Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of mathematical blunders


 * 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 and rename. Article has been replaced by an acceptable one by Dominus, but the title should be changed to one that is less pejorative and makes the new focus clear. Espresso Addict (talk) 11:55, 5 February 2008 (UTC)

List of mathematical blunders

 * – (View AfD) (View log)

Abandoned list which was once proposed for deletion. The two items in the list are completely insignificant from a historical perspective. The list is potentially waaaaaaaaay large and will consist of silly anecdotes with no purpose other than the humiliation of the blunder's author. Pichpich (talk) 21:15, 30 January 2008 (UTC)
 * Delete - Nothing is sourced, complete original research, and what is listed is not notable. ~ QuasiAbstract (talk/contrib) 21:37, 30 January 2008 (UTC)
 * Keep, but rename. I think a rename would do this article good, as well. "Mathematical Fallacies", or something.  We could probably lose the "List of" as it's not much of a list at this time. Just my opinion, granted. ~ QuasiAbstract (talk/contrib) 16:45, 4 February 2008 (UTC)


 * Delete per nom. No sensible criteria for inclusion, can't see a useful article emerging. JohnCD (talk) 22:47, 30 January 2008 (UTC)
 * Comment, some misstatements, but no Gimli Glider or Mars Climate Orbiter? I think an article around that sort of blunder is possible but as to random public statements, I'm not sure how notable they ever could be. --Dhartung | Talk 23:30, 30 January 2008 (UTC)
 * Delete a list with criteria this open to interpretation serves no useful purpose and many blunders will never be notable - Dumelow (talk) 23:52, 30 January 2008 (UTC)
 * Comment Oh, the problem of posting an article before it has any content! If you take it down and work on it, lose the table and lose the attitude.  People make mistakes.  I remember TIME magazine once had an article that gave a figure for the amount of excrement deposited by dogs in New York every day; readers did the math and it worked out to each dog pooping 130 pounds worth.  But that was back in December 1974, and of course, there have been no mistakes since then.  Mandsford (talk) 23:55, 30 January 2008 (UTC)
 * Comment I can imagine good article with this title but this in its present for certainly isn't it. Michael Hardy (talk) 04:54, 2 February 2008 (UTC)
 * Delete No objective inclusion criteria, current contents are not notable. Gandalf61 (talk) 17:27, 2 February 2008 (UTC)
 * Comment - Assuming a little good faith in the list creator, it is non-obvious that there is "no purpose other than the humiliation of the blunder's author". While I don't think the current list has any useful or notable contents, I do think a list of notable, interesting examples could be created given some well-defined inclusion criteria. - Neparis (talk) 00:21, 3 February 2008 (UTC)
 * Comment - I have just been collecting examples of real mathematical blunders. For example (and this is one of many) Kurt Gödel claimed in 1932 to have a proof that the truth of a certain class of formulas was decidable, and this result was used by Dana Scott and others to prove other theorems, but it was shown by Goldfarb in 1984 that Gödel had been mistaken and that the class was not decidable.  This is all well-documented and can be supported by multiple cites to the literature.  I also have examples of blunders by Von Neumann and  Cauchy.  Many examples of lesser blunders are known.  For example Alfred Kempe notoriously "proved" the Four-color theorem, but his proof was later shown to be erroneous.  A fascinating article could be written about this subject.  It is my understanding that a deleted article cannot be recreated until six months have passed.  I think that would be a shame in this case.  Would it help the situation for me to  replace the content of this article with something more verifiable and encyclopedic along the lines I have just discussed?  -- Dominus (talk) 03:27, 3 February 2008 (UTC)
 * Comment - why not ask the nominator on his talk page User talk:Pichpich if he would agree to withdraw the AfD nomination explaining that you can quickly replace the article with at least several of your most interesting referenced examples and bring it up to standard? - Neparis (talk) 00:22, 4 February 2008 (UTC)
 * Comment well, I'm here and no, I'm not too keen on withdrawing the nomination. Not that Dominus' idea is bad. Really, it isn't. But it's not what this article set out to be. I can see an article being built around historical blunders by mathematicians: there's an interesting story to be told there (and I'll throw in another well-known one: Erdös stubborn stand on Let's Make A Deal and the Monty Hall problem). But blunders by the layman? Listen to talk radio for an afternoon and you'll get 2 or 3 of these and I really don't see how this can work out to be an article. Pichpich (talk) 01:35, 4 February 2008 (UTC)
 * Why does it matter what the article "set out to be"? Isn't the important thing here to get good articles for Wikipedia? -- Dominus (talk) 12:14, 4 February 2008 (UTC)


 * Important comment - I have replaced the article with an entirely new article. -- Dominus (talk) 15:14, 4 February 2008 (UTC)
 * Comment - Would you commit to expand it by adding further examples? - Neparis (talk) 16:31, 4 February 2008 (UTC)
 * I won't commit to do anything. I may, however, expand it by adding further examples.  At present I am researching Von Neumann's purported proof of the consistency of arithmetic, and a certain paper of Hantao Zhang which, if published in the STOC 2008 proceedings, would overturn a long-accepted result of Robert Tarjan regarding the time complexity of the union-find problem.  It is likely that I would add these to this article.  -- Dominus (talk) 17:12, 4 February 2008 (UTC)
 * Comment. Very nice work. Sorry if the above seemed radical but by "what the article set out to be", I meant something more like "what the article's title suggests as development". I'd suggest keeping the article under a different name which accurately reflects its content, especially since "blunder" has a definite pejorative slant that is completely unnecessary. Any one have a good suggestion? Perhaps list of mistakes in mathematical proofs or list of mathematical arguments which were proved incorrect. Sure, that's not really the smoothest title but at least it gives a clearer sense of what the article is intended to be. Pichpich (talk) 23:35, 4 February 2008 (UTC)
 * Comment. I see nothing by Zhang in the STOC accepts nor anything about union find on Zhang's home page. Anywhere else I should be looking? never mind, found it on your blog. I think the blunder is in Lemma 1: link first then find can speed up other subsequent finds. —David Eppstein (talk) 01:05, 5 February 2008 (UTC)


 * Keep - Thanks to the good work of User:Dominus, the article now has completely different content which is a huge improvement over the article at the date of the AfD nomination. Diff - Neparis (talk) 16:42, 4 February 2008 (UTC)
 * Keep Dominus' new version. —David Eppstein (talk) 01:01, 5 February 2008 (UTC)
 * Keep the new version. JackSchmidt (talk) 04:08, 5 February 2008 (UTC)
 * Comment There may be a need to rename the article in order to address two concerns: firstly that it is hard to provide a neutral point of view on a list of "blunders", as a point of view is already implicit from the title, and secondly that a clear criteria for inclusion should be apparent, but the two versions of the article and the suggestions in this AfD are all very different topics. I think a reasonably good title could be derived from Published false theorems.  Both the terms published and false are reasonably objective when applied to mathematical theorems, so the implicit NPOV problems go away.  The scope of the article is also clearly defined, and rules out "engineering blunders" which are extremely interesting and important topic covered in books like "Fatal defect".  I would have a hard time calling three published false versions of the O'Nan Scott theorem a blunder, but no trouble saying they were false.  I have a hard time calling Thompson's forgetting about the Tits group a blunder (even though I have seen the error replicated in 21st century articles), but there was clearly a published false theorem.  The Mars Climate Orbiter problem and others should be discussed *somewhere*, but I think in a separate article. JackSchmidt (talk) 04:08, 5 February 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.