User talk:Rgrizza

Welcome
Hello  and welcome to Wikipedia! I'm glad you've chosen to join us. This is a great project with lots of dedicated people, which might seem intimidating at times, but don't let anything discourage you. Be bold!, explore, and contribute. Try to be civil by following simple guidelines and signing your talk comments with ~ but never forget that one of our central tenets is to ignore all rules. If you want to learn more, Tutorial is the place to go, but eventually the following links might also come in handy: Help FAQ Glossary Manual of Style Float around until you find something that tickles your fancy. One easy way to do this is to hit the random page button in the navigation bar to the left. Additionally, the Community Portal offers a more structured way to become acquainted with the many great committees and groups that focus on specific tasks. My personal favorite stomping grounds are Translation into English as well as the cleanup, welcoming, and counter-vandalism committees. Finally, the Wikimedia Foundation has several other wiki projects that you might enjoy. If you have any more questions, always feel free to ask me anything on my talk page. Again, welcome! -- Draeco 03:16, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

Hello from a main page regular
Recent vandal attacks on the main page where an 'interesting' picture has been snuck in via unprotected subparts of the main page have been annoying at the least - Yes it's true. It has been one or two lapses of concentration by admins who forgot to protect something that they placed on the front page templates. Admins are human, they do make mistakes. Everyone has been poked and reminded. I'm not saying that it won't happen again, but everything that should be done has.

However.

What should happen when such a vandal attacks? Within minutes someone with admin ability spots it, quietly reverts it and covers the cracks that the vandal oozed in via. The vandal is blocked, defeated and deflated, they move on.

What does happen when such a vandal attacks? Everyone, their dog, cat, hamster and rabbits swamp this talk page with "OMG!11!! I'M OFFENDED!! ARGH! ARGH! MY EYES WTF!" style messages of outrage and indignation. The vandal says "HAR HAR PWND! I EMS TEH 1337", posts several taunting messages about how good they are and revels in the afterglow of their nuclear attack.

Eventually, within minutes someone with admin ability spots it, reverts it and covers the cracks that the vandal oozed in via. The vandal is blocked and moves on with a self-satified smug smile and sticky underpants.

''People. If you get all up in arms about it, you're feeding the vandal's ego. Just let it pass. It will be reverted within minutes.'' --Monotonehell 10:41, 5 January 2007 (UTC)

Question blocks
Hi Rgrizza

I have put up an article titled Question blocks that came from WP:AFC. It was already proposed for deletion, but I would invite you to add to the topic, so that it is not deleted. Graeme Bartlett 00:48, 14 August 2007 (UTC)

Lehmer conjecture - it was not the wrong polynomial (but yours is also correct)
Hi, The polynomial giving the smallest known Mahler measure less than 1 was actually correct before you changed it, but so is the one you changed it to, so I won't revert it back. The point is that if we let f(x) be the polynomial originally listed, then the one you changed it to is f(-x). The Mahler measure of a polynomial is the product of the absolute values of the roots whose absolute values are greater than 1, so f(x) and f(-x) have the same Mahler measure. Admittedly the only root of the original poly that is outside the unit circle is negative, and for your f(-x) it is positive, which maybe make f(-x) a slightly better choice if you prefer positive roots to negative roots. But is was a bit much for you to say that the original poly (and the one at Wolfram) is wrong, since that's not the case. (Which you'd have been able to check if you'd computed the roots of the two polys and compared them, you'd have instantly seen there was just a sign change.)

JosephSilverman (talk) 03:36, 16 February 2013 (UTC)


 * I agree with JosephSilverman but would add that Wikipedia goes by what reliable sources say, not by our own personal research. Deltahedron (talk) 07:42, 17 February 2013 (UTC)


 * Ummmm... I wasn't suggesting that the polynomial was supposed to be discovered by personal research. I was just objecting a little bit to your saying that the polynomial is wrong and pointing out that if you'd checked it, you'd have seen that in fact it is not wrong, so there would have been no actual need to change the article. The original polynomial listed in the article was a polynomial whose Mahler measure is the smallest known (that is strictly larger than 1). Replacing x by -x gives a polynomial with the same property. If the article had said "this is the polynomial that was in Siegel's article", then that might or might not have been correct, because I've never looked at the original source. If you want to track it down and find out the one that Siegel originally used, that might be the most appropriate one to include with the article. JosephSilverman (talk) 22:42, 17 February 2013 (UTC)


 * My humblest apologies! This is quite embarassing.  I'm not sure what possessed me to think it was more reasonable that a typo had been made in two places than that there was more than one polynomial with the same Mahler measure; at any rate it was ridiculous to comment that it was wrong as I did without actually thinking about it.  Thank you very much for pointing out my mistake, JosephSilverman.  The polynomial I changed it to is, in fact, the one mentioned by D. H. Lehmer in his original 1933 Annals paper (already cited in the article). Rgrizza (talk) 13:52, 7 March 2013 (UTC)