Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Gopala–Hemachandra number


 * 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   redirect to Fibonacci number. Consensus is that this should not be a separate article. What, if anything, should be merged is something for the expert editors to discuss. I'm pointing the redirect at the section that discusses this topic, but the redirect target can be changed as may be necessary.  Sandstein  10:03, 23 April 2011 (UTC)

Gopala–Hemachandra number

 * – ( View AfD View log )

The term used here, "Gopala–Hemachandra number", is a seldom-used neologism and does not really make sense anyway; under the definition in the article, every number is a "Gopala–Hemachandra number". Most of the content of the article is peripheral historical discussion of Indian mathematicians' contributions to the study of the Fibonacci sequence, all of which is discussed in more detail at Fibonacci number. The remaining verifiable information in the article amounts to a single sentence noting that the term "Gopala–Hemachandra sequence" is sometimes used for a certain type of sequence; this single sentence could easily be incorporated into Fibonacci number if desired. —Mark Dominus (talk) 16:20, 15 April 2011 (UTC)

I should add that while the main claim of the article, "A Gopala–Hemachandra number is a term in a sequence of the form …", may appear to be well cited, this appearance is misleading. Two of the cited papers are unpublished, and at least one of the cited papers does not actually use the phrase. The currency of the term "Gopala–Hemachandra number" appears to be extremely limited. —Mark Dominus (talk) 17:04, 15 April 2011 (UTC)


 * Delete. The main point of having this article appears to be as a content fork from Fibonacci number that promotes a neologism assigning Gopala and Hemachandra credit for the Fibonacci numbers rather than Fibonacci; the differences in actual content (a linear combination of Fibonacci numbers rather than the Fibonacci numbers directly) are not significant enough to warrant a separate article. All three of these people made relevant early contributions, but our purpose here should not be to change terminology to better suit our political whims, it should be to use the terminology that is in place, and rightly or wrongly the in-place terminology is Fibonacci number. —David Eppstein (talk) 16:58, 15 April 2011 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Science-related deletion discussions.  —David Eppstein (talk) 17:00, 15 April 2011 (UTC)


 * Keep reliable sources describe it as a larger set of numbers of which "Fibonacci numbers are a special case", so it should have an article on its own. The earliest reference to use "Gopala–Hemachandra number" in the Wikipedia article is from 2004, so it is it not a neologism. It looks like this is going to be one of those articles like first flight and invention of calculus where people are going to argue endlessly about priority, but deletion is not the solution. --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) (talk) 19:33, 15 April 2011 (UTC)
 * The larger set of numbers also has a much more well known name: Integer. Every integer can be represented in the form described here. —David Eppstein (talk) 19:58, 15 April 2011 (UTC)
 * Your using the classic WP:Truth over WP:Verifiability arguments. Publish your counterarguments and they can be cited in the Wikipedia article or find an author that has published what you are arguing and it can be added to the article. We all know that Yetis and the Loch Ness monster and alien abductions do not exist, yet ... --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) (talk) 20:04, 15 April 2011 (UTC)
 * Ok, so here's an argument based on WP:V: there is no source that actually uses the phrase "Gopala–Hemachandra number". Some of them use the phrase "Gopala–Hemachandra sequence" but that has a slightly different meaning. And if you want to make the article be about sequences satisfying the same recurrence relation as the Fibonacci numbers then Google scholar has a total of four papers that use the phrase "Gopala-Hemachandra" in any sense and 353 articles that use the phrase "Fibonacci recurrence" so again making this separate from Fibonacci isn't supported by the preponderance of sources. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:45, 15 April 2011 (UTC)
 * Huh? "It has been suggested that the name Gopala-Hemachandra numbers be used for the general sequence: a, b, a+b, a+2b, 2a+3b, 3a+5b, … for any pair a, b, which for the case a=1, b=1 represents the Fibonacci numbers." (my emphasis added) --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) (talk) 21:42, 15 April 2011 (UTC)
 * Yes. These sequences are exactly the sequences that satisfy the Fibonacci recurrence. If we are to have an article about them them it should be under Fibonacci recurrence. But if you read the actual content of the present article, it's not about these sequences, it's about the early history of Fibonacci numbers, covered in less detail than the Fibonacci number article itself covers the same subject. —David Eppstein (talk) 21:52, 15 April 2011 (UTC)


 * Keep. GScholar search turns up enough usage of the term to justify an encyclopedia article. Rename the article to "Gopala-Hemachandra numbers" (plural) or "Gopala-Hemachandra sequence", since referring to single number this way doesn't seem to make since, and the scholarly usages appear confined to such plural references. Hullaballoo Wolfowitz (talk) 23:08, 15 April 2011 (UTC)
 * I would find your argument more convincing if it addressed the relative number of references that use a *different* term for the same subject, rather than merely counting the absolute number of references (four) that use this specific term. —David Eppstein (talk) 23:51, 15 April 2011 (UTC)
 * Delete: One of the references (Tetlow) notes the phrase "Fibonacci sequence" is used to describe the subject of the article. So it seems that if the concept being defined has a standard name at all it is "Fibonacci sequence" and not "Gopala–Hemachandra number" or even "Gopala–Hemachandra sequence". Most of the content of the article seems to be a rehash of the the "Origins" section of Fibonacci number with any mention of Fibonacci & Lucas removed. So I have to agree with David Eppstein in that it's a content fork and the name is a neologism. In other words the material already exists in other articles where it can be found more easily.--RDBury (talk) 19:21, 16 April 2011 (UTC)
 * Merge and redirect to Fibonacci number. The claim was made that "GScholar search turns up enough usage of the term ..." That is strange. For me the Google scholar search for "Gopala–Hemachandra number" (with the quote signs) results in 'Your search - "Gopala–Hemachandra number" - did not match any articles.' The search "Gopala–Hemachandra numbers" gives exactly one hit: the sentence by Kak also quoted in our article: "It has been suggested ..." (by whom?) – not in an arxiv paper, but in a contribution to the 2010 book Ancient Indian Leaps into Mathematics, published by Birkhäuser/Springer. One "reliable" hit does not notability make. There are a few more hits for just "Hemachandra numbers", which define this as the name under which the Fibonacci sequence was known in India, and also a few hits for "(Gopala–)Hemachandra sequence". Enough to establish that this term can be mentioned in the Origin section of Fibonacci number, but not enough for an article on its own. --Lambiam 19:50, 16 April 2011 (UTC)
 * Response. This search turns up four occurrences on the first page, in slightly different forms, with the contexts suggesting that some of the writers expected readers to find the phrase familiar. Hullaballoo Wolfowitz (talk) 21:08, 16 April 2011 (UTC)


 * Delete or merge if proper Looks to be largely used as a term similar to with Fibonacci, and the article seems to be more an attempt to highlight the work of these earlier men in the development of the sequence than an actual article on it. While there does seem to be a small amount of coverage that uses the term to mean a sequence with no specific starting number, this really isn't a significant enough distinction to warrant a separate article, and there's not really enough for a merge to be totally necessary. Plus, it seems that people still use the term Fibonacci even when the sequence doesn't necessarily start with 1 anyway.--Yaksar (let's chat) 21:22, 16 April 2011 (UTC)
 * Delete or merge and redirect. A lack of significant coverage in reliable sources has been demonstrated by the various searches described above, therefore a stand alone article is not justified. Yilloslime T C  22:02, 16 April 2011 (UTC)
 * Merge and redirect, per David Eppstein. Paul August &#9742; 19:53, 17 April 2011 (UTC)
 * Comment I tried merge and redirect once before, but it didn't stick. I brought the article to AFD this time because I didn't see any reason why a merge-and-redirect would be more likely to stick this time around.  —Mark Dominus (talk) 00:29, 18 April 2011 (UTC)
 * Delete. The subject of the article are sequences usually known as "Fibonacci sequences" (whereas the Fibonacci numbers form the Fibonacci sequence, with the definite article).  The term "Gopala–Hemachandra number" is a clear neologism.  I only get four (!) scholar hits for the phrase "Gopala–Hemachandra".  By contrast, Fibonacci sequences (under that name) are among the most thoroughly studied number sequences since antiquity.   Sławomir Biały  (talk) 02:02, 18 April 2011 (UTC)
 * Delete: The term is a neologism and it's not Wikipedia's place to promote it. These sequences are nothing more than linear recurrence relations of signature (1,1) and are quite well-studied. CRGreathouse (t | c) 19:59, 20 April 2011 (UTC)
 * Delete and also redirect/merge Gopala (mathematician) (which has almost no info) to Acharya Hemachandra. The existing mention of Gopala and Hemachandra in the article about the Fibonacci sequence, with xrefs to Gopala and Hemachandra, is fine.  Remove the "Gopala-Hemachandra number" neologism (or inline-cite and describe its usage as a minority view) from the Hemachandra article, but describe the recurrence there as an antecedent of Fibonacci.  Merge the stuff about "the prosodist Pingala..." from Gopala-Hemachandra number to the Hemachandra article too.  The "Gopala-Hemachandra number" article's presentation of a Gopala-Hemachandra number as some kind of accepted mathematical concept is highly bogus.  I think the article is basically soapboxing some kind of Indian nationalism, sort of like Jagged 85's stuff about Muslim inventions.  If the article is kept, it should be rewritten as "... is a term used by a few authors to mean...". (edited) 69.111.194.167 (talk) 09:18, 21 April 2011 (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.