Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Michael Rassias


 * 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. czar 02:25, 8 April 2018 (UTC)

Michael Rassias

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notability Mathchecker (talk) 23:16, 31 March 2018 (UTC)

The subject is only a post-doctoral researcher. Does not have a tenure-track at the University of Zurich where he is listed as working, let alone full professorship, position. So well below threshold of notability on this front.

Major contributions to research? Majority of his papers appear in fact to be in low-prestige journals, (some in journals associated with citation rings). I do not see any major research accomplishments on par with mathematicians for which wikipedia pages have been written. Needless to say, he has received no reputable international prizes for his research, etc.

That leaves his "editorial" activities: As was pointed out before, however, "co-editing" a book (whose content is a series of papers by other people) together with a famous senior mathematician is more or less a secretarial type job and is not in itself a criterion of notability.

The web-history of the article is consistent with that of a vanity wikipedia page.

I strongly suspect that it is the subject of the article himself who has constructed the page.

I think this is clear case for deletion. Mathchecker (talk) 23:16, 31 March 2018 (UTC)


 * Neutral for now. Please can you say why you think he created this page himself? I have seen a lot of blatant and hamfisted vanity on Wikipedia and this does not look like a particularly strong candidate. If there is anything fishy going on here then it is not very blatant. The article was drafted by an IP editor. It had a few false starts but it eventually got promoted to the article space by the usual AfC process. I would agree that the image of the subject is likely to be provided or uploaded by himself, or maybe a friend, but as that user account has not edited the article that is not a huge issue in itself. The user who uploaded the image could plausibly be the IP editor who made the article, given that both were created at pretty much the same time. That would not be ideal but it does not doom the article given that it was created as a draft and got through an AfC review. That IP has not edited it since. If they are an involved editor then editing the draft and then stepping back once it becomes an article seems reasonable behaviour although an explicit declaration of involvement would have helped. I'm not going to say that he definitely does or does not meet WP:PROF, which is what the really boils down to, as it is not clear to me how significant his publications are. They are clearly not nothing but I can't say whether they are enough. --DanielRigal (talk) 01:33, 1 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Changing to Delete as the subject has requested it and there is no good reason not to do as they request. --DanielRigal (talk) 21:01, 2 April 2018 (UTC)


 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Mathematics-related deletion discussions. DanielRigal (talk) 01:39, 1 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Academics and educators-related deletion discussions. DanielRigal (talk) 01:39, 1 April 2018 (UTC)

I conjecture that the subject made the article on the basis of (a) the choice and amount of detail which was included, (b) the fact that the IP address is in Switzerland, where the subject is based, and (c) the fact that no other articles are associated with this IP address. Subsequent edits to prevent the article from deletion were made from anonymous IP addresses in Greece. The web history is just very different from that of other wikipedia articles concerning mathematicians, and I do find that suspicious. But whether he made the article himself or not is of course secondary. The subject of this article does not come close to meeting any of the criteria of WP:PROF. Of course he has some scientific publications, and he has collaborated with other mathematicians, some distinguished, some not, as any young postdoc at his career stage would. Not only are these publications not in any way exceptional (and they would have to be truly exceptional for him to qualify under WP:PROF given his very low rank in career stage) but actually they appear quite weak: In particular, it would be surprising for a notable mathematician to even consider publishing in journals such as "Advances in Operator Theory", published by the "Tusi Mathematical Research Group (TMRG)" or "Applicable Analysis and Discrete Mathematics", published by University of Belgrade - School of Electrical Engineering, which not only have no reputation but seem like journals involved in citation rings. To anyone in the mathematics community, the presence of such journals on a CV cries out "scam". Anyway, the subject is so far from meeting WP:PROF that I don't think one has to dig too deeply into his publication record but the story gets worse and worse the more I look... Mathchecker (talk) 02:38, 1 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Delete, too soon to have established independent notability for his mathematical contributions. The article tries to make a case for inherited notability by working with famous people but we don't use that sort of reasoning here. And publishing stuff is also not a claim of notability; what WP:PROF asks for is that the stuff you publish have an established impact. Also, note that his Google Scholar profile is misleading — what it shows as his top-cited paper is actually "The Problem of S. M. Ulam for Approximately Multiplicative Mappings", a publication from 2000 (long before he was active as a professional mathematician) by someone else with a similar name, Themistocles M. Rassias. —David Eppstein (talk) 06:30, 1 April 2018 (UTC)
 * PS see also the recent edit history of prime gap, Helmut Maier, Rassias' conjecture (prodded), Gradimir Milovanović, and John Forbes Nash Jr. for additional promotional-looking editing related to the subject. —David Eppstein (talk) 06:36, 1 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Delete Doesn't rise to the standard of WP:PROF. Having published stuff, even if it was in collaboration with famous people, isn't enough. XOR&#39;easter (talk) 16:00, 1 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Comment. I received an email from Rassias, where he writes:
 * "Notwithstanding the fact that I feel honored that some people may have thought that a Wikipedia profile could exist for me, I believe it is too early in my career for such a thing. As I am not knowledgeable on how Wikipedia really works in order to proceed myself with it, I would like to ask for your help in order for this page to actually be deleted. If you could do this, I would appreciate it very much if you could please delete this Wikipedia page."
 * So I think WP:BLPREQUESTDELETE applies here. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:25, 2 April 2018 (UTC)


 * Delete Currently does not meet NPROF. If the subject has also personally requested deletion of the article, this is an even clearer delete. Hrodvarsson (talk) 21:27, 2 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Delete doesn't pass GNG.Deathlibrarian (talk) 02:06, 8 April 2018 (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.