Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Deformed Hermitian Yang–Mills equation


 * 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 keep. (non-admin closure) Extraordinary Writ (talk) 06:52, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

Deformed Hermitian Yang–Mills equation

 * – ( View AfD View log | edits since nomination)

Proposed for deletion because of lack of notability. It has the character of an academic review article on very recent works, which may or may not become notable in the future. Two of the references have not appeared in journals yet.

In terms of the subject of the majority of the article, there are hundreds of mathematical research fields which are similarly active and notable. The subject matter is already discussed, to an extent and manner which I think is perfectly appropriate to its notability, in the last paragraph of Gauge theory (mathematics).

A year and a half ago (at the time, one of the references was only listed as being "in preparation," reflecting its academic review nature) I added a notability tag and comment on the talk page, with no updates since then. Gumshoe2 (talk) 23:37, 11 December 2021 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Mathematics-related deletion discussions. Shellwood (talk) 23:48, 11 December 2021 (UTC)
 * Oppose: The original articles introducing the dHYM are 20 years old and have hundreds of citations (MMMS Nonlinear instantons from supersymmetric p-branes has 350 citations and LYZ From special lagrangian to hermitian–Yang–Mills via Fourier–Mukai transform has 150 citations according to google scholar). The equations are mentioned specifically in the Clay Mirror Symmetry book as a concrete mathematical prediction of mirror symmetry (obviously not the main focus of the book, which is 40 chapters long, but it has 900 citations). They are also discussed in the context of string theory in Clay Dirichlet Branes and Mirror Symmetry 10 years later, including the relation to Bridgeland stability (an equal aged and very notable topic). The mathematical study of the equations themselves didn't see much progress until 2014 for technical reasons (Jacob and Yau proved the equation is elliptic) but that paper has 50 citations. Of the two articles not yet published on the page, one is a survey of published work, fair enough the other is not peer-reviewed yet.
 * I think the subject is clearly notable enough for a page (especially in comparison to many other pages on the maths wikipedia) and one just needs to add in a few more sources which mention or discuss the importance of the equations (such as the Clay books). If this is the standard of notability being applied to mathematics articles, I fear we will need to delete half of the WikiProject.Tazerenix (talk) 03:28, 12 December 2021 (UTC)
 * Half of the wikiproject is not about research from the last couple years. Anyway, your page is mostly about recent research and you can't justify the notability of that research by pointing to reasonably notable works from twenty years ago. If recent research is notable, then the notability should be reflected by new sources; otherwise I think it's considered ok to wait some years before its notability becomes clear. Besides, the Leung-Yau-Zaslow paper is already referred to on the Gauge theory (mathematics) page in a way which I think is perfectly appropriate (although unnecessary). And it would be perfectly reasonable to also add a mention of the "Nonlinear instantons from supersymmetric p-brane" paper there as well. It is not at all clear to me that the mathematical research of Chen, Collins-Xie-Yau, Collins-Jacob-Yau, Collins-Yau, Collins-Shi, Jacob-Sheu, Jacob-Yau (i.e. the majority of the page as written) are notable by wiki standards. There are some other reasonably well cited papers (Freed-Witten, Douglas et al) that, as written, only have a tangential relation to the material. Gumshoe2 (talk) 06:01, 12 December 2021 (UTC)


 * The subject is clearly notable enough to warrant a wikipedia page. This discussion about whether content should be included based on peer reviewed research from the last 5 years is besides the point (WP:ARTN). Notability does not refer to specific pieces of content within a Wikipedia page. That is covered by verifiability and relevance of those specific pieces of content to the topic of the page. In this case the recent work is peer reviewed, verifiable, and relevant to the topic, without giving undue weight to any part of the theory. Just based on the general notability of the topic "dHYM equation" it would be perfectly valid for this page to exist even as a stub if you wanted to insist on removing all the content that is based on work from the last 5 years. By the way only half the content of the page is based on recent work ("Local form" and "Solutions"), the rest being implicit or explicit in the original and highly cited descriptions of the equation 20 years ago. I don't see how the age of peer reviewed references for some of the content on the page are relevant to the notability of the topic overall. I also wouldn't class the references to the dHYM equation appearing in the Bridgeland stabliity literature or the Clay books (or indeed in the physics literature) as a "trivial mention." Research is often conducted by presenting motivating questions or equations and then discussing work tangentially related to them, or inspired by them. In this case the dHYM equation has appeared in this context in enough work to clearly indicate "significant coverage" or at least "not insignificant coverage". Given the leeway that the Maths WikiProject gets with the general notability guidelines already, I really can't see how this page can be considered significantly less notable than most other topics.Tazerenix (talk) 01:32, 13 December 2021 (UTC)


 * It isn't so clear to me. Theoretical physics and mathematics have very different citation standards, so since MMMS and LYZ are at the interface, google scholar numbers are not easily interpretable. According to INSPIRE-HEP (cataloguing high-energy physics citations), about 700 other papers from the year 2000 are more cited than MMMS paper, and Strominger himself has fifty other papers more cited in his career. And the LYZ paper is around #5000 for papers from its year. On MathSciNet (centered on math citations) MMMS has only 20 citations and LYZ has 55. About forty other papers in the particular field of differential geometry were more cited from that year than LYZ. So arguments based on citation numbers for those papers aren't, for me, convincing. Also, there are a lot of things discussed in the Clay book (900 pages as you say) and I don't think it's reasonable to say that everything that's discussed for a couple pages in it is automatically notable. Looking through the top citations to MMMS on google scholar, it seems that most citations only refer to it in a passing way, but I'm not an expert on theoretical physics.


 * As for comparison to other math articles on wikipedia, looking at e.g. the papers in Category:Differential geometry, it seems very clear to me that dHYM is in the lowest tier of notability, so I'm not sure what you have in mind. There are a few articles particularly around systolic geometry which I think are comparable in some ways to your dHYM article, e.g. Filling area conjecture. In fact it seems that when those systolic articles were written, they were similarly about then-recent research which the author found significant. In my opinion they haven't aged very well, and I would be cautious about the possibility of repeating the same phenomena here. (Although in the case of those articles, the parallel to MMMS and LYZ, namely Gromov's Metric Structures book and "Filling Riemannian Manifolds" paper, are notable by any possible standard.) Gumshoe2 (talk) 00:46, 15 December 2021 (UTC)


 * (By the way, looking at the topics of all other articles you've written, I think that similarly by any standard they are all notable beyond reproach. I don't think this topic is comparable to those.) Gumshoe2 (talk) 01:00, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

 Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus. Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Daniel (talk) 23:44, 18 December 2021 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Science-related deletion discussions. –LaundryPizza03 ( d  c̄ ) 19:41, 12 December 2021 (UTC)

 Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus. Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Missvain (talk) 03:50, 26 December 2021 (UTC)
 * Keep: I see 12 references currently with some but not unreasonably much overlap, so I'm not sure I understand the point in the OP. The age and citations mentioned above also point to notability. I think standards for notability are also a bit less for a highly technical topic like this (sometimes only needing 2 or 3 good sources), but I will let domain experts comment more on that. Caleb Stanford (talk) 05:59, 23 December 2021 (UTC)
 * Keep We're not talking about a grandiose Theory of Everything proposal posted online three months ago, but a topic that entered the peer-reviewed literature in the year 2000, and which attracted attention rather than vanishing into obscurity. I think we're OK holding onto this page. Was Mariño et al. (2000) the most influential paper of the year? No, but it doesn't have to be. XOR&#39;easter (talk) 18:42, 26 December 2021 (UTC)
 * Just to clarify my own position, I agree with your (Xor easter) characterization. My sole caveat is that I would estimate that such a standard applies equally well to at least tens of thousands of math papers (and I think this is a conservative estimate). And to Caleb Stanford, I don’t understand what point you thought I was making; I didn’t have anything about overlap in mind. Gumshoe2 (talk) 08:32, 31 December 2021 (UTC)


 * Keep - verifiable, multiply sourced content written up without puffery. I see no value in deleting this kind of content. &mdash; Charles Stewart (talk) 14:04, 27 December 2021 (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.