Talk:Quasiperiodic function

Please clarify
"if A/B is irrational there is no true period, but a succession of increasingly accurate "almost" periods."

What, pray tell, is an accurate "almost period"? This is not clear at all. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.122.161.136 (talk) 02:25, 28 April 2014 (UTC)

Page move
Since quasiperiodic function is the spelling used in the article, and is also more standard, I moved the page. Wikipedia does not have a good mechanism for this in the case you want to swap redirect pages, in the sense that the history is now the history of the old redirect page, and the history of the article itself can be found under quasi-periodic function. Gene Ward Smith 22:42, 6 June 2006 (UTC)
 * I moved the page by deleting the redirect first. So the history is now under quasiperiodic function. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 22:59, 6 June 2006 (UTC)


 * Thanks.


 * I'm moving some material to almost periodic function, where it fits better.

Gene Ward Smith 23:44, 6 June 2006 (UTC)

Arithmetic quasiperiodicity
Is said to be an example of quasiperiodicity, but I don't see how it (easily) meets the stated definition with multiplicative functional equations. Only later in the article are additive functional equations introduced. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.33.4.235 (talk) 04:31, 9 May 2013 (UTC)

Plain English, please.
Can someone who knows what this is about please insert a description of it in plain English? It is nothing but abstruse mathematical formulae and technical terms surely almost no-one other than a mathematician (who probably doesn't need to read this article) would understand.

I could have made a similar observation on any of hundreds of mathematical articles on Wikipedia, as many of them have this same problem. I sometimes want to read on mathematical topics in Wikipedia, but am immediately stymied 90 percent of the time by the jargon and difficult formulae.

Maybe it takes a certain type of writer, but I certainly believe it is possible to explain even quite advanced mathematical concepts in plain English intelligible to the lay person. (What technical terms are needed can be defined clearly when they first appear. True, they are often linked to their own articles in Wikipedia; but when you read an article with 20 or 50 terms you don't understand, each linked to its own article, and its own equally-difficult-to-understand description, you just give up in despair.)

I would point to writers such as Isaac Asimov and Martin Gardner as exemplars of how complex mathematical concepts can be explained clearly (and retaining much of the subtlety also) to non-experts. Such explanations can actually be far wordier than the very concise technical terms and formulae; but, well-written, this wordiness is not just loose verbiage, but very carefully calculated to make things intelligible, step by step, to the lay reader. Isaac Asimov, for instance, might spend maybe 20 pages explaining imaginary numbers and the square root of -1 (and did so in one of his wonderfully clear books on numbers - "Asimov on Numbers", I think it was), where a mathematician might express all the same meaning in half a page of concise formulae and jargon; but at the end of those 20 pages, the lay reader actually does understand the basic concepts involved. I would love for there to be writers of this sort working on the more mathematical or scientific Wikipedia articles.

I don't suggest that the formulae, technical explanations, and so on should be removed or thinned down. (I very rarely advocate for *any* information to be deleted from Wikipedia, even if it's a bit marginal: information is precious and should be preserved.) But it would be nice if a two-tiered approach could be taken to articles of this sort. First of all would be a plain-English description, going into as much detail as possible while remaining intelligible to non-mathematicians. And then, after that, all the technical parts, formulae, and so on could follow, for those who are able to go into that aspect.

I am a musician, not a mathematician: I was trying to find out what the concepts of "the seven strictly proper diatonic scales" or "the five proper diatonic scales" meant, and this led to the article "Rothenberg propriety", which mentions the concept of "periodic scales", which are apparently relevant to "proper scales". "Periodic scales" was undefined (and unlinked to any other article), but periodic scales were stated to correspond to "what mathematicians call quasiperiodic functions". So that's how I came to this article I am now commenting on, hoping to find enlightenment about periodic scales. Instead, I got only technical stuff which didn't seem to relate in any way at all to musical scales, and I still have no idea what periodic scales are, or "proper diatonic scales", or any of the other things related to them which I mentioned above.

This is a very common problem in Wikipedia, it seems to me. These highly technical articles may help technically knowledge people learn even more abstruse things - but they are very often quite unhelpful to non-technical people who want to gain some understanding of the lower rungs of technical areas of knowledge. And this is a perfect example of that.

I don't know if it's any use to appeal for simpler descriptions of things to preface the technical parts, because I am in effect requesting that probably thousands of articles be extensively modified and expanded. But if anyone reads this and agrees, perhaps it may finally reach knowledgeable editors who can do something about it, bit by bit, in one article, and then another, and so on. At any rate, I think it would be good if it could be made known that some people (I presume I am not the only one) do find this to be a very pervasive problem in many of the more technical Wikipedia articles.

To anyone who gives consideration to this, my thanks. M.J.E. (talk) 13:35, 3 July 2010 (UTC)

-- This is a perfect explanation of how I feel when looking up articles on subjects like this. I feel confident in my math ability, but I'm not college educated and a lot of the formulas and notations feel foreign. A single introductory paragraph would be excellent and make the later sections more approachable -- (semi) anonymous —Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.248.177.34 (talk) 09:19, 15 March 2011 (UTC)


 * Sorry, but you cannot expect volunteers to cater to people who understand nothing about complicated topics. If you really want to fix this problem, you have to check a few books out of a library and study for a few months or years. Then when you understand it well enough, you will be able to explain it simply for the next person. After all, you are not paying for this, right? --Filll (talk | wpc ) 21:23, 29 December 2012 (UTC)


 * --Not paying, but that doesn't mean that Wikipedia has no standards, or that one of the guiding principles should be jettisoned.

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