User talk:69.245.186.97

I don't know who will read this but I hope it is the authors of this and many similar articles about mathematical subjects. I find the math articles on Wikipedia are becoming more and more formal and couched in mathematical jargon. Many of the articles start from the beginning using very advanced mathematical concepts that many readers both young (students) and old (myself, an electronics engineer who actually had a class in Modern Applied Algebra in college) would find incomprehensible. My suggestion is for each of these articles to have some elementary explanations that, while they may not be strictly mathematically correct, are less "opaque" to the average, non-mathematician, reader. I am not saying that the advanced and formal treatment of the subject are not valuable but they may discourage readers form further investigation of the subjects in which they are interested. An encyclopedia is supposed to be a general source of information and not a formal treatise on any particular subject.

As background info, I was looking at an article on the LTE Telecommunications standard which lead me to an article on E-UTRA which is the radio modulation interface for LTE. That article referred to this article on quadratic permutation polynomials. I had a vague notion that QPP was a method to shuffle data around in an error coding scheme but I cannot confirm my notion because this article is too dense for me ( or perhaps I am too dense to understand). But I am sure that a high school student that was good at math but not excellent at math would not be able to understand what was in this article. Surely, if the author wishes to improve the knowledge and understanding of his/her readers, that author could spare some time to express the concepts in a more "pedestrian" way and then work up to the formal mathematics gradually. A little discussion about what quadratic permutation polynomials are used for might help to give readers insight as to why they are studied at all. Mathematicians are notorious for being so deep into their subject matter that no one that is not at their level can understand what they are talking about. This is exactly why so many young people avoid STEM subjects.

By the way, don't ask me to improve this article because I would probably have to go back to college to get an advanced degree just to know where to begin.

69.245.186.97 (talk) 19:44, 23 April 2020 (UTC) Dale C. Wittlock dcwittlo@comcast.net