Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Polynomial transformations


 * 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. There is consensus that the material is notable; whether it needs to be renamed or merged can be discussed on the article's talk page. RockMagnetist (talk) 23:48, 12 June 2014 (UTC)

Polynomial transformations

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A page of polynomial problems and solutions, or sort of solutions, as formal proofs aren't given, but they're all trivial problems. Not a good subject for a WP article. JohnBlackburne wordsdeeds 18:11, 27 May 2014 (UTC)
 * per discussions below change to redirect to Polynomial-time reduction, already the target of Polynomial transformation.-- JohnBlackburne wordsdeeds 21:23, 31 May 2014 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Science-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 19:19, 27 May 2014 (UTC)


 * Delete . This reads too much like a textbook. The first section is more extensively and (in my opinion) better described in reciprocal polynomial. The rest is not really specific to polynomials but about a transformation of the dependent variable in a function (as explained in the last section). The article has been around for eight years with little improvement. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 08:10, 28 May 2014 (UTC)
 * I am fine with there being an article if it is a complete rewrite (and satisfies the rules). -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 09:25, 2 June 2014 (UTC)


 * Comment. The nomination suggests that this is not a good subject for an article, but that is not the same as saying that the current article is unsatisfactory (Deletion is not cleanup).  ZMATH reviews 35 articles with the exact phrase in the title.  Google Scholar has over 2000.  I suggest that the topic is notable, even if the current contents are not.  Deltahedron (talk) 12:13, 31 May 2014 (UTC)


 * Can you provide links to some of the articles you think makes this a notable topic? The current content is unencyclopaedic, or at least not appropriate for this encyclopaedia. Finding sources for it won't change that – they could be more of the same sort of content. They could be on topic covered by other articles we already have, such as reciprocal polynomial. Or there could be a notable topic out there waiting to be written based on sources.-- JohnBlackburne wordsdeeds 12:38, 31 May 2014 (UTC)
 * The phrase seems to have several radically meanings, so perhaps a disambiguation article is appropriate. For example,
 * Polynomial transformations of Tschirnhaus, Bring and Jarrard seems closest to the current version
 * Polynomial transformations and data-independent neighborhood functions in statistics
 * Survey of polynomial transformations between NP-complete problems in computational complexity
 * Polynomial transformations of real and complex n-dimensional space:
 * A geometry of polynomial transformations of the real plane
 * Jung’s type theorem for polynomial transformations of ℂ 2
 * On polynomial transformations of C n 
 * Certain examples in connection with problems about polynomial transformations of C n
 * Polynomial transformations of integers and general fields:
 * On polynomial transformations. I, II
 * On polynomial transformations in several variables
 * Intrinsic characterization of polynomial transformations between vector spaces over a field of characteristic zero
 * Deltahedron (talk) 15:38, 31 May 2014 (UTC)
 * Some of that looks like its related to Holomorphic functions, but that doesn't mention polynomial transformations. It mentions polynomials and in a sense holomorphic functions are transformations. Which may why there are so many hits, transformation is a broad term that has many uses in maths – functions and mappings, rotations+translations in space, algebraic techniques as given here, and of course polynomials themselves.
 * And looking at them they're not actual sources. They're text searches of catalogs, which have summaries, if that (this has just the title and journal details), of the source. You need access to sources to write an article. Many are foreign too - the 'transformation' may arise from a translation of a more precise foreign term.-- JohnBlackburne wordsdeeds 16:10, 31 May 2014 (UTC)
 * Of course a ZMATH link isn't an actual source in itself. It's a link to a page containg the precise bibliographic details you need to find the source, together with a summary of what that source contains and often a DOI link to online text as well.  What I posted is a handful of references that show the existence of potential sources for an article.  If it were decided to write or rewrite an article here, then access to the sources would of course be needed but almost everything indexed by ZMATH is either a book or a journal, and they can almost always be found an any decent library if not online.  What we are discussing here is whether an article could reasonably be written.  Deltahedron (talk) 16:33, 31 May 2014 (UTC)
 * Oh, and when you wrote "this has just the title and journal details", you forgot to mention that it also has a scanned image containing a summary of the article and a DOI link to the text. What more do you want at this stage — a hand-illuminated copy of the author's original manuscript?  Deltahedron (talk) 16:40, 31 May 2014 (UTC)

Ah, I didn't notice the DOI link, just the scanned page which seemed to be the main source of information. The DOI link takes me here: which has a sentence more unless I pay £33 to read the rest.

I still think though that all you have is a list of links. If there's an article to be written we need a clear idea what on, which requires only a single source not many unrelated ones. Sources aren't needed for a disambiguation page at all: that is based only on articles, and which have either similar titles or mention the topic. A quick search finds only one, Polynomial-time reduction, which is the redirect target for Polynomial transformation and mentions polynomial transformations as one type of polynomial-time reduction. That would make that a good redirect target, as I don't see any more articles so a need for disambiguation.-- JohnBlackburne wordsdeeds 20:32, 31 May 2014 (UTC)


 * At the risk of repeating myself: I posted a list of research papers, with links to additional information for the convenience of the readers. The purpose of the posting was to provide evidence for the proposition that "polynomial transformation" is a sufficiently widely used term in the mathematical research literature to merit some kind of article.  I leave it to other editors to agree with that proposition or not as they see fit.  Complaining that the convenience links, as supplied, are somehow less than adequate for some other purpose, such as writing the article in question, is a diversion quite irrelevant to the matter in hand, which, I repeat, is is the term "polynomial transformation" one about which an article could reasonably be written?.


 * I note that recommending that the article become a redirect is a recommendation to keep, not to delete. Is the original proposal being withdrawn?  Deltahedron (talk) 20:52, 31 May 2014 (UTC)


 * Comment I have expanded the article using one of the references above. Deltahedron (talk) 21:16, 31 May 2014 (UTC)


 * I found the above article after searching, to see if I could find articles for a dab page. That's there's only one and it's an exact match suggests this should be a redirect, yes, so I'm changing my !vote to that. And I saw you've added a paper on Tschirnhaus transformations but there is already an article on them.-- JohnBlackburne wordsdeeds 21:23, 31 May 2014 (UTC)
 * So there is. The paper is on "Polynomial transformations of Tschirnhaus, Bring and Jarrard", and if you read the text I added, there's a link to Tschirnhaus transformation and a discussion about how those transformations and others are used in a specific context.  Describing a paper with a title of the form "A, B and C" as if it were a paper on "A" alone is not accurate.  Deltahedron (talk) 21:32, 31 May 2014 (UTC)


 * Keep per WP:HEY. This is an encyclopedic topic (one that is completely unrelated to the proposed redirect target polynomial-time reduction despite the similarity of name) and Deltahedron has improved it to the point where it looks like an encyclopedia article. It still could use more improvement (especially inline sources) but that's not a big enough problem to warrant deletion. —David Eppstein (talk) 17:20, 3 June 2014 (UTC)


 * Keep This sounds like the classic set index article. Maybe WikiProject Mathematics can take it on as a project. --Bejnar (talk) 00:53, 5 June 2014 (UTC)
 * Comments "Polynomial transformation" may be understood in two completely different ways: either as "transformation of a polynomial", the meaning in this article, or as "transformation described by polynomials". As far as I know, for almost every mathematicians (even interested in the same area as the authors of the unique reference of the article), the term "polynomial transformation" alone refers to the second meaning. Therefore, if the article is kept, its name has to be changed because of WP:PRIMARY TOPIC.
 * In fact, the subject of the article is not "transformation of polynomials", but "manipulation of polynomial roots without computing them". This could be the subject of a good encyclopedic article, with links to properties of polynomial roots, Vieta's formulas, Algebraic number (polynomial whose roots are the sum, product or quotient of the roots of two polynomials), Resultant (the main tool for such manipulations), ... The present article could be the stub of such an article. However, I do not like the title "Manipulation of polynomial roots without computing them" and I have not found any better title. D.Lazard (talk) 08:59, 5 June 2014 (UTC)


 * Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion so a clearer consensus may be reached.


 * Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, slakr  \ talk / 03:39, 6 June 2014 (UTC)


 * Why is this being relisted? It seems nobody is in favour of deletion anymore. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 11:51, 7 June 2014 (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.