Talk:Walter Rudin

Nicknames for his books
I've never heard "Mama Rudin" or "Papa Rudin", although "Baby Rudin" is quite common and easily verifiable. The other names sound like a joke that someone may make, and I wonder if the article creator mistook such a joke for common usage. --C S (Talk) 23:19, 16 June 2006 (UTC)


 * Google hasn't heard of Mama Rudin (excepting Wikipedia-related links), and the hits for Papa Rudin are substantially smaller than for Baby Rudin (understandable, I suppose); however, those hits for papa Rudin are for real and complex analysis, which makes a lot more sense. --C S (Talk) 23:24, 16 June 2006 (UTC)


 * I have always heard them called "Baby Rudin", "Papa Rudin", "Grandpa Rudin", but never "Mama Rudin". I have also heard "Baby Rudin" called "Little Rudin", and "Papa Rudin" called "Big Rudin. All this aside do the nick names of his books need to be mentioned in this article? 68.5.115.22 (talk) 06:29, 31 May 2010 (UTC)


 * The nicknames are definitely relevant. I think Little Rudin and Big Rudin should be added too. I actually came to this article because I just bought Real and Complex Analysis and I wanted to check whether it was Big Rudin/Papa Rudin or had a different nickname.  editeur24 (talk) 22:32, 1 March 2021 (UTC)

Criticism of Texts
THE "BABY" AND "bIG" RUDIN BOOKS TOO OVERRATED! The books are good, but too technical and sometimes impose narrow vision. Rudin book on Principles of Mathematical analysis defines the Riemann stijelites integral with a very heavy emphasis on order theoretic definition incapable of generalization to Banach spaces valued maps. Compare and contrast with the book of Bartle R.G more readable and with broader vision. Also the same book introduces stoke's theorem in too terse a manner. Better treatment of Analyis is availble in Foundations of modern analyis by J. diuodenne a classic. one can learn better analyis for sergelang's Analyis-I and exemplary analysis-II. The imlicit function theorem is done in a lucid and succint manner but only for those who have not read the masterpiece of J. Deiuodenne Foundations of modern Analysis. The book real and complex analysis treats foundations of complex analyis in too terse a fashion leaving the laurent's theorem as an exercise! The real contribution of the book is an algorithm for winding numbers but it is not understandable. A mail was sent to the author but it has not evoked any response and surprisingly no reply from the faculty or staff of the university. Moreover the choice of the subject mater in real& complex analysis is not so good. the author has wasted pages on results which are really not that important, as is evident in the progress of the subject in last 30 years. Certainly the author does not seem to have a good vision. Compare to the classic of Alhfors or Serge lang's book on Complex analyis.

In a book dealing with abstract Mathematics( Baby rudin ) when the author uses the term complex quantity rather than complex number one feels amused. According to me The books are overrated. They are original and display great scholarship on the part of the author but not as scholarly as Lang's or dieuodenne's treatises nor as readable as goldebrg's Real analyis or Bartle's analyis and not  as original as Alhfors classic. Only the people who have not browsed through Dieodenne or Lang would refer these books as the ultimate books. The above two books  suffer from the notion of integral  which  is  treated as linear functional rather than more general view which is taken for exapmle in Serge Lang's Analyis _II. The books are good as supplementary books to to scholarly texts like Serge Lang's analyiss-II or dieodenne's foundations of modern analysis or more readable and lucid Goldber's Real Analyis, R.G. Baryle's modern analyis, H'L royden's Real analyis, Titschmarch's classic theory of functions. i strongly object to training of analysis based on these books when these alternative better sources are available. May be rudin's books made their entry earlier on the scene when there was dearth of modern treatises and people were reluctant to use full general treatment offered in Dieuodene or Lang. Nevertheless the books are great scholarly acievements of human civilization! Anil.pedgaonkar 10:54, 6 December 2006 (UTC) Anil Pedgaonkar


 * Perhaps you could cite a published criticism of Rudin's texts and add it to the main article? Otherwise, talk pages are not meant as forums for users to promote their personal views. See Talk page and WP:NOT for talk page guidelinesDiggyG 21:05, 11 July 2007 (UTC)


 * IMO the above opinion is good because it made me search for a published criticism. Rudin's books, like so much of american mathematics books, are simply republications of old german texts. i think rudin sometimes goes overboard with theorem-proof-theorm proof german thing. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 128.163.22.131 (talk) 01:12, 12 March 2008 (UTC)


 * I personally thought ``baby Rudin" was excellent. I found the last chapter immensely enjoyable to read. Orthografer (talk) 04:44, 30 December 2009 (UTC)

Death on 5/20/2010
Sadly, Walter Rudin did die yesterday evening after a long illness. Multiple University of Wisconsin math professors have confirmed this. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Horacelamb (talk • contribs) 17:29, 21 May 2010 (UTC)


 * Do you have a source for this, other than word-of-mouth? Unless you have a source, we cannot report him as deceased. — Gavia immer (talk) 17:32, 21 May 2010 (UTC)


 * Source is here. --ExerciseForTheReader (talk) 20:24, 21 May 2010 (UTC)

Wisconsin State Journal
Anyone else get the sense that this article was plagiarized from this version of the article? NW ( Talk ) 20:35, 21 May 2010 (UTC)


 * It's Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia. You can't plagiarise it, you can only copy it. 132.216.24.117 (talk) 21:02, 21 May 2010 (UTC)


 * False. Freedom of material is irrelevant when considering plagiarism, which is merely the "use or close imitation of the language and thoughts of another author and the representation of them as one's own original work" (from the 1995 Random House Compact Unabridged Dictionary, via Plagiarism).  Even if someone grants you the unconditional right to reuse, modify, etc. their work, if you do not credit them, it is plagiarism.
 * Furthermore, Wikipedia is not "free to copy". "Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify Wikipedia's text under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License and, unless otherwise noted, the GNU Free Documentation License. unversioned, with no invariant sections, front-cover texts, or back-cover texts" (Copyrights).  Basically at the very least authors should be credited and licenses cited.  --98.202.53.240 (talk) 00:18, 22 May 2010 (UTC)
 * You're right, 98.202.53.240. Having said that, I think the version of our article that NuclearWarfare links above did serve as an uncredited source for the newspaper article, but I don't see it following closely enough to be considered plagiarism, except perhaps at a stretch the fourth paragraph (that starts "Rudin was born in Vienna, Austria..."). Not something to be worried about, in my opinion, though credit would be nice. — Gavia immer (talk) 00:27, 22 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Yeah, I think I agree (admittedly I only scanned over the two texts). --98.202.53.240 (talk) 00:30, 22 May 2010 (UTC)

cause of death
The infobox said "Cause of death: Parkinson's disease". I removed this per the Parkinson's disease article, which says:
 * PD is not considered to be a fatal disease by itself, but it progresses with time. The average life expectancy of a PD patient is generally lower than for people who do not have the disease.[44] In the late stages of the disease, PD may cause complications such as choking, pneumonia, and falls that can lead to death.

Rudin suffered from Parkinson's according to the obituary, but it's not clear what the immediate cause of death was. The mention of PD in the article, plus the infobox saying he was 89 years old, is probably good enough. 69.228.170.24 (talk) 69.228.170.24 (talk) 20:46, 26 May 2010 (UTC)

Uniqueness theory does not belong here
The section on Uniqueness Theory does not seem to belong in his biography at all. If it's noteworthy, move it to its own article. if not, let the reader find out more about it on their own (or include a two-sentence summary.) --Arithmomaniac38 (talk) 20:21, 16 June 2013 (UTC)

Leading text in the US, and where else?
The article currently says Little Rudin is the most-used text in the US. I used it myself at Yale in 1978. It would be interesting to know if it is the most-used in other parts of the world too. I encourage someone to look into that. If there are any Rudin fans out there, even family and friends, feel free to suggest sources on the Talk page here for that. If you're too close, you shouldnt' edit article to be puff pieces, but you should feel free to make suggestions of source articles other people could use to edit here. editeur24 (talk) 22:36, 1 March 2021 (UTC)