Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Polynomial recurrence


 * 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. L Faraone  13:13, 26 April 2013 (UTC)

Polynomial recurrence

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Non-notable type of recursion, which, if it needs encyclopaedic treatment, should receive it as a minor subsection in an article like recurrence relation. Currently an orphan linked only from the page on Michael Somos, despite having been around for years. There are a few hundred Google Books and Scholar hits for the term; as far as I can tell, none or almost none refer to recursions of the type discussed in the article. JBL (talk) 18:42, 18 April 2013 (UTC)
 * Comment Polynomial recurrences play a role in in dynamical systems theory, connecting Poincare recurrence to additive combinatorics through the work of Hillel Furstenberg and others; Terence Tao has a nice lecture on this. They also play a role in the theory of cryptographically secure pseudorandom number generators and in special functions. The current article is but a particular definition, but it seems like the topic of the article has potential to be expanded. --Mark viking (talk) 21:12, 18 April 2013 (UTC)
 * In addition to the situations you mention, there are also so-called "polynomially-recursive sequences" in combinatorics (which is what I was looking for when I came across this article). I agree that there is probably an interesting article to be written with a name similar to the one of the current article (there are, after all, several hundred book and scholar hits).  But I don't think the current content of the article bears any relationship to what would appear in such an article, and moreover there's so little there that it's not as if deleting the current article would be a barrier to writing a more useful one. --JBL (talk) 21:56, 18 April 2013 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Science-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 00:25, 19 April 2013 (UTC)


 * Weak keep. The topic is clearly notable and relates to Somos sequences.  Deltahedron (talk) 06:12, 19 April 2013 (UTC)
 * Where does this notability come from? Can you find any source that considers the class of such recurrences?  The fact that Somos sequences are examples does not automatically make this generalization notable. --JBL (talk) 13:50, 19 April 2013 (UTC)


 * Redirect to recurrence relation. The notion described in the present article is a non-linear generalization of linearly recursive sequences.  I'm by no means an expert in such things, but the definition seems to be rather obscure, and the present article title does not seem to be a good fit.  I think the material would be better as a section of the recurrence relation article.  Ozob (talk) 10:44, 19 April 2013 (UTC)
 * Delete. Not a common use of "polynomial recurrence".  Alternatively, move to algebraic recurrence and merge to recurrence relation.  A "polynomial recurrence" should be $$a_n = P(a_{n-1}, a_{n-2}, \ldots, a_{n-k}),$$, where P is a polynomial.  — Arthur Rubin  (talk) 18:07, 19 April 2013 (UTC)


 * Delete. with extreme prejudice. What will it take to remove this? Not that it is a big deal, but it has been over 4 years. Here are the facts: Exactly one article links to this aside from stuff like "pages flagged as problematic in March 2009" and the like. That one page is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Somos which has 1.5 lines of text. It says: " he proposed a conjecture about certain polynomial recurrences, now called Somos sequences " If you go to the linked article it is nicely self contained and has a link to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recurrence_relation. SO there is no reason for this to be here although it isn't hurting anything either except, I suppose, that people arrive here looking for something else. Gentlemath (talk) 04:19, 25 April 2013 (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.