Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Vitali Kapovitch


 * 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. -- Cirt (talk) 07:55, 12 October 2010 (UTC)

Vitali Kapovitch

 * – ( View AfD View log  •  )

Prodded by User:Thomjakobsen and deprodded by User:DGG, this person fails WP:PROF. Highest cited paper, 18. Single digit h-index. Abductive (reasoning) 08:08, 5 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Neutral. The nominator is correct that on the face of it the entry does not appear to satisfy WP:PROF. What gives me some pause here, however, is that the subject has publications in the most prestigious and selective journals in the discipline - Annals of Mathematics, Acta Mathematica, Journal of the American Mathematical Society and two in Duke Mathematical Journal. This is an indication of something unusual... Nsk92 (talk) 09:12, 5 October 2010 (UTC)
 * In only one of those is he the first author. Abductive  (reasoning) 17:40, 5 October 2010 (UTC)
 * In math the concept of the first author does not really exist - for math papers the authors are almost always listed alphabetically. Nsk92 (talk) 17:45, 5 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Academics and educators-related deletion discussions.  —Nsk92 (talk) 17:50, 5 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Weak Keep basically per Nsk92. Mathematics is a low-publication/citation rate field, with correspondingly greater emphasis on quality over quantity. Not my specialty, so I don't know what's going on here, but I do not think keeping could hurt Wikipedia in any way. Ray  Talk 18:17, 5 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Taking the term "rational homotopy theory" from Kapovitch's highest cited paper, a Google Scholar search shows papers with 657, 401, 318, 207, 63, 34, 31, 24, and then Kapovitch's 18 citations. So it's not a low citation field; it's Kapovitch that has low citations. Abductive  (reasoning) 19:23, 5 October 2010 (UTC)
 * I have rather ambivalent feelings about this entry, but the high citation articles/books you mention above a rather few and they are 30-40 years old. In math the shelf life of articles is pretty long and the publication speeds are fairly slow, so citations usualy accumulate fairly slowly over time. Excluding books, I see almost no articles in the googlescholar search you linked above that have been published in the last 20 years and that have more than 20 citations. Nsk92 (talk) 19:38, 5 October 2010 (UTC)
 * One could say, then, that this page on an Associate Professor was created too early... Abductive  (reasoning) 19:59, 5 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Also, taking another term from the title of Kapovitch's highest-cited paper, "nonnegative curvature", and limiting the search to the last ten years, titles only, one sees papers with 41, 25, 18, 18, 16, ..., with the last two by Kapovitch. Looks pretty average, and average does not meet WP:PROF. Abductive  (reasoning) 20:10, 5 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Yeah, I admit that I have very ambivalent feelings about this article, particularly in its current state - basically a rather unilluminating out-of-date resume, probably created by a postdoc or a grad student. However, as a professional mathematician myself, I know that having even just one article in a journal at the level of JAMS/Annals/Acta is fairly rare, even for very good mathematicians; here we have three such articles (already at a relatively early stage in his career), plus two in Duke, plus one in the Journal of Differential Geometry, plus two in Geometric and Functional Analysis - also top-notch places. This to me indicates a fairly unusual degree of excellence. I have looked up the reviews of his papers in MathSciNet. Some of them are fairly complimentary (e.g. for the JAMS paper the reviewer concludes "... Thus, in focussing on the relation of splitting rigidity to vanishing of derivations, the authors arrive at a beautiful connection between the geometry of curvature and the algebra of rational homotopy." For the Acta paper the reviewer writes, in particular: "This is a rich paper in which the authors completely settle the problem of determining which are the pinched, negatively curved manifolds (i.e., complete Riemannian manifolds whose sectional curvature is bounded between two negative constants) with amenable fundamental group." Mathematically, all this stuff about manifolds of positive curvature and pinched curvature and the relevant Alexandrov geometry is very far from my own area of expertise and I do not feel particularly competent in adding stuff to the article explaining what he did and why it is significant. If someone else did that, I'd probably be inclined to keep the article. Nsk92 (talk) 20:14, 5 October 2010 (UTC)
 * In other words, whoever knows this guy and wrote this two sentence page can't explain what he did to advance mathematics, but Wikipedia needs his CV just in case? Without encyclopedic content, heck, without even an article on pinched manifolds or curved manifolds or splitting rigidity (although there is a very short article on Rigidity (mathematics) why should this BLP be kept? Abductive  (reasoning) 02:26, 6 October 2010 (UTC)
 * I don't think that whomever created this page can't explain why this stuff is important, rather they probably did not understand that they needed to do that - such pages are often created by inexperienced users who are not familiar with Wikipedia standards and don't really know what is expected from a WP article. As for the terms you mention - we do have articles on Curvature of Riemannian manifolds, CAT(k) spaces, Soul theorem, Collapsing manifolds etc - which is what Kapovitch's papers are about. In any event, there are a great many notable and important scientific topics about which we do not yet have articles - that does not mean that we do not need articles about them. Like I said, mathematically I am fairly far from these topics but even I have a rough understanding that they are important. In particular, this stuff is very much related to Grigori Perelman's solution of the Geometrization conjecture - probably the most important and famous result in mathematics for the last ten years.  E.g. long-term evolution of Ricci flow in Perelman's stuff can produce some limiting "pinched" objects with potentially bad behavior - possible collapsing of a manifold etc; it is important to know when this behavior can occur to be able to rule it out, for example, in Perelman's proof itself. Nsk92 (talk) 04:38, 6 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Kapovitch appears only in the Geometrization conjecture article, with no indication of any contribution at all. In fact, his paper is only cited to make a claim about a different mathematician. Abductive  (reasoning) 05:33, 6 October 2010 (UTC)
 * That is correct, of course, but it does not imply that his own work is not significant or important. The Geometrization conjecture article itself is in a rather poor shape -it really does not explain anything about the nature of Perelman's proof which, as I understand it, was quite revolutionary. Similarly, there are no WP articles on quite a few related and important topics, such as Alexandrov geometry, for example. The general reason for this is that academics, on the whole, are very little involved in editing Wikipedia (the most active WP editors appear to be undergraduate and high school students) and as a result modern academic topics and developments are not well represented on Wikipedia - which I think is to Wikipedia's detriment. What I do know is that most mathematicians would gladly give up a year's salary to have a result worthy of publication in Annals/Acta/JAMS and he has several of those... Nsk92 (talk) 07:00, 6 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Making the low citation numbers for those articles in those journals worse, not better. Abductive  (reasoning) 07:24, 6 October 2010 (UTC)
 * The low citation numbers are a mark of the fact that his articles are recent and in a field that, owing to major developments of late, can be difficult to understand. They do not reflect any lack of importance - indeed, it is not uncommon in math for superb and technically difficult work to take a good while before others grasp the work well enough to follow up on it (I was once told 10-20 years is not an unusual gap for truly first-rate results). Nsk correctly describes the stature of Annals/Acta, etc. Ray  Talk 15:38, 8 October 2010 (UTC)


 * Delete: WP:PROF is designed to avoid endless discussions on citation statistics and their interpretation, yet people choose to ignore it. The article has nothing about his contributions to his field or other indication of notability.--RDBury (talk) 07:30, 6 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Delete. Yes, he does have articles in some of the more prestigious journals, but they haven't been cited much, even by math standards: WoS citations are 5, 5, 4, 3, 2, 2, 2, 1, 1, 1, 0, ... Journal prestige does not necessarily translate into article impact (immediate or otherwise) and this sort of situation is not really that unusual. (For reference, I'll note that I voted "keep" in another current math-related AfD on the basis of articles cited around 10X as much as this case, but others still consider this insufficient.) As noted above, math research does accrue recognition more slowly, so it's possible this person's work may ultimately show real impact. It's just too early to tell. Respectfully, Agricola44 (talk) 18:29, 6 October 2010 (UTC).
 * Weak delete. The excellent journal placement for his papers is a very good sign for his career, and it also shows that these papers are likely to make an impact in future, but it's not really anything we can use to show that he has already made an impact. He is mentioned in several books as having played a minor role in the Perelman case but again I don't think that's sufficient. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:02, 6 October 2010 (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.