User talk:JonMcLoone/2006

Mathematica links
Hello, and welcome on Wikipedia. While we encourage new users to join, I have to say that I don't see why you added a link to Mathematica to some of the maths articles like partial differential equation. It does not seem particularly relevant to the article. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 01:51, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

Request for edit summary
When editing an article on Wikipedia there is a small field labeled "Edit summary" under the main edit-box. It looks like this: The text written here will appear on the Recent changes page, in the page revision history, on the diff page, and in the watchlists of users who are watching that article. See m:Help:Edit summary for full information on this feature.

Filling in the edit summary field greatly helps your fellow contributors in understanding what you changed, so please always fill in the edit summary field, especially for big edits or when you are making subtle but important changes, like changing dates or numbers. Thank you. – Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 16:37, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

OK, I see that now

Your links to Mathematica
Your links to mathematica and Wolfram are not always very relevant, or not so helpful. It appears to me in some places you put them just because you could. I removed a bunch I thought were not so useful, and kept some which I thought belonged there (like the link in QR decomposition and Comparison of numerical analysis software). You can reply here if you have comments. Thanks. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 16:43, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

Response: Your links to Mathematica
There seems to be some misunderstanding of the categorization of Mathematica as a Computer Algebra System. Wolfram has never described it as such, and while it does include computer algebra capabilities, to describe it as less of a numerical analysis package than Matlab and IDL which numerical analysis holds as prime examples is strictly misleading. It has the same core set of numerical features, at the same or faster performance. In addition it has extended precision arithmetic and error tracking which are important for numerical analysis and missing from those packages.

Ref: Mark Sofroniou,G. Spalett, Journal of Logic and Algebraic Programming,Year: 2005, Volume:  64, Issue:  1,Page range:  113-134 I don't see the logic in the way that some software is presented and others note. eg Why on root finding is the Mathematica home page is any less relevant than the numerical recipes homepage. Both are solution providers for that problem. On the absolute value page why is the Matlab reference useful and the Mathematica reference not. Further, on absolute value the Mathematica reference adds something in that it shows there are different types of implementation. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by JonMcLoone (talk • contribs).


 * Regarding the first paragraph, Mathematica is used far less than Matlab for numerical work (see also my comment on my user talk page). Re root finding, numerical recipes is more than a solution provider: it also explains the algorithms and gives their implementation. Re absolute value, I'm afraid I don't quite understand your comment. Matlab is not mentioned in either the Notes or the References section, while I found three references to Wolfram sites (though none to Mathematica).
 * By the way, it would be helpful if you could sign your comments so that it's clear who said what. You can do this by typing four tildes ~ after your comments. See Sign your posts on talk pages for details. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 13:06, 29 November 2006 (UTC)


 * In absolute value, the references to matlab and fortran are not that relevant either. But I don't like your argument that since the mathematica link is just as relevant as the matlab one, then since the matlab link is in, therefore the mathematica link must be in also. That paragraph was just mentioning a few implementations. It does not (and should not) be absolutely fair to and representative of all programming languages out there. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 16:18, 29 November 2006 (UTC)