User talk:David Eppstein/2010a

Articles_for_deletion/Peter_Hudecki_(2nd_nomination)
You commented in the last Article for deletion discussion. This article is up for deletion again.

You are welcome to comment about the discussion for deletion. Ikip 04:09, 3 January 2010 (UTC)

JoAnn E. Manson
I revisited the JoAnn E. Manson article, removed improper citations and added new ones using the conventional citation style. I then removed the BLP unsourced and citation style banners from the top of the page since I thought they were no longer relevant. Was I right to remove these banners or should I have first requested permission from an experienced editor? I wasn't sure whom to contact about this. Thanks for your help.MedicineMan555 (talk) 03:38, 10 January 2010 (UTC)
 * Your removal of the tags looks completely reasonable to me. Thanks for the cleanup. —David Eppstein (talk) 06:04, 10 January 2010 (UTC)

Context?
I think in this case, the phrase "a branch of mathematics" is not necessary (whereas for "category theory" or "functional analysis", or "topology" it is necessary). The lay reader will realize that "computational number theory" is mathematics, but would probably not figure that out in those other cases. Michael Hardy (talk) 07:05, 12 January 2010 (UTC)

AfD Renato M.E. Sabbatini
I'm asking everyone to take another look at based on recent changes to the article. Upsala (talk) 13:47, 15 January 2010 (UTC)

Oriented matroid article could use expansion
Hello David! You may be interested in helping to expand a relatively new article on Oriented matroids, or you may know of persons with interest. Thanks for your work on WP and IRL. Cheers, Kiefer.Wolfowitz (talk) 02:59, 18 January 2010 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the pointer. It will have to wait at least until I return from SODA, though, both because I don't have time to do much while I'm traveling and because all my oriented matroid books are in my office. —David Eppstein (talk) 04:43, 18 January 2010 (UTC)

Morton Gurtin
Meets all sorts of WP:PROF criteria I think. I'm not really proficient with academic bios, so would you care to take a look and restore? cheers. – Spaceman  Spiff  09:15, 22 January 2010 (UTC)
 * Sure, I'll try to find some time later today for it. —David Eppstein (talk) 15:26, 22 January 2010 (UTC)
 * ✅ —David Eppstein (talk) 22:13, 22 January 2010 (UTC)
 * Perfect! Handling these deletions and drive by taggings is getting to be a bit more of a task than I imagined. cheers. – Spaceman  Spiff  22:23, 22 January 2010 (UTC)

John Hawks
Hawks is one of the best known bloggers on evolution and a key protagonist in the multiregional evolution debate. I linked 5 or so existing mentions of him in Wikipedia to the bio article, but there were more like 50 mentions of him that I didn't get to. --JWB(talk) 16:41, 22 January 2010 (UTC)

RH/R. H. Bing
Ive changed the name back from RH Bing to R. H. Bing, as that is the form used in his published papers, his collected works, his books, his obituary, and mathscinet. I have found no evidence for the form "RH Bing". r.e.b. (talk) 04:39, 23 January 2010 (UTC)
 * Ok. The article on him still says that he sometimes used RH but cites no sources for that; should we just remove it? —David Eppstein (talk) 04:41, 23 January 2010 (UTC)

I've removed it until a source turns up. I suspect it might have originated in a misunderstanding of one of the many anecdotes about his name. r.e.b. (talk) 05:01, 23 January 2010 (UTC)

AfD Nomination of Russet Noon (April 18, 2009)
Hello Professor Eppstein, I'm writing to request that you consider restoring the article on Russet Noon, which was deleted back in April of 2009. You might recall that the argument against keeping this article at the time was based on the alleged lack of notoriety of the novel. However, there is a Wikipedia section under author Peter David's main article, which is entitled Potato Moon. As you will notice, this section refers to Russet Noon by name, since Potato Moon is a parody of Russet Noon. Given that Peter David could be considered by many to be a legendary author in the comic book genre, how is it not notorious that he decided to host a red-robin satire on his personal blog about Russet Noon?

Please be kind enough to let me know your thoughts about this appeal.

Ladysybilla (talk) 21:05, 25 January 2010 (UTC)


 * Given that the most recent deletion was not by me, and occurred after a very strong consensus to delete at a full deletion discussion, I'm not the person to ask: you should probably instead take it to WP:DRV. However, see WP:NOTINHERITED and WP:SPS: something a famous person discusses is not necessarily itself famous, and blogs aren't usually usable as sources. So I suspect that, were you to try DRV, your chances of success would be low unless you can turn up multiple newspaper stories or the like about it. —David Eppstein (talk) 22:05, 25 January 2010 (UTC)

About Halting/Godel
Since you seem to know about these issues--- I was wondering if you have changed your mind regarding the proofs. It is important to have widely accessible presentations of these theorems, and if you look at the talk age of Godel's incompleteness theorems, you can see that the presentation is pretty optimal now. If you are willing to change your mind and support the material, it would do a great deal of good. This subject is notoriously badly presented in popular literature.Likebox (talk) 22:25, 25 January 2010 (UTC)


 * From the silence I gather the answer is no. Sorry to have bothered you.Likebox (talk) 02:18, 27 January 2010 (UTC)

Eduardo Blasco Ferrer
You placed a notability tag on this article, which was recently PRODed as an unsourced BLP, and which I tried to clean up a bit. If you look at the history, you can see that there was a lot of unsourced information related to notability, and I stubbed it when I looked for references. He does seem to be the top person in his field, however (pre-modern Sardinian language); his books are reviewed in Romance Philology (unfortunately I don't have access to that journal right now) and he's on the journal's board, etc. (this is all discussed on the talk page). I just haven't found accessible sources; he gets a bunch of Google scholar hits but most of them are Italian journals. For now I've added a list of his books, which I just took off the Harvard catalog. I'm still looking for more sources, either in English or Italian. Whether you think the notability tag is still necessary is up to you, but it seems to me he meets WP:PROF. Chick Bowen 23:20, 26 January 2010 (UTC)


 * I'd prefer to see something more than "he wrote a lot of books" but at least in its current state I'd be unlikely to take it to an AfD — the article definitely hints at a pass of WP:PROF although it doesn't provide strong evidence for a pass. —David Eppstein (talk) 23:37, 26 January 2010 (UTC)

Geometry of numbers
Hi David. I extensively re-wrote the article, on which you had commented about "jargon". I removed the jargon notice. Thanks, Kiefer.Wolfowitz (talk) 17:19, 27 January 2010 (UTC)
 * It's definitely much improved, though it still feels a bit disjointed to me. Thanks for all the work making it better. —David Eppstein (talk) 05:36, 28 January 2010 (UTC)
 * Thanks for your kind words and for inserting the symmetry condition! Kiefer.Wolfowitz (talk) 09:26, 28 January 2010 (UTC)

Ogi Ogas
Hi there. As a contributor to this article, you may be interested to know I have re-nominated it for deletion. Your comments are welcome at Articles for deletion/Ogi Ogas (2nd nomination). Robofish (talk) 16:39, 28 January 2010 (UTC)

FYI: Deletion on your talk page and later rewriting my invitation
Just thought you may want to know, an alternate account deleted my poorly worded invitation on your talk page. Some editors disagreed about these deletions. and also went to ANI about it.

I actually appreciate this deletion because I completely rewrote the template. The template was inviting you here: here. Ikip 04:19, 1 February 2010 (UTC)


 * Thanks, I saw both the invitation and its deletion. —David Eppstein (talk) 04:21, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

Re: Articles for deletion/Lael Anson Best
Patelurology2 (talk) 15:52, 2 February 2010 (UTC) Patelurology2 (talk) 16:04, 2 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Added more External links from which text will be prepared citing those as references; adopting this page, though I am beginner.
 * All arrows have been suppressed.
 * More content will be added.
 * Thanks

Invalid claim of non-free content
Professor Eppstein, with all due respect to you, the image File:FlorentinaMosoraDG2.jpg has been in the public domain for 50 years as already explained in the Information uploaded with the image. Thus, the status Non-free content does not apply. Thank you for withdrawing your claim and deletion request.Bci2 07:01, 3 February 2010 (UTC).

RE: You wrote: >> However, there is a concern that the rationale provided for using this file on Wikipedia may not meet the criteria required by Non-free content. This can be corrected by going to the file description page and adding or clarifying the reason why the file qualifies under this policy. Adding and completing one of the templates available from Non-free use rationale guideline is an easy way to ensure that your file is in compliance with Wikipedia policy. Please be aware that a non-free use rationale is not the same as an image copyright tag; descriptions for files used under the non-free content policy require both a copyright tag and a non-free use rationale... Thank you. David Eppstein (talk) 06:44, 3 February 2010 (UTC)>>


 * With all due respect, 50-year-old intellectual property is generally not in the public domain. Within the U.S., one can only rely on something being public domain if it was published prior to 1923. Try explaining why this case might be an exception. If you can't come up with something a lot more convincing than you have so far, my plan is to take it to a full deletion discussion, and/or the Wikipedia copyright noticeboard. —David Eppstein (talk) 07:24, 3 February 2010 (UTC)

H. A. Pogorzelski
I deprodded this, but could you take a look--if he was the ed. of MR he;s notable, but was he? The article will need some considerable improvement of course, even so.  DGG ( talk ) 18:39, 4 February 2010 (UTC)
 * I found a source for the MR editorship, and removed some other inappropriate material from the article. I'll take a look again sometime later when I have more time to do so and see whether it can be expanded a bit more. —David Eppstein (talk) 19:10, 4 February 2010 (UTC)


 * By the way, the editorship appears to be more of a managing editor position and less of the sort of editor-in-chief that is intended by WP:PROF; it happened prior to his Ph.D. and prior to his work at the Institute for Advanced Study. But the other sources I added seem to be enough for a pass of WP:GNG. —David Eppstein (talk) 00:01, 5 February 2010 (UTC)

Doctoral advisor
Thanks, David. I never had the funding to continue grad school, so this is all second-hand to me. If I had the time, I'd fix the fact that there are literally dozens of articles in Wikipedia using this term, and none of them had a Wikilink; most still don't. -- Orange Mike  &#x007C;   Talk  22:03, 15 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Probably a lot more than that, if one counts all of the academic biographies that mention who the subject's advisor was. —David Eppstein (talk) 22:06, 15 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Those are the ones I was thinking of, mostly; just didn't want to abuse the term "literally". -- Orange Mike  &#x007C;   Talk  22:12, 15 February 2010 (UTC)

Amanda Palmer
Hello David: thanks for adding that reference. After some easy pickins, I think I reached the bottom of the well, resource-wise. Something funny about that statue: last night in Tuscaloosa Gaiman read a short story, in the form of a letter, from the persona of ... indeed, a human statue, obsessively and creepily following this woman he's fallen in love with. By the end of the story, he's actually in her room. Brr! Drmies (talk) 22:15, 19 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Gaiman also recently directed a short film "Statuesque" about a man (played by Bill Nighy) who falls in love with one of a group of human statues; another of the statues (played by Palmer) intermediates. Unfortunately I can't find a copy online; it's been on Youtube but has been taken down. —David Eppstein (talk) 22:34, 19 February 2010 (UTC)

Final discussion for Requests for comment/Biographies of living people
Hello, I note that you have commented on the first phase of Requests for comment/Biographies of living people

As this RFC closes, there are two proposals being considered:
 * 1) Proposal to Close This RfC
 * 2) Alternate proposal to close this RFC: we don't need a whole new layer of bureaucracy

Your opinion on this is welcome. Okip  02:06, 24 February 2010 (UTC)

AfD nomination of Joe_Szwaja
An article that you have been involved in editing, Joe_Szwaja, has been listed for deletion. If you are interested in the deletion discussion, please participate by adding your comments at Articles for deletion/. Thank you.Please contact me if you're unsure why you received this message.  Bevin  bell 18:34, 27 February 2010 (UTC)

Alfréd Rényi Prize
FYI. I created an article for the Alfréd Rényi Prize. I took the information for the article from the Renyi Institute's web page that lists the award winners. I don't speak Hungarian, but (with the help of google translate) I believe my interpretation of the page to be correct. (Hungarians appear to list first names last.) I thought you might want to check the article for accuracy. I could not find articles for every mathematician on the list, but such an article might still exist under a slightly different name. Cheers --  Jwesley 78 04:53, 8 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Thanks for letting me know. Of course, I don't speak Hungarian either. —David Eppstein (talk) 04:55, 8 March 2010 (UTC)
 * I should perhaps find a Hungarian-fluent editor to check it (at least to verify the names).  Jwesley 78 05:12, 8 March 2010 (UTC)
 * FYI - I've contacted a Hungarian editor: User_talk:Gargaj.  Jwesley 78 05:33, 8 March 2010 (UTC)


 * Also, I recently saw that you're an invited speaker to this Summer's Canadian Conference on Computational Geometry. I plan to be at that conference, and will possibly present a paper. I'll be looking forward to hearing you speak. (BTW, my name is Justin Smith. I'm a PhD student in CS at the University Of Cincinnati.)  Jwesley 78 05:17, 8 March 2010 (UTC)
 * I also left a message with User:Kope, a Hungarian mathematician who edits Wikipedia. I'll see you at CCCG, then, and I'll try to pay attention to when your talk is scheduled. I'm having trouble getting through to the Cincinatti web page right now so I can't tell whether there's anyone I've met on the faculty there — who are you working with? —David Eppstein (talk) 07:49, 8 March 2010 (UTC)
 * My advisor is George B. Purdy. My school page is here. And the faculty list is here. The department's web server has been very slow tonight.
 * My work (so far) has been focused primarily on "combinatorial" (as opposed to "computational") geometry. Currently, we're working to extend several results from "planar" combinatorial geometry into higher dimensions.
 * I've come across your name several times while searching for literature related to topics I'm studying. I'm quite interested in your work. You have published on several topics that interest me. When I gain a bit more autonomy in my work, I'd love an opportunity to collaborate with you to work on a problem.  Jwesley 78 08:28, 8 March 2010 (UTC)

Block of IP address 88.23.21.130
I see that you indef blocked the IP address 88.23.21.130. While I understand that BLP violations are enforced prety severely, it seems that a first-time block for an IP address is too excessive, and is likely to cause colateral damage.Please either unblock the IP, or set a reasonable expiry. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 06:50, 8 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Given the severity of the BLP violations in question and the fact that they sat unnoticed for weeks I felt that keeping the editor in question permanently away from the encyclopedia was warranted. But I can imagine that after some shorter time someone else might be assigned the same address. I've shortened it to a month. —David Eppstein (talk) 07:42, 8 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Thank you. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 08:45, 8 March 2010 (UTC)

Erdős–Beck theorem merged
I merged the content of Erdős–Beck theorem into Beck's theorem (geometry). It might need a little more cleanup, since it was my first time "merging" articles. Cheers,  Jwesley 78 15:11, 11 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Also, would you please add the George B. Purdy article to your watch list? Being his advisee, I have a potential conflict of interest about the contents of that article, and will try to avoid making future edits. I've also stated my COI on the article's talk page. Thanks, -- Jwesley 78 19:23, 11 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Ok, done. And thanks for the merge — I think the "two theorems" are not as distinct as the current version makes them sound (the E-B theorem with k=n(1-1/C) implies the other one pretty much immediately) but that can be cleaned up later. —David Eppstein (talk) 19:32, 11 March 2010 (UTC)
 * You're right, "E-B" implies "two extremes". And it shows "two extremes" to be true in a more general way, i.e., it shows that a similar result can be obtained for any "constant" C; but of course, as C decreases the K (of the N^2/K) increases. Beck's original proof showed it to be true for some C <= 100, but it's not clear whether the result would become invalid once C gets too small. I had noticed this implication before, but it didn't occur to me when I was merging the articles. I'll work on reorganizing the article, and adding this observation. Thanks,  Jwesley 78 21:45, 11 March 2010 (UTC)


 * Here's an observation we've had recently. (I'm hoping you might see something we're missing.) In the original paper, Beck extended "two extremes" to an arbitrary higher dimension (Theorem 5.4). However, my advisor and I doubt the validity of his proof. Beck uses an inductive argument. By projecting from each point, and asserting the result to be true in the projected set of points (one dimension down) he arrives at Omega(n^d) incidences. (This section is very brief on details.) He appears to be claiming that having this many incidences is the same as having Omega(n^d) hyperplanes, but this would only be the case if one could easily show that at least some constant fraction of the hyperplanes contains at most some constant number of points. I don't see how this claim follows easily from his hypothesis. I can finish his proof by instead using Agarwal & Aronov's bound on incidences, so I'm sure the result is correct. I just think his proof is questionable. I'm curious if you see any way to recover his proof w/o using A&A's incidence bound. (I'm sure you stay busy, so don't feel any obligation to spend much time on this.)   Jwesley 78 21:45, 11 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Yes, I also don't understand that part of the proof. It looks like a bug. —David Eppstein (talk) 00:04, 13 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Thanks for looking at this. Interestingly, Elekes & Toth utilized "two extremes in higher dimensions" to give an alternative proof of the A&A incidence bound.  Unless there's a way to rescue Beck's original proof (without A&A or a derivative), E&T's alternative proof becomes trivial. Since the result is still correct, there's little danger of any other results being (potentially) invalidated.  Jwesley 78 02:05, 13 March 2010 (UTC)

Lattice (order)
Hi David Eppstein, I commented on the talk page concerning the Hasse diagrams: Talk:Lattice (order) The second graphic is now gone, and a description included in the diagram. Greetings, Lipedia (talk) 17:13, 15 March 2010 (UTC)

EL - Clique Benchmarks
An ip user keeps adding an external link, e.g., this. I've already removed the link 3 times, so I'll leave it for others to decide. I suspect that the link would violate WP:ELNO, but the persistent ip user would like a second opinion.  Jwesley 78 03:07, 20 March 2010 (UTC)

BHOSLIB benchmarks are relatively new and, some people used these benchmarks but did not mention the name of BHOSLIB. If you search google scholar with the keywords of benchmarks, kexu and clique, you can find more papers using the BHOSLIB benchmarks. More importantly, it has been confirmed by some researchers in recent papers that BHOSLIB benchmarks (appearing to be much harder than DIMACS ones) are very useful for evaluating the performance of maximum clique algorithms. So it is reasonable to add a link to BHOSLIB in Wikipedia. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 115.170.189.163 (talk) 04:12, 20 March 2010 (UTC)


 * I'd rather add links to libraries that have become well-established, than links to libraries that are only in the process of becoming established, per WP:SOAP. —David Eppstein (talk) 04:53, 20 March 2010 (UTC)

Challenging benchmarks play a very important role in the design and evaluation of practical algorithms which is a rapidly developing area. DIMACS benchmarks (with a history of almost 20 years) are well known and but they are not so challenging to solve as before. More and more people have confirmed that BHOSLIB benchmarks are much more challenging to solve than DIMACS ones (please take a look at the BHOSLIB website and the related papers). So I think that adding a link to BHOSLIB can reflect the information on recent developments, which is in accordance with the policy of Wikipedia. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 116.69.2.162 (talk) 00:57, 21 March 2010 (UTC)
 * The policy of Wikipedia is to be a follower, not a leader. Establish the significance of the benchmarks elsewhere; if they truly are significant, it should be reflected soon enough in better citation counts, which we can use to justify a link here. —David Eppstein (talk) 02:57, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

Citation count is important but does not mean everything. It should be interpreted in light of what citing authors have done. Recently, BHOSLIB benchmarks have been used heavily by some researchers to evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art algorithms. In addition, if you search google scholar with the keywords of benchmarks, kexu and graph, you can find almost 40 papers which should not be regarded as "too few". Maybe, we can ask for other people's opinion about this. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 115.170.71.47 (talk) 04:13, 21 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Since you asked for another opinion, I'll give mine. There should be no rush to add an external link to these benchmarks from a Wikipedia article. If they are as popular as you claim, it will soon become obvious (and at that time, I'm sure established editors would also want the link added).  Remember, the audience is a broad group of people, not just computer scientists working to improve graph algorithms.  External links (e.g., to benchmarks) are only selectively added.  Those that are only meaningful to a select few readers are often eliminated from articles. Such links are obviously useful to those in your field of study, and would effectively be communicated through more traditional academic means (e.g., conferences, articles, or group website).  Jwesley 78 04:32, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

EMC² Barnstar - Thanks

 * Thanks! —David Eppstein (talk) 00:02, 22 March 2010 (UTC)

What???
I just got the message "Welcome to Wikipedia. Please do not remove Articles for deletion notices from articles, or remove other people's comments in Articles for deletion debates, as you did with Yair Garfias. Otherwise, it may be difficult to create consensus. If you oppose the deletion of an article, please comment at the respective page instead. Thank you. —David Eppstein (talk) 03:48, 29 December 2009 (UTC)". Now, I'm positive I didn't do such a thing and I don't even have the lesser idea who Yair Garfias is (he doesn't appear in the Wikipedia, to start with). Now, I'm really a neophyte to IP, so my concern is as follows: is there any possibility I share the IP with other people? Or is it that this action must have been done with my computer without my knowing it? Thanks, Nicolás Jiménez, México. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 189.216.66.130 (talk)
 * Probably your internet provider reassigned you the same number used by someone else a few months ago. It shouldn't be anything to worry about, but if you don't want your edits getting mixed up with those of other people it's easy to create a login name that would be yours alone — see Why create an account?. As for who Garfias is, he appears to be a musician. Someone keeps adding his name to other musical groups that he doesn't really belong to. —David Eppstein (talk) 07:02, 24 March 2010 (UTC)

Riemann hypothesis
Up to a point, I feel. 1/2 + it may be clear enough, but when we need 1/2 * it there's an ambiguity because, certainly in computing, different results may occur depending on the order in which operations are performed. Maybe in this case it doesn't matter, but I think 1/2 looks old-fashioned, and $1/2$ more what readers might expect to see. Rodhull andemu  02:41, 31 March 2010 (UTC)
 * $1/2$ is never seen in modern typesetting of mathematics research. It's either 1/2 (if the formula is simple and one wishes to avoid making the lines too tall) or $$\tfrac12$$. The raising and lowering of the numbers are too easily confused with superscripts and subscripts that mean other things. I think we should follow suit. —David Eppstein (talk) 02:56, 31 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Maybe so, I'm somewhat out of touch with how modern mathematical texts are written, and WP:MOSMATH is strangely silent on the topic. As long as we avoid any ambiguity, there's probably not an issue. Otherwise, of course.... Rodhull  andemu  03:03, 31 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Well there's also the fact that $1/2$ doesn't get the kerning right and looks ugly. The 2 is too far from the slash. —David Eppstein (talk) 03:11, 31 March 2010 (UTC)