Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Example calculations with roots of unity


 * 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.  Cbrown1023   talk   18:39, 27 April 2008 (UTC)

Example calculations with roots of unity

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No reputable sources given to estabilish notability of these results, or for verifiability, or to establish that it is not original research. (The only sources listed are a Spanish Usenet discussion, and a paper by Weber and Keckeisen that does not actually describe the subject of this article. When sources were requested on the Talk page, the author (User:Zahlentheorie) stated that the mathematical correctness of the article was sufficient.) —Steven G. Johnson (talk) 17:24, 21 April 2008 (UTC)


 * Delete or transwiki to some mathematics Wikibook (though I couldn't find a good target). The calculations themselves are not notable; as the title says, they are example calculations. Wikipedia is not a textbook. And it may be original research. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 10:02, 23 April 2008 (UTC)
 * Delete. This material is suitable for a textbook, but not an encyclopedia. Sancho 16:51, 23 April 2008 (UTC)
 * Comment. Are the contents of the article correct?  I didn't look very closely, but I found myself becoming suspicious. Michael Hardy (talk) 00:10, 24 April 2008 (UTC)
 * Strong Delete I think it's correct down to the appearance of an undefined Φ, but profoundly trivial. Send it back to the newsgroup that produced it. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 22:51, 25 April 2008 (UTC)
 * Keep I think asking from an article that is about examples that it represent a profound contribution like a main article is misunderstanding the word "example." Examples can be extremely useful and complement an article in very useful ways, e.g. consider the example for Pell's equation, which explains how to solve them in a useful and immediately applicable way. As for this article, filtering coefficients of a series or a polynomial according to the value modulo some n of the exponent is a very useful technique that has many uses. Similarly, the article shows how to compute with roots of an equation using only the equation itself, without actually calculating the roots. This too is quite useful. As for the induction proof, I think it's a nice example of complete induction and maybe we could link to it from the Mathematical Induction page. -Zahlentheorie (talk) 15:01, 26 April 2008 (UTC)
 * Wikipedia is not a how-to guide and these applications are trivial. Better to link to symmetric polynomial, which should actually explain the technique. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 15:39, 26 April 2008 (UTC)
 * As the entries on this page show, trivial is a term that is highly subjective. To establish triviality on Wikipedia, you'd need some kind of a vote, I think, at any rate more than the opinion of one contributor only. -Zahlentheorie (talk) 21:33, 26 April 2008 (UTC)
 * There is a very simple test for Wikipedia articles: can you provide a reference to a reputable source that derives these results? If you can't find a reputable reference for these calculations (or at least very similar ones) then it is either (a) too trivial/obscure for textbooks etc. to use it as a useful example or (b) nontrivial original research.  Take your pick; either way it is inappropriate for Wikipedia (independent of the "Wikipedia is not a textbook" arguments).  —Steven G. Johnson (talk) 22:21, 26 April 2008 (UTC)
 * Well, the induction proof is a special case of formula #35 from the Mathworld article [| Cyclotomic Polynomial], which if I remember correctly does fulfill Wikipedia's standards for reputability. -Zahlentheorie (talk) 22:35, 26 April 2008 (UTC)
 * Great. Once you add in the proper citations (starting w/ mathworld and probably going to the other sources cited on that page) so we can see that this is not an original work, then everything will be kosher.  We can't just infer, by looking at the article, that it is related to some preexisting work.  That's why we need people who specialize in that sort of thing to provide citations and other references.  To the layperson (and the editors at large) the authority of an article stems from the sources and the sources only.  Add those sources and the article can stay.  As it stands right now, with 2 sources (which do not count as verifiable for WP:N), it should be deleted Protonk (talk) 08:14, 27 April 2008 (UTC)
 * Hello there, I added the link to Mathworld and checked the references of their article. It comes down to about five possible candidates for theorem #35. Unfortunately I am not at a university, so I don't have access to these specialized journals. -Zahlentheorie (talk) 11:17, 27 April 2008 (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.