Talk:Main Page

Links to Mathematicians
I've just done a job of de-cluttering the Wanted Page list by removing internal links to mathematicians, philosophers and their works and replacing them with Wikipedia links.

However, it occurs to me that we might want to include links to our specific pages on mathematicians, and if possible get the links to go directly to our modest little piece on the mathematician in question.

How easy would that be? At the moment it's easy enough to add a link to the "mathematicians" page, but it would be nice to go one step further. --Matt Westwood 14:06, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

Using the table method on the mathematicians page isn't working too well since we can't link directly to the person. Maybe we should have it so that each mathematician is under their own section.

eg.

Related Proofs/Theorems
My only concern with this is that the page may become too large. Although saying that what we could do would be to have subpages for each mathematician, where we can have a full bio or whatever, and just have small sections set to trasnclude so that on the main page we can include, and this will just have a small amount of information. Such as:


 * years active
 * small bio maybe
 * proofs/theorems

If anyone thinks this is an okay idea let me know and I'll begin to implement this. --Joe (talk) 17:28, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

Worth trying out, at least. --Matt Westwood 18:27, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

Okay, I have it started but it still needs to get some kinks worked out. --Joe (talk) 19:46, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

I have to go for dinner, feel free to pick at it a bit if you want. --Joe (talk) 19:50, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

If your dinner's as good as the mixed grill I just put together and scarfed down (sausage, burgers, lamb chops, tomatoes, mushrooms, fried eggs, baked beans and chips) then you won't want to move for several hours. I'll give this some proper looking-at in the morning, work out how to drive it then. --Matt Westwood 20:03, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

Referencing fields of mathematics
I noticed recently that a category can have a text page attached, so I have been moving the references to fields of mathematics (e.g. Geometry, Topology etc.) from the Definitions namespace to the Categories one. This makes it easier to (for example) distinguish links to the genre of Topology from those to the definition of the mathematical object that is a Topology.

I went through the definitions yesterday and moved a whole load of them (leaving redirects where appropriate).

What does anyone else think: is this a good approach? Define genres in the category pages and not the definitions pages? --Matt Westwood 10:28, 1 March 2009 (UTC)

Makes sense to me. Definitely leave the redirects, though. --Cynic (talk) 18:30, 1 March 2009 (UTC)

I agree with Cynic. --Joe (talk)

Open Hypotheses
We need a category to put (among others) the Riemann Hypothesis, which now has 5 links to it (including this one).

Obviously we can't prove it as such but we ought to be able to reference it.

So how about a category to put this in, along with P vs NP, Navier-Stokes, the Hodge Conjecture and all the others?

As a subcategory of Category:Proofs, or do we want a completely new category? And what do we call it: "Open Questions" or what? --Matt Westwood 09:38, 7 March 2009 (UTC)

Good question, I'd would like to say put it inside Category:Proofs if for no other reason then organization. --Joe (talk) 14:02, 7 March 2009 (UTC)

Actually, on second thought, a completely separate one seems good as well. --Joe (talk) 14:03, 7 March 2009 (UTC)

I think a new category in the main namespace would be in order. Maybe Category:Unsolved Problems or Category:Open Questions --Cynic (talk) 19:47, 7 March 2009 (UTC)

I would suggest "Open Questions". Of course, there is also the notion of "Conjectures", which we may or may not want to distinguish. -- lasserempe 19:50, 7 March 2009 (UTC)

What's the difference? We could set up two separate subcategories of "unproved statements" or something. --Matt Westwood 21:33, 7 March 2009 (UTC)

Well, P NP is more of an open question since there is not one widely accepted side to the arguement (to the best of my knowledge), whereas the Riemann Hypothesis is more of a conjecture since one side of the question (namely, that the nontrivial solutions have real part 1/2) is generally believed to be true. With that in mind, it might make sense to have conjectures as a subcategory of open questions, but I don't really care that much. --Cynic (talk) 21:56, 7 March 2009 (UTC)