User talk:Virginia-American

Hi. My user name is one I use on a lot of sites; it was my ethnic group in the 2000 US Census.

I majored in math at the U of Va. but dropped out, and now program computers. However, I have kept up my interest in math, especially number theory, as a hobby.

I have made a few edits to misc. articles about number theory, and I have done major edits to the articles about quadratic reciprocity nad allied topics.

tip: typography
Notice that en-dash (–, HTML entity &amp;ndash;, Unicode U+2013 "EN DASH") and minus sign (−, &amp;minus;, U+2212 "MINUS SIGN") are distinct characters. Please use the former in ranges, and the latter in mathematical formulas. Also, binary minus signs should be surrounded by spaces (unlike dashes). ASCII hyphen (-, U002D "HYPHEN-MINUS") is yet another character, but you are already aware of that. — EJ (talk) 13:37, 1 April 2008 (UTC)

Riemann zeros.
I replied to your post on my web page, here's a cut-n-paste:
 * Hi, sorry for the late reply, didn't see your post earlier. I had not seen that paper before, but have certainly looked at similar-looking graphics. Somewhere, I have an animation of the polylogarithm; the Riemann zeros occur when the polylog zeros pass through the point z=-1. There are also these clearly-visible contour lines, that dance around and reconnect as if they were magnetic field lines. I don't have anything as insightful as Arias-de-Reyna to say about it, thought. Here's the movie... polylog animation. Its a very slow download, though. linas (talk) 15:11, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

DYK nomination
Hi. I've nominated Quartic reciprocity, an article you worked on, for consideration to appear on the Main Page as part of Did you know. You can see the hook for the article at Template talk:Did you know, where you can improve it if you see fit. Thanks --Bruce1eetalk 10:20, 10 November 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, Bruce. Truth is, I wasn't even aware of the DYK pages until now. Virginia-American (talk) 14:00, 10 November 2008 (UTC)

DYK for Quartic reciprocity
Congratulations! --Bruce1eetalk 04:59, 13 November 2008 (UTC)

Quadratic Reciprocity
I took out my dubious statement about QR following from Landsberg-Schaar. I seem to recall seeing a quick proof somewhere, but on a closer look, all I could find was a proof which goes via the simpler Gauss sum evaluation, which is already mentioned in the article.

LDH (talk) 02:06, 18 November 2008 (UTC)

Floor and ceiling
Thank you for your very nice rewrite of this article! A few quibbles. Floor/Ceiling/Fraction are not continuous, true, but they are (obviously) almost everywhere continuous and their discontinuities are isolated. There are surely power series for them; they simply don't converge at the discontinuities. But these really are quibbles -- the article is now much better organized and has good new content. --macrakis (talk) 03:17, 28 January 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, Macrakis. I believe that a power series is continuous everywhere it's defined; Laurent series aren't, but I don't know if they can have simple jump discontinuities.

I'm going to add a couple of more formulas, nothing spectacular. What I want to do is include graphs for {x} and x mod y, (for y = &minus;2) but I haven't figured out how to use gnuplot yet. Virginia-American (talk) 14:52, 28 January 2009 (UTC)

Quadratic Reciprocity in French
At one point (here) during your extensive reworking of Quadratic reciprocity you changed the headings of the table under "Legendre and his symbol" to be in French. I'm changing them back to English because I can't see any good reason for that - I assume it was an oversight. Hv (talk) 09:30, 12 October 2009 (UTC)


 * I just copied the table in Lemermyer's book, which is presumably a copy of legerndre's. Virginia-American (talk) 01:33, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

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 * Euler's criterion (check to confirm | fix with Dab solver)
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 * Wilson's theorem (check to confirm | fix with Dab solver)
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Merchandise Question
Hey Virginia-American!

Apologies for the late response (for some reason I didn't get an email notice) but I saw your question on Meta] about where you could get a key for the Wikipedia Globe/Languages shirt. There is a great key at [[:File:Wikipedia_language_shirt_names.png and I'm looking into options for including a card with the shirts so that people can always have it on hand when they get their package. Thanks for the note! Jalexander--WMF 23:04, 31 July 2012 (UTC)

Square (algebra)
[] I am not happy with how did you express your thoughts in this edit summary. If you do remove something, which was earlier installed to its place deliberately, "for consistency", then you should specify why was it "inconsistent", or at least what inconsistency do you speak about. Incnis Mrsi (talk) 15:15, 6 September 2012 (UTC)
 * the one formula used a different type face than all the other formulas in the paragraph. IMO they should all be {{math or none should - Virginia-American (talk) 21:54, 6 September 2012 (UTC)

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Cut-and-paste
Hello. When you move material from one article to another, as you did here, it is usual to give the precise place the material came from, to preserve the attribution history: see Copying within Wikipedia. Deltahedron (talk) 12:12, 9 September 2012 (UTC)
 * It was moved from my sandbox User:Virginia-American/Sandbox/Eisenstein reciprocity. I decided to make the article on power residue symbol when I realized that I was starting to copy a lot of the material from gauss's lemma to the Eisenstein article. I basically was preserving Latex - I intend to put a couple of proofs in the power residue article and remove them from Gauss's lemma and Eisenstein reciprocity.

Traffic on cyclotomic polynomial
Hello,

Have you seen the strange history statistic on this article ? One day with more than 10,000 views, less than 100 the other days. To get this statistic, go to history page, there is a link to "page view statistic". --D.Lazard (talk) 08:29, 20 October 2012 (UTC)


 * 10,000 hits?! Maybe someone's testing a 'bot? Virginia-American (talk) 09:59, 20 October 2012 (UTC)

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Ω(n) and νp(n) are not additive?
Hi Virginia-American, on the page arithmetic function, it says that functions Ω(n) and νp(n) are completely additive. But they are not even additive, are they? For example:


 * Ω(9+10) = Ω(19) = 1 ≠ 4 = 2 + 2 = Ω(9) + Ω(10)

since 19 is a prime, 9 has two factors (3 and 3), and 10 has two factors as well (2 and 5). It looks like this comes from your edit 262976316, even though I may be wrong. Do you know the explanation? Has such apparently wrong (unless I misunderstand entirely) information been in Wikipedia for almost ten years? /95.166.232.165 (talk) 12:33, 23 October 2018 (UTC)
 * Ah, now I see my mistake, we define additive as f(ab) = f(a) + f(b), not f(a + b) = f(a) + f(b) (which would be simply linear functions (proportionalities)). Sorry for the interruption :-) /95.166.232.165 (talk) 12:38, 23 October 2018 (UTC)