Talk:Outline of mathematics

Text from 2002
What about a group? --XJ&alpha;m 200204195F0

Rename proposal for this page and all the pages of the set this page belongs to
See the proposal at the Village pump

The Transhumanist 09:21, 4 July 2008 (UTC)


 * The community has so far rejected these renamings, and this page follows the format of an index. So renamed. Verbal chat  20:32, 9 October 2009 (UTC)


 * That's from July 2008. There were no objections for those moves. -- Quiddity (talk) 21:09, 9 October 2009 (UTC)


 * Well that's great, but there was no consensus then and there is a new consensus now in October 2009 at the mathematics project and with WP:OUTLINE failing to gain consensus. Verbal chat  09:54, 10 October 2009 (UTC)


 * I oppose the move from "Outline of" - this has been named an outline for over a year! Where's the consensus for renaming it? The Transhumanist 04:59, 20 October 2009 (UTC)


 * It's a list/index Outlines have more branching, with each subtopic being a proper subset of the header above it. Abductive  (reasoning) 16:31, 20 October 2009 (UTC)


 * Keep "list" name. It's simple and unambiguous. -- Brangifer (talk) 02:09, 21 October 2009 (UTC)

Straw poll and discussion concerning what outlines should be called
A discussion is underway that may affect the name of this article.

See: Wikipedia talk:Outlines

The Transhumanist 04:59, 20 October 2009 (UTC)

Merge
The target page, Lists of mathematics topics, is a listing of just lists, hence none of the content from this page could be merged there. (Notice the difference between "List" and "Lists". Which is one of the minor reasons a rename was made to "Outline of X"). Hence, I object to the merge proposal. (and I especially object to just deleting/redirecting the page without attempting discussion).

Please wait for the RfC to make some of the fundamental issues clear, before trying to delete/merge outlines. Edit-warring may be considered harmful. -- Quiddity (talk) 18:18, 23 October 2009 (UTC)


 * object to merge - I agree with Quiddity. This is not a list of lists like the proposed target.  Since there are 2 objections now, and no supporting discussion, I've removed the merge tag.  The Transhumanist 22:12, 9 May 2010 (UTC)

Influential mathematicians
well, list seems not ideal. Erdos? Gauss? Euclid? Descartes? personally I've never heard of the first fella...--Billymac00 (talk) 04:20, 10 July 2010 (UTC)

Redirect to Areas of mathematics
I redirected this article to Areas of mathematics with the edit summary (redirected to better-developed article on same subject). This was reverted with the edit summary (reverse improper deletion of page). This was not a deletion and I don't see why anyone thinks it was improper. Would anyone else like to compare the two articles? It doesn't seem worth improving this somewhat eccentric article when the other, though not perfect, is clearly better. Comments are welcome. Dingo1729 (talk) 20:31, 10 October 2011 (UTC)
 * Seems pointless to me! Brad7777 (talk) 21:26, 8 November 2011 (UTC)
 * I agree, redirecting the outline seems pointless. Simply redirecting an article has the same effect as deleting it.  Deletions should be nominated at WP:AfD.  Keep in mind that the scope of the titles differ.  Areas of mathematics is an item list - the set of things that are areas of mathematics.  The outline's scope is as an overview of the overall subject of mathematics, not just a list of its areas or subfields.  The outline is a member of a network of outlines that covers knowledge as a whole.  To make it disappear would create a gap in that set, one of Wikipedia's contents navigation systems.  Outlines are hierarchical lists, to support rapid browsing and macro study of their title subjects.  The article Areas of mathematics appears to be evolving into article with paragraph formatting, while the outline is strictly a list.  Though incomplete, the outline will be developed in time. The Transhumanist 23:35, 8 November 2011 (UTC)

Rating Template
I'm rating this outline as top priority and assigning it to the "general maths" field. Bryanrutherford0 (talk) 17:00, 17 October 2013 (UTC)

Suggested reading
Suggested reading for editors of this page:

. --Siddhant (talk) 06:15, 1 February 2014 (UTC)

Quick explanation of Wikipedia outlines
"Outline" is short for "hierarchical outline". There are two types of outlines: sentence outlines (like those you made in school to plan a paper), and topic outlines (like the topical synopses that professors hand out at the beginning of a college course). Outlines on Wikipedia are primarily topic outlines that serve 2 main purposes: they provide taxonomical classification of subjects showing what topics belong to a subject and how they are related to each other (via their placement in the tree structure), and as subject-based tables of contents linked to topics in the encyclopedia. The hierarchy is maintained through the use of heading levels and indented bullets. See Outlines for a more in-depth explanation. The Transhumanist 00:07, 9 August 2015 (UTC)

Redirect to Mathematics
As tagged since November 2021, this article contains WP:original research. In particular, the "provided taxonomical classification" (see previous post) does not correspond to any reliably published classification. Moreover this classification contains many blatant errors and, very often gives much more emphasis on marginal concepts than on fundamental concepts. In particular, the section "Concepts" lists three items: mathematical object, which is not a topic in mathematics, but only a jargon term; mathematical structure; and abstraction, which is not really a mathematical process. On the other hand, theorems and proofs are not mentioned, although most mathematicians consider that something is mathematics only if theorems and proofs are implied. So, for a taxonomy, as well for the other purposes cited above, Category:Mathematics is much more accurate and useful.

The outline is also deeply misleading. For example, the first section is "Philosophy", which suggests that philosophy of mathematics is the most important part of mathematics, while this is not a part of mathematics at all. Also most of the comments that are added to list items are either wrong or misleading. For example, section "Mathematics is" excludes the facts that mathematics is a very active field of research and a tool used in almost all sciences.

In my opinion, the structure of a outline article is not adapted for the complexity of mathematics. If I am wrong, the article requires to be rewritten from scratch, and I do not see any Wikipedian that is both willing and able to do that.

On the other hand, Mathematics and its table of content well fullfill the purpose of a outline (as summarized in the previous post (this was not the case at the date of the previous post). So, I will redirect this title to Mathematics. D.Lazard (talk) 14:28, 18 May 2024 (UTC)