fair that I write directly about your non-coincidental appearance at another article by him.
 * I think both of you should avoid each other for a few weeks, until you are in better moods. Kiefer .Wolfowitz 20:53, 23 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the apology. But I'm still not sure you have this straight. All I've done here is remind T that he will need secondary sources for this article. T's response (The best course is to put this up for AfD) was distinctly unpleasant, though William M. Connolley (talk) 21:06, 23 May 2011 (UTC)
 * I agree that T's response, whether it be sarcasm or not, wasn't helpful. I don't want anybody's head to explode, so I hope that everybody will just relax for a bit. I am pretty sure that others would agree that you don't enjoy one other's editing right now: I would bet, without pretending to cite any policy, that you both would edit better with a bit more distance. :-) Kiefer .Wolfowitz 21:21, 23 May 2011 (UTC)

Content
In reply to William M. Connolley's comment above re the link to MR1699320: When I follow the same link (from my university account with a MathSciNet subscription) I get the heading that you quote, up to and including the ISBN, followed by "FEATURED REVIEW" (in all caps) and a little over 400 words of text ending "Reviewed by Igor Belegradek". In particular, the quotation given in this article does appear in the first paragraph of the review. Unfortunately, MathSciNet reviews are not publically accessible, but I can verify that the review does support the content of this page (including the chapter summaries). Jowa fan (talk) 01:46, 24 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Thanks, that would be helpful. You could also take a look at the book itself, quite interesting :) Tkuvho (talk) 03:42, 24 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Sorry, "I can verify" was a figure of speech that I now see is ambiguous. I mean I have already verified this.  Apologies for any confusion. Jowa fan (talk) 03:57, 24 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Great, thanks for your interest. Feel free to contribute to the page, as well :) Tkuvho (talk) 04:05, 24 May 2011 (UTC)
 * I'm not doubting that the review exists. What I'm wondering is if the citation can be improved. For print stuff, you can cite page etc even if I don't have a library available. Is this an on-line only thing, that remains simply opaque to anyone without an account? That seems less useful William M. Connolley (talk) 07:27, 24 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Exactly. It's like a book sitting in a research library somewhere, you can only get to it if you have access to that library, otherwise it's as you say opaque.  There's no page number or other missing details; if you have access then you'll see the content as soon as you click on the link. Jowa fan (talk) 09:02, 24 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Gentlemen, MathSciNet is the electronic version of the paper Mathematical Reviews, available in most serious mathematics libraries. Tkuvho (talk) 09:11, 24 May 2011 (UTC)
 * If so, the reference should be improved to add the page numbers. As I've been saying for a while. Does the electronic version (to which you appear to have access) really make no reference to the page numbers available in the paper version? William M. Connolley (talk) 09:41, 24 May 2011 (UTC)


 * Thanks for your comment. It gives the review number, which includes the volume number, which allow one to locate the review unambiguously.  Should we include these?  Tkuvho (talk) 10:37, 24 May 2011 (UTC)

Local theory of Banach spaces
The book also contains Gromov's famous appendix to the famous Springer-Verlag Lecture notes in mathematics by Vitali D. Milman and Joram Lindenstrauss. In it, Gromov injected new ideas into the understanding of the local theory of Banach spaces (following Dvoretzsky's theorem on nearly Euclidean slices of finite dimensional Banach spaces, which had been illuminated by Milman's use of Lèvy's inequality c. 1970). Kiefer .Wolfowitz 16:41, 24 May 2011 (UTC)

Delete?
I PRODed this. KW clearly didn't read what I wrote, because he removed it with ''remove PROD, because the book's notability indeed fame is already established by article. Another example of imprudent interaction of nominator with lead writer, as cautioned earlier, following months of calm)''. Which looks like more WP:ABF.

So, to repeat myself in the hope that KW might actually read what I wrote this time: The book may or may not be notable, but this article isn't of any use, consisting of little more than chapter headings. That is to say, the notability isn't the issue. I'm quite happy to believe that the book is notable. The point is that the article is utterly useless, and has been since it was first created William M. Connolley (talk) 12:06, 12 September 2011 (UTC)


 * William, you judge it to be "utterly useless" (which does not strike me as a PROD criterion). You accused of me of failing to read your notes. I did not comment earlier because your rationalization was so idiosyncratic and unwarranted that it did not merit comment, and honesty might have not suited your temperament today. (Why did you PROD it today, rather in the last months?)
 * In any event, the article is not utterly useless, in my judgment and Tkuvho's judgment, as you have known for months. Knowing our disagreement, you need to write something serious—rather than indulge a whimsical impulse—before wasting more time with a PROD. Regardless, improving the article would take less time than debating deletion, and so here is a chance for you to show good faith and good deeds. Kiefer .Wolfowitz 12:25, 12 September 2011 (UTC)
 * Nope, I don't know enough about this to improve it. You've known about the problems with this article for months, and have done nothing, despite claiming knowledge William M. Connolley (talk) 12:59, 12 September 2011 (UTC)
 * I take it that game theory is not your specialty? ;) Kiefer .Wolfowitz 13:36, 12 September 2011 (UTC)
 * Nope. And if you're playing games, please stop. How about you use your valuable time to actually improve this article? William M. Connolley (talk) 15:42, 12 September 2011 (UTC)
 * William, I am not playing games. Would you please specify concrete improvements you want? Calling the article "utterly useless" is not helpful. Also, in mathematics, books are often described chapter by chapter, so much so that Paul Halmos specifically forbade such reviews from the Bulletin of the AMS when he was editing. At least the article obeys tradition.
 * Seriously, give us some concrete steps and give me 2-3 weeks, and I'll fix it, at least to stub standards. (I do not understand why in thousands of math articles, you are prodding this one, but further discussion on that point is probably non-productive.)
 * Sincerely, Kiefer .Wolfowitz 19:06, 12 September 2011 (UTC)
 * You've had months and done nothing. Still, you can have another 3 weeks William M. Connolley (talk) 07:32, 13 September 2011 (UTC)

I don't see "this article can be improved" on the list of reasons for deletion. I would have removed the WP:PROD without hesitation, if someone else hadn't got there first. Jowa fan (talk) 01:05, 13 September 2011 (UTC)


 * William, please specify concrete problems that need to be addressed.
 * Before, you objected to referencing Mathematical Reviews via MathSciNet without a page number. I have added hundreds of math-reviews citations to references in scores of articles, and you are the only person who has demanded page references (to what is now an electronic medium without page references). Humans have stopped stampeding woolly mammoths off of cliffs, and mathematicians don't reference MR by page.
 * Your tone could use sweetening, whether by honey or saccharine, also.
 * Sincerely, Kiefer .Wolfowitz 08:52, 13 September 2011 (UTC)
 * If you're going to complain about tone, look to your own edit summaries first. And drop the stuff about mammoths; I'm sure you thought it most witty but it doesn't come across well. As I've said: the article is a useless collection of chapter titles. This is a concrete problem, as is your failure to read my words. Perhaps you'll manage this time William M. Connolley (talk) 11:15, 13 September 2011 (UTC)


 * William, please specify something concrete. Your statement that this is a useless collection of chapter titles, besides being false, is irrelevant; you might as well have PRODDed earlier versions of TAOP: What AFD criteria are violated? Kiefer .Wolfowitz 13:10, 13 September 2011 (UTC)

While I do not agree with WMC that page numbers are required for Mathematical Review citations (this would have been pedantic even when many people still used the print version, and nowadays it would be almost ridiculous), I agree with him that there are serious problems with this article.

In terms of notability, this book seems to be a borderline case. It seems to meet the extremely lax suggested standard proposed in WP:Notability (books): "For these reasons, the bulk of standards delineated previously for mainstream books are incompatible in the academic bailiwick. Again, common sense should prevail. In such cases, suggested bases for a finding of notability include whether the book is published by an academic press,[8] how widely the book is cited by other academic publications or in the media,[9] how influential the book is considered to be in its specialty area, or adjunct disciplines, and whether it is taught or required reading in a number of reputable educational institutions."

However, this lax standard only makes sense under the assumption that there is actually something to say about a book. I am not convinced that this is the case here. The article is in extremely poor shape. Basically it is just uninspired advertising: It starts with rather uninformative praise from Mathematical Reviews and Zentralblatt. The rest of the article is just an outline of the book, organised by chapters. If this book is really so important that it can even be compared to The Art of Computer Programming, then I would expect that there are also some more informative reviews that tell us something about how, why and by whom it was written, how it is used, etc. But at present we only have the MR and Zbl reviews -- something that all but the most insignificant class of mathematics books have.

I am not even convinced that the information in this article is correct. The article appears to claim that Gromov is responsible for the 1981 French edition as well as the English edition, even though it was apparently edited by two other people. If true, then this is key information and should be stressed more. If not, the lead must be rewritten significantly. As far as I can tell, the book's fame is based primarily on the quality of the 1981 first edition, not on subsequent changes.

Consistent with my general practice, if this article goes to AfD I will !vote for its deletion unless I can be convinced that its notability is more than borderline or that a reasonable article can be written about it. Hans Adler 13:55, 13 September 2011 (UTC)

Notability
This book helped popularize the category of metric spaces with bi-Lipschitz mappings, so much so that Gromov's "distortion" rivals "Banach-Mazur distance". Thanks! Kiefer .Wolfowitz 14:15, 13 September 2011 (UTC)
 * Marcel Berger, Encounter with a Geometer, Part II, AMS Notices, Volume 47, Number 3. Please see pages 332--336, particularly page 334:
 * [Milman and Schechtman's LNM on local theory of Banach spaces], which states many key ideas came from Gromov (and Milman, etc.)
 * Lindenstrauss and Benyamini on Gromov's ideas.
 * Gilles Pisier on Gromov. (c.f. the paper by Pisier, Milman, and a third on the metric type and cotype of spaces, related to Enflo's roundness: c.f. which BiLipschitz embeddings etc.) This exposition may be better. It appeared c. 1985 in Springer's LNMS

Attempt of constructive critique
Dear colleagues,

I have looked through Category:Mathematics_books and did not find a good example to compare with, so it seems that we have not really decided how a good article about a book should look. Anyhow, I think it would be better to
 * make the article much shorter
 * move the publishing details to a separate section
 * move the reviews to a separate section (there are plenty, so I am sure notability is not the issue here)
 * most important, write a short lead explaining what the book is about and why is it important (preferably, a referenced lead, to avoid further tags)
 * I tend to agree with Halmos that reproducing the TOC in the article is not a good idea (perhaps a link to the TOC would be sufficient).

A more ambitious project would be to agree on general guidelines for such articles, but this is perhaps a topic for Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mathematics.

Best, Sasha (talk) 15:35, 18 September 2011 (UTC)


 * Hi Sasha!
 * Those are all good suggestions. When I read a review, I would prefer an brilliant insider's insights to a summary of the TOC, particularly if the review is edited by Halmos. However, we have to be careful with OR, and I did mention Halmos to support my contention that the industry-standard review in mathematics follows the TOC.
 * There are many examples of technical books on WP, and indeed there is a template for such books. Please examine Concrete Mathematics or The Art of Computer Programming for examples.
 * Cheers, Kiefer .Wolfowitz 16:37, 18 September 2011 (UTC)


 * Hi!
 * Following your implicit suggestion, I have added an infobox.
 * (And now also a Template:Hidden. Sasha (talk) 18:14, 18 September 2011 (UTC))
 * To my taste, the ACP page is also too long. Most of it is the TOC, and the second largest part is the story of the exponential reward -- nice as it is, this is not why the book is so famous.
 * Best, Sasha (talk) 17:58, 18 September 2011 (UTC)