User talk:JayBeeEll/Archives/2018/

Robber baron (industrialist)
Could you please stop removing my edits? If you think the lead is not a right place for it, create a proper section and move it. --Emesik (talk) 19:39, 10 January 2018 (UTC)


 * I have created a discussion on the article talk page, which is what you should have done when your edit was reverted the first time. I do not particularly think this fragment is interesting or important, so I have no desire to include it in the article myself, and there is no obligation otherwise.  If you want to include it, the onus is on you to do it in a way that is at least plausibly appropriate.  --JBL (talk) 19:46, 10 January 2018 (UTC)


 * If you had read WP:BRD you'd have learned how to revert. First of all, a reason should be given. "Yah no" doesn't seem to be one. Emesik (talk) 19:59, 10 January 2018 (UTC)

Thx
Thanks for putting in work & opening that sock puppet investigation. (WP s/w didn't give 'Thank' option to click for edit opening the investigation, so that is why thanking here @ your Talk.) Good work. --IHTS (talk) 20:05, 10 January 2018 (UTC)


 * the thanks are appreciated! (When I started filing the report I wasn't sure I was right about all 3 of them, but when I looked closely enough to see the " ... (see Talk)" pattern ....)  --JBL (talk) 20:47, 10 January 2018 (UTC)

I give you my thanks also. It seemed that tedium would never end, and then you resolved it quickly and decisively. It is very much appreciated. Quale (talk) 21:45, 10 January 2018 (UTC)
 * +1 222.153.250.135 (talk) 22:57, 10 January 2018 (UTC)

Parabola
Hi Joel. Last December you added a tag on the Parabola page, asking for some citations in the section showing that all parabolas are similar. The tag was quite appropriate, but the editor who added that section has asked me to help find some citations for it (I've done this for him in the past). The material is fairly elementary which sometimes makes it harder to get good citations (as in this case), and the citations I've found are not the greatest. I'm going to have to rewrite some of the section in order to use these, so I thought I would check with you to see if there was anything about the section besides the lack of references that concerned you (as there were other sections without references that you didn't tag, I thought there might be something else). Thanks. --Bill Cherowitzo (talk) 04:59, 24 January 2018 (UTC)


 * Hi ,
 * Thanks for the message. I think the reason I tagged that section relates to the pre-history of how it came to be added to the article: see the talkpage section Talk:Parabola.  (The whole article is too large -- unmanageably so -- and full of crufty details while lacking identifiable structure.  So there's a lot of tagging one could do if one wanted to!  But my watchlist-based editing is focused on observing marginal changes.)
 * Hope this helps!
 * JBL (talk) 12:51, 24 January 2018 (UTC)


 * Thanks for that, the talkpage was enlightening. I'll go ahead with this section, but at 74K this page is ripe for splitting. I'll toss out the suggestion to split on the talkpage, but I'm thinking that an elementary/advanced split is appropriate once the haggling over what goes where settles down. --Bill Cherowitzo (talk) 19:10, 24 January 2018 (UTC)


 * Hi ,
 * Happy to help, and thanks for improving that section. A split seems like a really good idea; the details of how to make it work out seem challenging, to say the least.  With the semester in full swing, I am probably even less likely than at other times to contribute in any very helpful way, unfortunately :-/.
 * All the best,
 * JBL (talk) 15:17, 3 February 2018 (UTC)

Quite personal?
I want to make explicit that I perceive a certain general animosity from your side concerning my edits (please, recall Absolute value, also) and even to comments on TPs. I also want you to be sure that I for my side do not stack up any offense, but I would prefer to either get to know about reasons for animosity I might have caused, and to apologize accordingly, or to have some more precise hints, where my edits frustrate your requirements (e.g., I still chew on the "smallest primes" you reverted my edits to).

In any case, I do not want to bother additionally, so feel free to either delete this remark, answer to it here or at my TP, or simply -for convenience- do nothing, I won't be stalking, not a bit. Best regards, Purgy (talk) 07:47, 20 January 2018 (UTC)


 * Hi ,
 * I would like to assure you that I have no feelings of animosity towards you whatsoever, and I apologize for giving that impression. (I will admit to not understanding how I have given that impression, but communication on the internet, and the issue of tone in particular, is hard.)
 * That said, I do have a strong editorial feeling about your writing style: I find it extremely elliptic and difficult to follow. As a local example: the second sentence of your message here contains six (!) distinct phrases.  Even in the more direct first sentence I find that I must read it twice to understand it because of the elliptic remark in the parenthetical.  (A remark whose referent I don't understand: I have looked at the article history and I see one place where an edit of mine followed one of yours, but I don't think they were related to each other.)  As a result, I often do not read your comments on, e.g., WT:MATH.
 * I am open to discussing any of this further, if you desire.
 * All the best,
 * JBL (talk) 16:19, 20 January 2018 (UTC)


 * Thank you for your reply. It is of importance to me, not to cause unintentionally hurt feelings because of my deficiencies in the use of the English language. Even when not acknowledging vulnerability by bare facts, I strictly strive for not being personally attacking (see Absolute value). Believe it or not, I already do try to be less elliptic, especially when making edits to some article, but yes, I sometimes get carried away on TPs: my apologies. You won't miss much when totally ignoring my contributions, especially not the -only few- to WT:MATH. So I also do not want to waste your time on discussing my deficiencies. Cheers, Purgy (talk) 11:46, 21 January 2018 (UTC)


 * Hi ,
 * Rest assured that you have not caused any hurt feelings on my part. I hope that the same can be said in reverse.  As I mentioned, I don't understand what I've done that initiated this thread, and you are certainly welcome to explain (preferably, with a precise and unambiguous pointer to a particular action or discussion).  I also hope that you will not be offended if, from time to time, I adjust wording that you add to articles.  (Substantively, your contributions are clearly a benefit to Wikipedia!)
 * Best, JBL (talk) 16:20, 3 February 2018 (UTC)
 * Sorry, I missed to put the intended link under TP in my OP in this thread. I perceived your remark in the penultimate comment about the caption for the Sieve-pic being "not correct" as incorrect, and the verdict on the pic, I just had lauded as my favourite there, as inappropriately harsh ("The colored animation has some irritating features"). Well, I think my reply was not overflowing in amicability, but, remembering a reversion a day before, missing my intentions, and other atmospherically differences that vaguely came to my recall, I did not want to brood over some slowly glowing animosity, and so decided to contact you on your TP. I am certainly not surprised if a good deal of my English idiom is improvable, it just hurts if I cannot perceive a real improvement in being reverted. (My pet peeve is preferring "$$i\; \text{is a square root of}\; -1$$" to "$$i^2 = -1$$", as discussed with others :p )


 * I am very thankful for your remark of my contributions being at least substantively a benefit, and, of course, I am thankful and not the least offended if these benefits get the right idiomatic coverage. I consider all matters settled, and there is not the least animosity from my side. Purgy (talk) 18:50, 3 February 2018 (UTC)

Taylor series
Hello Joel,

I am writing to you because recently you undid a change I made to the generalized form of Taylor series expansion in several variables. Firstly, I would like you to know that I am only a student and my understanding of mathematics is no where near to what you would have. After you undid my change, I went back and looked at the formula again and I still can't agree with the original form.

I would like to ask you to look at what I suggested again. Please explain to me what I have overlooked if you have the time or perhaps point to where I could find sources on this matter (I checked both the sources listed on the wikipedia page but I couldn't find this formula in both).

I changed the formula from this:
 * $$\begin{align}

T(x_1,\ldots,x_d) &= \sum_{n_1=0}^\infty \cdots \sum_{n_d = 0}^\infty \frac{(x_1-a_1)^{n_1}\cdots (x_d-a_d)^{n_d}}{n_1!\cdots n_d!}\,\left(\frac{\partial^{n_1 + \cdots + n_d}f}{\partial x_1^{n_1}\cdots \partial x_d^{n_d}}\right)(a_1,\ldots,a_d) \\ \end{align}$$

To this:
 * $$\begin{align}

T(x_1,\ldots,x_d) &= \sum_{n_1=0}^\infty \cdots \sum_{n_d = 0}^\infty \frac{(x_1-a_1)^{n_1}\cdots (x_d-a_d)^{n_d}}{(n_1 + \cdots + n_d)!}\,\left(\frac{\partial^{n_1 + \cdots + n_d}f}{\partial x_1^{n_1}\cdots \partial x_d^{n_d}}\right)(a_1,\ldots,a_d) \\ \end{align}$$

I changed the product in the denominator to summation because factorial in the denominator should correspond to the power of the (x - a) and the order of the derivative just like that of the Taylor series for one variable: $$ \sum_{n=0} ^ {\infty} \frac {f^{(n)}(a)}{n!} \, (x-a)^{n} $$

This is also evident in the expansion given in the same section: $$\begin{align} &= f(a_1, \ldots,a_d) + \sum_{j=1}^d \frac{\partial f(a_1, \ldots,a_d)}{\partial x_j} (x_j - a_j) + \frac{1}{2!} \sum_{j=1}^d \sum_{k=1}^d \frac{\partial^2 f(a_1, \ldots,a_d)}{\partial x_j \partial x_k} (x_j - a_j)(x_k - a_k) + \\ & \qquad \qquad + \frac{1}{3!} \sum_{j=1}^d\sum_{k=1}^d\sum_{l=1}^d \frac{\partial^3 f(a_1, \ldots,a_d)}{\partial x_j \partial x_k \partial x_l} (x_j - a_j)(x_k - a_k)(x_l - a_l) + \cdots\end{align} $$

If you have the time, try expanding the series with two variable (which is $$T(x_1, x_d)$$). And when you expand until the term where $$n_1 = 1, n_2 = 1$$, which is: $$\frac{(x_1 - a_1)(x_2 - a_2)}{2!} \frac{\partial^2 f}{\partial x_1 \partial x_2}(a_1, a_2)$$

we will have a problem where the denominator is $$1!1!$$ instead of $$(1+1)!$$ if we use the original formula.

I hope you could give it a second thought.

Thanks for your time! Antony yang (talk) 09:57, 3 February 2018 (UTC)


 * Hi, thanks for your message. The difference is subtle, and you are not the first person to be tripped up by the formulation in the article.  Let me focus on the two-variable case, centered at the origin, for sake of simplicity.  Using subscripts to represent partial derivatives, the formula you changed has the following form upon expanding:
 * $$ f(0,0) + f_x(0, 0) x + f_y(0, 0) y + \frac{f_{xx}(0,0)}{2} x^2 + f_{xy}(0,0) xy + \frac{f_{yy}(0,0)}{2} y^2 + \frac{f_{xxx}(0,0)}{6} x^3 + \frac{f_{xxy}(0,0)}{2} x^2y + \ldots$$
 * The thing you're comparing it to has the following form:
 * $$ f(0,0) + f_x(0, 0) x + f_y(0, 0) y + \frac{f_{xx}(0,0)}{2} x^2 + \frac{f_{xy}(0,0)}{2} xy + \frac{f_{yx}(0,0)}{2} yx + \frac{f_{yy}(0,0)}{2} y^2 + \frac{f_{xxx}(0,0)}{6} x^3 + \frac{f_{xxy}(0,0)}{6} x^2y + \frac{f_{xyx}(0,0)}{6} x\cdot y\cdot x + \frac{f_{yxx}(0,0)}{6} y x^2+ \ldots$$
 * The latter expression has the factorial-of-a-sum denominator, but it includes duplicate summands (once you account for commutation of partial derivatives and of powers of variables). If one groups those duplicates together and count multiplicities, what comes out is the first formula.
 * All the best,
 * JBL (talk) 15:13, 3 February 2018 (UTC)


 * Joel, thanks for the clarification! I was trying to fix what I thought was a mistake in the formula, but it turns out to be my mistake in the first place! I have overlooked the commutation of higher order partial derivatives. Thus, I think I should say that the formula has already assumed commutability of the partial derivatives. Sorry for going through the trouble of explaining this to me, I should have been more careful.
 * Thanks!
 * Antony yang (talk) 05:41, 4 February 2018 (UTC)

Olipo revert
I added the following statement to Oulipo which you reverted:
 * Martin Gardner featured Oulipo in his February 1977 Mathematical Games column in Scientific American.

This same paragraph (about the history and visibiliy of Olipo) contains the statements:
 * Temps Mêlés devoted an issue to Oulipo in 1964
 * Belgian radio broadcast one Oulipo meeting.
 * The group as a whole began to emerge from obscurity in 1973 with the publication of La Littérature Potentielle
 * In 2012 Harvard University Press published a history of the movement,

Why is the statement about being featured in this widely read column not relevant and the above four statements are? --Toploftical (talk) 13:59, 19 February 2018 (UTC)


 * It is not necessary to believe that the section before your edit was good in order to believe that your edit made it less good. Yes, some other sentences in the paragraph suffer from the same problem, and if they had been added at a moment when I happened to open my watchlist, I might have reverted their addition as well.  I would be more interested in discussing this with you if it weren't a recurring fixation of yours to make questionable edits like this.  --JBL (talk) 17:19, 19 February 2018 (UTC)


 * RE: Your remark, "Martin Gardener mentioned something" is not important to the history of that thing unless there is a non-Gardener source that says so."
 * Would the following citation (from Strange Attractors: Poems of Love and Mathematics edited by Sarah Glaz, Joanne Growney, p. xiii, ISBN 1568813414) satisfy this requirement?
 * "During the thirty-year period 1956-1986, Martin Gardner' 'Mathematical Games' column for Scientific American frequently brought poetry to the attention of mathematicians. Gardner became well-known for his ability to make arcane topics accessible and enjoyable–and he was one of the popularizers of the OULIPO literary movement."
 * I can provide more such citations.


 * RE: Your remark, "Yes, some other sentences in the paragraph suffer from the same problem..."
 * So why did you delete only the sentence that I added? Are you going to delete the rest of those sentences now that you know about them?


 * RE: Your remark, "I would be more interested in discussing this with you if it weren't a recurring fixation of yours to make questionable edits like this."
 * Please see Civility--Toploftical (talk) 00:07, 20 February 2018 (UTC)


 * That citation would certainly be helpful. (This is true on much more general WP:V/WP:RS grounds.) Even better would be one that said something substantive about Oulipo, not just about Gardner. Indeed, this is my main objection to the edits in my previous post: they are potentially interesting factoids about Gardner and his column, but they have no valuable information about the subjects of the articles you add them to. --JBL (talk) 00:19, 20 February 2018 (UTC)

Cheers -- thanks for paying attention

 * my pleasure! It got snuck in there in a flurry of edits by that user and some IPs, so it wasn't hard to see how one could miss it.  Now that the block is over, hopefully disruption won't begin again.  ("Nazis aren't that bad, but also if Nazis are bad it's because they were actually socialists" doesn't seem like a very fruitful perspective for productive editing.)  All the best, JBL (talk) 16:12, 28 February 2018 (UTC)

So we disagree on recursion

 * Recursion

I said my piece, perhaps a mite on the sharp side, but I hold no grudge.

It's rooted in the animus of a working computer scientist toward (some) of the ivory tower computer science types.

I'm the guy who long ago lost four hours I couldn't afford on a deadline death march sending a patch to the University of Waterloo (supposed a credible math school) for their Watcom C++ compiler library because they didn't put a test in front of the quicksort tail recursion to only recurse on the smaller side of the divided partition, their failure resulting in order-N stack memory consumption on a previously ordered list (either forward ordered or reverse ordered, I can't now recall). Oh, joy! What naive, clueless nimby did that, I've wanted to know with burning passion, ever since. I've always blamed the fripperous way they teach recursion at the undergraduate level: magic mental beans.

The one paper I really liked was Putnam's paper on whether 2 is a subset of 3 (it is in some axiomatic systems, and not in others). Turns out, there's no axiomatic system which doesn't have set theoretic artifacts. This is also true of recursion, given any physical embedding. &mdash; MaxEnt 14:26, 4 March 2018 (UTC)

March 2018
You have been blocked from editing for a period of 24 hours for edit warring. Once the block has expired, you are welcome to make useful contributions. During a dispute, you should first try to discuss controversial changes and seek consensus. If that proves unsuccessful, you are encouraged to seek dispute resolution, and in some cases it may be appropriate to request page protection. If you think there are good reasons for being unblocked, please read the guide to appealing blocks, then add the following text below the block notice on your talk page:. Randykitty (talk) 18:20, 10 March 2018 (UTC)


 * Thank you for your even-handed approach to this second chapter. As I said, the article is off my watchlist and I'll take a break from it.  --JBL (talk) 18:34, 10 March 2018 (UTC)

Sockpuppet investigations/Elseford
Only SPI clerks are permitted to move cases. Please do not do so again. (I'll have a clerk review the move. Don't undo what you did.) Thanks.--Bbb23 (talk) 15:38, 17 March 2018 (UTC)


 * Sure thing. --JBL (talk) 15:44, 17 March 2018 (UTC)

Your Cranston filibuster
When you spelled out that you thought articles to when he voted on certain things weren't enough, I adhered to those mentioning his role in particular. Now that you've struck back against those edits, I've found myself between a rock and a hard place. - Informant16 April 21, 2018


 * I wrote the message below before checking your editing history and discovering that you have been around for a number of years. So, the tone (addressed to a relatively novice editor) is not exactly right, and no offense is intended by it.
 * Wikipedia is edited by consensus, I do not have the final word about anything. The traditional way to proceed (as described in WP:BRD) is for you to open a discussion on the talk page of the article, putting forward the reasons that you believe your edits are improvements.  If we can come to a consensus, that will be great; if not, there are various mechanisms for soliciting input from other editors.  (And often that happens just from the initial posting to the talk page.)  I would point out that you have made 11 additions to the page in 2018, of which I have examined all but only reverted 4, so it is not as if I am making your editing impossible.  --JBL (talk) 21:35, 21 April 2018 (UTC)

RE: Recent edits to pentagonal number theorem
I'm going to assume that you're going to put that chunk of text back some place in the article, right? It's not that inappropriate. Right above it the pentagonal numbers are defined, and this just gives a better, more compact formula for the interleaved sequence at play in the theorem expansion. If you're going to moderate, find a nice place else in the article to stick it!Maxie (talk) 14:01, 29 April 2018 (UTC)

Collatz talk
Just so you know, the post you removed from talk:Collatz conjecture seems to be from Alireza Badali, whom you may remember as a frequenter of the Math Help Desk last winter, but has since been blocked, and is now evading the block by posting anonymously. If you see similar posts in the future you probably only need to cite WP:EVADE to revert. I've already notified an admin about the situation. Meanwhile I was just going to let the archive bot remove the post from the Math Help Desk; it won't get saved if there are no replies.

PS. Are you the same Joel Lewis seen in the MIT OCW for multivariable calculus? --RDBury (talk) 07:03, 25 May 2018 (UTC)


 * Hi, thanks, I hadn't realized he was blocked, as you surmised. Yes, that's me.  All the best, JBL (talk) 12:21, 25 May 2018 (UTC)

Plea for peace
Hi, JBL, I generally admire you and your edits, which I've seen on a number of articles, and I certainly don't want to end up on your bad list. You just attacked me in fairly strong terms, however, and I would like to try to find a way to make it straight, if we can. You wrote:
 * "Your repeated efforts to derail a thoughtful and substantive discussion with insults and personal attacks is really regrettable."

I know I have faults as an editor, and I would like to become better, but I think you're misreading the situation here somewhat. To summarize the background, Paul August reverted an anonymous edit which added von Neumann to the category of combustion scientists. I thought the edit was good, but instead of restoring it myself, unilaterally, I added a friendly note to Paul's talk page, pointing out some of von Neumann's contributions to the field, and suggesting that Paul might want to restore the edit himself. (This is all in the copied discussion.) He replied that he thought the article needed to mention combustion science, and I replied, pointing out some places where the article already mentions von Neumann's substantial contributions to this science.

He then replied that he needed a source that uses the term "combustion scientist" explicitly, setting a bar that can't be jumped over, regardless of the history of the science, or of von Neumann's contribution to it, or of the basic meanings of the words involved, etc. At this point I began to suspect that I was being trolled, i.e., being opposed by every means possible, regardless of what I wrote. So my next few replies were perhaps less than polite.

So I admit to using (jocular) insults here and there, and I apologize for it, but I never did it to derail a thoughtful discussion. I've only done it after the discussion had already been driven off the rails of thoughtfulness by the other party. Eleuther (talk) 18:54, 25 May 2018 (UTC)


 * Hi, thanks for your message, and for the kind words. I realize the discussion has moved on while I've been away, so let me keep my message short.  I do not think that anyone has been trolling you, and Paul August seems to me to have been presenting himself in a straightforward and thoughtful way.  Issues of tone (particularly subtler things like "jocularity") can be hard to judge on the internet.  I harbor no hard feelings towards you, and I hope the reverse is true as well.  All the best, JBL (talk) 12:33, 29 May 2018 (UTC)


 * Thanks, JBL. If you would care to comment on the overall issue at Categories for discussion/Log/2018 May 29, I would welcome it. Eleuther (talk) 22:38, 29 May 2018 (UTC)

Add some references
Hey Joel, would you please add some of the references into the opening paragraph for University Bible Fellowship? Someone is apparently trying to eliminate references one by one. Some of the references may not be so clear, but there are many that are clear. Any of the newspaper references will do, such as #3, 4, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, or 23. Bkarcher (talk) 14:30, 9 July 2018 (UTC)

Re: Mica and basal cleavage
You should not "fix" redirects, still less call them vandalism. Please red WP:NOTBROKEN and stop this behaviour. DuncanHill (talk) 14:08, 25 July 2018 (UTC) My apologies - I was trying to respond to the person who had reverted you, but you're removal of the talk page post (which you should not do) led me to mistakenly end up here. DuncanHill (talk) 14:10, 25 July 2018 (UTC)
 * I've reported the IP at Sockpuppet investigations/LithiumFlash, and also requested semi-protection of the talk page. DuncanHill (talk) 14:29, 25 July 2018 (UTC)
 * Thanks for your help with this, and no apology necessary.  --JBL (talk) 15:53, 26 July 2018 (UTC)

Khayyam's triangle in the lead ?
Hi, i don't intend to have any dispute with you or anybody else, but could you please discuss your edits on the talk pages especially when you remove some sourced content ? This would be, i think, far more constructive than engaging in edit warring and explaining your edits in your edit summaries. I made you a proposal to continue our discussion on the talk page instead of edit warring but you reverted me again. For your information, i've read the history section of the article and since you're skilled to check the history of revisions, you'll be able to find that i even edited this section several times recently. Regards.---Wikaviani (talk) 15:31, 25 July 2018 (UTC)


 * Wikaviani, absolutely nothing I have done would have prevented you from beginning a discussion on the talk page if you thought it was important or necessary.   --JBL (talk) 17:29, 26 July 2018 (UTC)

Campaign of David Eppstein against "Decision Stream"
Dear Joel B. Lewis,

I really respect your reasonable judgments.

That's why it is strange to see, that you are involved in activity of David Eppstein, who, despite Wikipedia rules, created account BustYourMyth to move campaign against machine learning method - "Decision Stream". He even found the way to persuade admin to delete the "Draft:Decision Stream", which is in development process.

From my point of view, for example, information about accuracy of Decision Stream provided on the page "MNIST database" - quite legal, and doesn't require any additional sourcing. Other edits, such as short description of Decision Stream provided by Fuyuko Yukimura on the page "Deep learning" was supported by Wikipedia community until the attack from David Eppstein.

Despite the fact that article "Decision Stream: Cultivating Deep Decision Trees" was published in IEEE Xplore just 2 months ago (07 June 2018) it is really popular, according ResearchGate, and even cited once: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316471270_Decision_Stream_Cultivating_Deep_Decision_Trees

What do you think about this strange situation in Wikipedia?

Kind regards, AlexNet22


 * Dear, I think that the persistent and inappropriate promotional editing by you and your colleagues, combined with the completely absurd accusations of sock-puppetry, have worn out any remaining patience with your position. I suggest you spend more time doing research and less time trying to push it in WP.  --JBL (talk) 15:31, 28 July 2018 (UTC)

Please read the Foundation's rule on BLPGOSSIP
This rule applies to all articles in Wikipedia. I refer to your restoring to the article on the Lindelof Hypothesis of a link to the unsourced gossip published on another site by a departmental colleague of Professor Fokas, rubbishing his professional history. This is not suitable for Wikipedia. Seceaf (talk) 23:15, 11 August 2018 (UTC)


 * Your inability to understand policies is not my problem; since you will be almost certainly be blocked as a sock-puppet in the next day or two, doubly not. But, because I'm a nice guy, here is a quick hint: "linking to" and "repeating" are not the same. --JBL (talk) 23:21, 11 August 2018 (UTC)

Thank you for reverting me
Thank you for providing a source for that definition of a polytope; I have definitely learnt my lesson to not revert just because I found something really hard to believe, and have left the IP editor who added it originally an apology. The world of terminology is wide, indeed! m(_ _)m Double sharp (talk) 14:58, 31 August 2018 (UTC)


 * No harm done, and thanks for the kind message! (I don't know how a person would know to look for this usage without knowing already that it was common; it seems to be standard among people who study the combinatorics of convex polyhedra.) --JBL (talk) 16:11, 31 August 2018 (UTC)

Thank you
Hi, we may have had some disagreements in the past and i came here to talk to you about it. This time, i'm here to thank you with my own words for your edit at Binomial theorem and Pascal's triangle. Take care. ---Wikaviani  (talk) (contribs)  19:47, 7 September 2018 (UTC)


 * Hi, thanks very much for the kind words. Take care, and happy editing, JBL (talk) 21:12, 7 September 2018 (UTC)

reverted me at Charlie Wilson talk page
Hi, you used Twinkle to revert me, an Anti-vandalism tool. You don't, shall we say, want blatant POV, but on the other hand, some articles have had POV for years anyway, and I wonder if you have considered the benefit of not being hasty in these matters? Second thoughts may be more valuable than the first. Sure, some edits are just bad, and we don't need them in public view. But I take it to be agreed, that all reverts should be justified and all reverters should be ready to discuss. Furthermore, You're reverting on the talk page, so the issue is not simply that newcomers to the article might be misled by bad edits/POV. Thus, I contemplate, here, that the fact that one person is reverting slightly more (or very much more). I understand that you believe that reversions aren't necessarilly a bad thing. The many people in the community who occasionally revert pages, including myself, agree with you. But I am wondering if feel that you have no need to compromise and attempt to reach consensus?DanLanglois (talk) 11:17, 12 September 2018 (UTC)


 * The fact that you do not understand our very clear and simple policy WP:NOTFORUM is your problem, not my problem. Notice that I did not revert your other recent talk-page edit because it contains a concrete comment about editing the article (even though your poor communication skills mean that probably no one will ever respond to it).  You are not welcome to comment here further. --JBL (talk) 11:55, 12 September 2018 (UTC)

Catalan number
I have no idea how I removed "ordered"; that was a complete accident. Thanks for double checking me there. I had just meant to add the bit about not necessarily binary, but didn't care about it all that much anyway. –Deacon Vorbis (carbon &bull; videos) 13:26, 20 September 2018 (UTC)


 * no worries, these things happen :). About not-necessarily binary, there were two reasons I removed it: first, I thought it was placed too early in the sentence for a reader to appreciate it, and second, I felt like the definition is given in the second parenthetical.  I wonder if there's a way to work it into the second parenthetical (to indicate that the vertices can have any number of leaves), because it could be more explicit.  I thought about it for a minute before I reverted but didn't come up with a good way to do it.  (I also don't feel strongly about this :).)  All the best, JBL (talk) 12:43, 21 September 2018 (UTC)

Your message
Hello. I have read the message you sent me and I think the answer to your comment is that GNG is a test of the quantity of coverage, and is not interested in whether the coverage received is of a form that is rare. Regards. James500 (talk) 13:57, 24 September 2018 (UTC)


 * Hi ,
 * For context, I should say that this is not important to me (e.g., I am unlikely to follow up with an AfD, the article is not on my watchlist, etc.). But really you are mistaken.  Again to use myself as an example, there are published reviews of more than a dozen of my papers.  I am a completely ordinary research mathematician, and there is no question that I am not notable (neither under GNG nor under WP:NPROF).  This kind of "coverage" is not a sign of notability, it is just routine for people in this field.  It also has no biographical content at all.  Under the standard you are suggesting, essentially every American research mathematician would be notable within a handful of years of acquiring a PhD.  --JBL (talk) 15:09, 24 September 2018 (UTC)

Depend on context.
You reverted my edits, saying "the information that the different arguments depend on context is crucial" but that is not a neutral point of view. People fall in several groups: "always 1" or "depends on context" or "undefined". Picking the middle option seems reasonable, but that doesn't mean that it is neutral. For those who agree with Knuth, the value is simply 1 in all contexts. Authors can define any expression in any way they want, so rather than saying that the value depends on the context, it is more accurate to say that the value depends on the author. MvH (talk) 17:44, 26 September 2018 (UTC)


 * I disagree and would be happy to explain, but first I would like to propose to move this discussion to the article talk page (so that others are aware of it), if that's all right with you. --JBL (talk) 11:07, 27 September 2018 (UTC)


 * OK MvH (talk) 17:40, 27 September 2018 (UTC)


 * Thank you, I have copied your comment there and responded. --JBL (talk) 10:27, 28 September 2018 (UTC)

What “procedural grounds” are you taking about?
Be clear and explain why do you deny vandalizing my Sine edits and side by a vandal asking me to explain instead of taking responsibility yourself for acting decently and honestly? Any unbiased editor can easily tell that I have acted in good faith but you have CLEARLY not. Hopefully, your behavior won’t last unpunished. Cocorrector (talk) 16:16, 10 November 2018 (UTC)


 * Hi ,
 * It looks like you are pretty new here, so let me give you some (hopefully) helpful suggestions: A vandal is someone who makes things worse with the intention of making things worse.  WCherowi is a longstanding contributor with specialist expertise; he is not a vandal, and his edit was not vandalism.  Falsely calling him a vandal and calling his edit vandalism is not going to get your desired outcome, and similarly your personal remarks directed at me are not productive.  Instead, you and WCherowi are involved in what is called here a "content dispute": you both have reasons to prefer one or the other version.  The correct way to handle a content dispute is through discussion on an article talk-page, to reach consensus. In my edit summary, I linked to WP:BRD -- this is the procedural grounds I meant.  You should read it; it explains a lot about how Wikipedia functions.  Wikipedia is a collaborative project; this means that one has to be willing to discuss with other editors, and also open to the possibility that one's contributions will be altered or removed.
 * Hope this helps,
 * JBL (talk) 16:24, 10 November 2018 (UTC)

I read it and saw that no reverts are advised without good reason that needs to be explained. No good reason was given by either one of you. Neither one of you has applied that procedure to own self. Being a long-time editor does excuse neither one of you from harassing a new editor and supporting each other would not conceal your CLEAR bias. Of course, I did not mean to offend either one of you but you both have displayed little or no concern to my improving edits with plenty of links to other pages. There is much more to be added here rather than vandalized. Certainly, your actions were nothing but disruptive and there is hardly a need for you to hide behind procedures you fail to abide by. Having done good edits elsewhere does not endow us with destructive privileges as I can easily tell in spite of being new here. Therefore, your only argument does not stand the tiniest scrutiny. Cocorrector (talk) 16:53, 10 November 2018 (UTC)


 * That's great, you have logically proved beyond any doubt that I am a terrible person acting with ill intent to make the world a bad place. I hope this makes you feel better.  However, it will not change the situation on the articles in question, and your edits are likely to be reverted again if you try to make them without engaging in discussion on a relevant article talk page.  --JBL (talk) 17:09, 10 November 2018 (UTC)

I commend you on courageously admitting your fault but why would you stop short from correcting it on your own? And why would you be so sure that my revert would be revandalized? Have you arranged for hidden support from a long-time editor-friend? Wouldn’t that further violate some rules which novices are not as aware of as you likely are? I would truly appreciate a genuine discussion initiated by you on the talk for the Sine page. It is only fair since you were the first to point out the rules which I followed, contrary to you. I remind you that no reverts are advised without sound justification, so please assume responsibility for your unjustified action. That, at least, would potentially salvage some of your reputation which you luckily seem to resist tarnishing here. Cocorrector (talk) 18:07, 10 November 2018 (UTC)

Thank you!
Didn't realize the year change was there. Thanks my guy! 7_qz 01:42, 13 December 2018 (UTC)
 * Happy to help! --JBL (talk) 15:23, 13 December 2018 (UTC)

Watchlist
Hey, just to let you know, i watch your talk since i posted here. I just removed this post and warned the IP. Feel free to ask me to remove you from my watchlist and i will do so. Take care. ---Wikaviani  (talk) (contribs)  22:44, 16 December 2018 (UTC)
 * Thanks -- I appreciate your actions and have no objection to you keeping this page on your watchlist. --JBL (talk) 20:45, 17 December 2018 (UTC)

Primes
Hi Joel, 1 is divisible by 1 and by itself, so the correct defnition of a prime is that it has two dividers. Therefore I changed the text in Mersenne prime. WeiaR (talk) 22:47, 29 December 2018 (UTC)


 * No, here is the correct definition of a prime number. Please keep in mind that when one says prime numbers are divisible only by 1 and by themselves this means they're different from 1 (the smallest prime number being 2). Regards. ---Wikaviani  (talk) (contribs)  23:25, 29 December 2018 (UTC)


 * Hi, the sentence in question is “Since they are prime numbers, Mersenne primes are divisible only by 1 and by themselves.” This is not offered as a definition of prime number, but as a property that primes possess.  It is inarguably correct.  Since the section goes on to discuss which numbers divide Mersenne numbers, the property is more salient than the alternative you suggest.  Finally, the usual word in mathematical English is “divisor”, not "divider".  If you'd like to discuss further, I suggest we do it on the talk page, where other editors can weight in (not just my talk-page watcher ;) ).  --JBL (talk) 14:55, 30 December 2018 (UTC)