Talk:Main Page

Please Post Any Ideas

People should actually make user pages. Tell us a bit about yourself e.g. age, what you do, where you're from... At least, as long as your not paranoid about putting that on the internet --Cynic 21:30, 27 April 2008 (UTC)

I was wondering whether there should be a Wanted articles page?

--Alex ferguson 20:01, 4 May 2008 (UTC)

Good call. See Special:Wantedpages for a list of pages that have text links going to them but are yet to be created, and Proofwiki.org:Wanted proofs list for any other proofs that users have requested separately and are not linked to in any other article. Note that if you create a proof listed on the special page (as long as the name is exactly as shown) it will be removed from this list, but that if you create a proof listed on the Wanted Proofs page, you should manually remove that proof. --Cynic 00:02, 7 May 2008 (UTC)

you should put that somewhere in the help section, and/or on that wanted page --Joe 02:04, 7 May 2008 (UTC)

I found this: http://www.wellington.org/nandor/ProbStats/Discrete/proofs/proofs.htm. Thought we could somehow implement it here? Would help others in writing proofs. --Alex ferguson 20:02, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

You could put the descriptions of each type of proof into the category page for that class of proof. However, this could bring up some copyright issues. You probably would want to talk to the creator of that web page to make sure it was okay with them first (note, you should still reference their website as the source). I don't think it's necessary, after all anyone interested enough in math to add to ProofWiki probably already knows what induction is.--Cynic 21:16, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

When writing proofs it would be useful to be able to reference definitions. As well as proofs, then, it would be useful to have a completely different section containing definitions, which could of course themselves contain (or reference) proofs which these definitions rely on.

This leads us on to axioms. Would it be worth adding a page detailing the ZF axioms, and another detailing the axioms of propositional logic? All mathematics can be derived (sooner or later) from these, so we could use that as a basis for this entire operation. I have a 1300-page document sitting on my computer which is an attempt to do just this (it just needs a lot of work to make it web-friendly and wikified).

Having done that, it would be an interesting idea to make sure that every result uses as its basis an existing result, all the way back to these axioms, and we may even be able to create a dependency tree (okay it won't be a "tree" as such, it will have more than one path for most of the proofs, but you see what I mean).

Having done that, we can then make an attempt to rigorously identify which proofs rely upon, for example, the Axiom of Choice and (if we're really ambitious) upon the Law of Excluded Middle.

BTW there's a couple of problems that need to be sorted out:

1. In the posting "Symmetric group centraliser trivial" this should of course read "Symmetric group centre trivial", silly me when I wrote it.

2. In that posting you can see there are two different styles of rendering - one looks like a full LaTeX style rendering (which is nice) and the other looks like the substandard MathML rendering that still needs a lot fo work.

--Matt Westwood 10:28, 20 July 2008 (UTC)

I like the idea of a definitions section and a page of axioms. And the idea of proving everything from the axioms is nice, but it would be a seriously long term project. Also, doesn't Gödel's incompleteness theorem mean that we can't really prove everything from axioms? Of course, I never really understood that particular theorem that well, so I could be wrong. As for the other problems:

1. Fixed, I moved it to "Symmetric Group Center Trivial", made "Symmetric Group Centre Trivial" as a redirect to it for the British and Canadians, and deleted the old page.

2. At the top of the page just under the page name (third over) click "My Preferences", then click "math", and choose "Always render at PNG". That makes all the LaTeX look good. Or you can add \, at the end of the line just before to force the line to render as PNG.

--cynic 14:38, 20 July 2008 (UTC)

I'll see if I can make it default to always render as PNG. --Joe 16:39, 20 July 2008 (UTC)

True, you can't prove everything from axioms, but everything that can be proved can be proved from axioms.--Matt Westwood 05:32, 21 July 2008 (UTC)

The Main namespace is right now reserved for proofs, so I think we should have a new namespace which has the axioms, to make things more distinguishable --Joe 18:14, 22 July 2008 (UTC)