Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Sultan Catto


 * 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. Espresso Addict 23:57, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

Sultan Catto

 * – (View AfD) (View log)

No indication of notability. h2g2bob (talk) 17:06, 11 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Keep. Reading what does appear to be factual on the article, he seems to have published enough papers and garnered enough accolades for at least a short article. • Lawrence Cohen  18:19, 11 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Keep. Whoever listed this WP Article for Deletion must think (I'm exagerating of course) that physicists on WP must be in the class of Newton or Einstein (or be a Nobel Laureate) to be qualified for an article on WP; this physicist has clearly published enough, and his discussed work is linked to sufficient WP other articles and concepts to qualify the article as notable by WP standards. --Ludvikus 22:22, 11 October 2007 (UTC)
 * 13 Independently available, peer-reviewed, cited, & published articles as follows: . Ludvikus 22:45, 11 October 2007 (UTC)
 * It is professors job to write articles. Other professors have hundreds of them. 13 no big deal. What is most important is how they are judged be peers. `'Míkka 22:50, 11 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Weak Keep. just a bit above an "average professor", if judged from the article, but chances are growing. `'Míkka 22:50, 11 October 2007 (UTC)
 * delete Changed my vote after noticing that the only claim of notability is Benjamin W. Lee Prize, which itself cannot be verified and information about it unreferenced in wikipedia and moreover controversial (who issues it). "recently he is completing a book" is only a promise I talkked above. No big deal. See him in wikipedia when he finishes the book. `'Míkka 06:55, 12 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Academics and educators-related deletions.   —David Eppstein 00:18, 12 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Hehe, you will be surprized how many different "Lee Prizes" and "lee Awards" exist.:-) `'Míkka 06:57, 12 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Weak delete. The publication and citation record looks a bit light to me, and I can't dig up much else in the way of external recognition. I'm not convinced the Lee award is sufficiently important to count for much. —David Eppstein 00:24, 12 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Weak delete unless stronger references come along. 13 published articles is not all that many for an academic.  Have they been widely cited?  Has he had any influence in the field?  I am also very dubious about the veracity of the personal details in the article that are by and large completely unsourced, even to self-published biographies.  I believe that User:Ludvikus is likely either the article's subject or a friend of his, and appears unable to follow Wikipedia's rules on NPOV and No Original Research when it comes to this subject.  I feel he would be wise to leave editing the article to others, if it is kept. Matthew Brown (Morven) (T:C) 06:30, 12 October 2007 (UTC)
 * I have deleted a large amount of the unsourced biographical information, and gave a reference to his position at CUNY. Matthew Brown (Morven) (T:C) 06:39, 12 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Delete. The publications listed are virtually all self-published. They have to meet minimal presentational and academic standards for the archive (maintained at Cornell University), and that's it. At least one is a very short (4 page) copy of a talk. Of the remaining 3, one is in a collection of working papers from an international workshop, one is a multi-authored 5 page letter printed in the journal Physics Letters described by the journal as "short communication", and one is in the The Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society, a publication reserved for short papers (under 10 pages). It does not appear in their prestigious main journal, The Journal of the American Mathematical Society or even their Transactions of the American Mathematical Society. Citations, apart from self reference are virtually nil at both Cite Base and Google Scholar. The only book that he is listed as having 'authored' is not actually authored - he was a co-editor of a collection of conference papers (not all by him). They're a dime a dozen in academia, and often edited by graduate students. Is the conference even notable? Note that the author of Sultan Catto also created this article International Conference on Differential Geometric Methods in Theoretical Physics.) In sum, this is not a particularly distinguished publishing record even by academic standards. The fact that his name appears in the Wikipedia articles of two notable physicists means nothing. The author of this article added his name as a "distinguished student" of Feza Gürsey (not referenced), as well as one of the winners of the Benjamin W. Lee Prize., which is not particularly prestigious (see here for more on the notability of the prize (or lack of it).Voceditenore 07:38, 12 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Delete per Voceditenore. --Crusio 19:17, 12 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Weak Delete  In general, I'd think CUNY probably more able to judge notability than people around here.  But there do seem to be  some dubious elements. He is not Professor at Rockefeller, he was Visiting Professor, not nearly as significant. His web page as well as the article  shows a distinct tendency to emphasize association with the more famous, the page with his full list of publications was not working, and "completing a book on..." arouses a certain skepticism that there isn't much better to say. The notability of scientists is the notability of their work, and its not the number of papers or their place of publication that is primary, but what people think of them. (Just as it's not number of novels that makes a notable novelist, but their readership and reviews. Jane Austen's 6 is more than Barbara Cartland's 600). For the published articles, Web of Science shows 10 items, with the most referred to being cited 21, 9, and 7 times--which nobody would call significant. But sometimes nowadays some people do publish primarily in arXiv, and rely on the citations there to establish their reputation.  So looking at the citations there, 13 items are listed, none have more than 8 citations, equally insignificant. Something must have  impressed CUNY, but none of us here can figure out what. Delete unless someone can explain. DGG (talk) 05:01, 14 October 2007 (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.