Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Alladi–Grinstead constant


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was delete. Actually, consensus to weakly delete, but I can't click the button any less hard.  Sandstein  11:47, 23 May 2017 (UTC)

Alladi–Grinstead constant

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In the absence of a statement as to what the value of the constant is, this has no encyclopedic value. (Inserting the value of the constant, sourced to a reliable source, will justify keeping the article. Apparently nothing short of AFD can get the author to insert the value.)

Also, no explanation of notability, such as discussion by other mathematicians. Robert McClenon (talk) 23:09, 1 May 2017 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Mathematics-related deletion discussions. North America1000 09:21, 2 May 2017 (UTC)

 Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
 * Weak delete. This appears to be a legitimately studied concept in mathematics, but a very obscure one. The original Alladi–Grinstead paper from 1977 has been cited 7 times in Google scholar, but none of those citations appear to constitute non-trivial in-depth coverage of this concept. The MathWorld coverage is in-depth-enough to count towards WP:GNG, but it's only one source, and I don't think we should automatically cover things just because MathWorld does. I found the phrase "Alladi–Grinstead constant" outside MathWorld only in one other paper, a recent unpublished preprint, which uses the constant in a formula rather than studying it in-depth. The phrase "Alladi-Grinstead" appears nowhere in MathSciNet. So I don't think this meets the standard of having multiple in-depth studies by multiple independent groups of researchers. —David Eppstein (talk) 16:12, 2 May 2017 (UTC)
 * Weak keep, or perhaps better yet, merge the main points into the "Number theory" section of Factorial. As David Eppstein said, this is a legitimate topic, but very obscure; I myself hadn't heard of it until I came across a stub and tried to rewrite it in a way that I could understand, using the MathWorld article as a guide.  Judging from the coverage I could find (a couple discussions in books; a MathWorld article, and a brief discussion in another; some entries in the OEIS), I'd say that it deserves mention, but it doesn't necessarily stand alone as an article.  The important thing is not so much the constant itself, but the fact that partitions of factorials into prime powers can be studied, and that people have to some extent done so.  (For example, the section in Guy's book includes it as one result among a few on the topic of writing n! as the product of n large factors, due to Erdős and others.)  The numerical value of the constant was given in the Definition section, and I've now also included it in the lede, with a pointer to the OEIS entry for its decimal expansion.  The question is now about the "value" in a conceptual sense, i.e., how important is this material to number theory?  I tend to feel that if MathWorld has an article on it, and a couple books have sections that focus on it, Wikipedia ought to include it somewhere, but a whole article devoted to it may be the wrong way to go. On that note, we should also consider the page Lueroth constant, which is entirely redundant with this page (it's just the c we define in this article). The MathWorld page for it is just a redirect to their page for the Alladi–Grinstead constant.  So, if this article is kept, then Lueroth constant should redirect to it; if Alladi–Grinstead constant is deleted, so should Lueroth constant. XOR&#39;easter (talk) 16:19, 3 May 2017 (UTC)

Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, North America1000 10:43, 8 May 2017 (UTC)  Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.

Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks,  CAPTAIN RAJU  (✉)   12:55, 15 May 2017 (UTC)
 * Weak Delete I deleted the entirely-useless table of factorials. The rest is just mostly useless. Power~enwiki (talk) 21:57, 15 May 2017 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.