Talk:Main Page

Extending ProofWiki to "derivations" and visual explanations?
I'm proposing the extension of ProofWiki to "derivations" and visual explanations of mathematical concepts and expressions. Examples would include the convolution integral or e.g. the Hilbert transform.

An example explanation is how the convolution integral is presented here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convolution#Visual_explanation

What do you think?


 * No reason why not. We already have plenty of visual enhancements of proofs. The only thing limiting us has been the ingenuity of the people putting such visuals in place.


 * If you have particular skills and interests in this area, then please feel free to contribute. Your work will be very welcome. --prime mover (talk) 07:47, 24 December 2015 (UTC)


 * I'm willing to contribute, but I don't understand how to edit the Wiki (if I even have the rights to set up those pages). --Mviljamaa (talk) 09:18, 24 December 2015 (UTC)


 * You should have sufficient rights to edit pages. You also have all sorts of Help and FAQ pages to read. Feel free to study these. You have links on your home Talk page, and you also have various links down the left hand side to explore. --prime mover (talk) 13:56, 24 December 2015 (UTC)

Joke namespace
Since it is of course of the utmost and pressing importance that we ensure that we have documented all the mathematical jokes in the world, we are going to need a namespace for them.

Can we therefore have a "Joke" namespace, the same way we have a "Mathematician" and "Book" namespace?

What does anyone else think? --prime mover (talk) 08:29, 3 January 2016 (UTC)


 * Meh. Use subpages until it becomes too unwieldy. It's better that they're all in one place, to be read in a single run. &mdash; Lord_Farin (talk) 22:02, 3 January 2016 (UTC)

Style problem
Something gone wrong with this page Category:Definitions/Fundamental Dimensions

Anyone able to sort it out? --prime mover (talk) 18:42, 23 January 2016 (UTC)


 * no worries, flushed my browser cache, all OK --prime mover (talk) 19:02, 23 January 2016 (UTC)

Problem with MathJax?
Is anyone else seeing this problem?


 * [[File:MathJaxProblem.png]]

All the $\LaTeX$ strings are appearing with a following vertical line.

I first noticed this yesterday on a different machine from my usual one (Windows 7 vintage), but now I notice it on this (my trusty old Vista). On both machines I am using Google Chrome.

I just tried it on Firefux and it's fine (I don't fancy getting IE out this morning to check that too) -- so it appears it may be a problem with Google Chrome. --prime mover (talk) 07:28, 30 January 2016 (UTC)


 * I can't reproduce it. &mdash; Lord_Farin (talk) 09:14, 30 January 2016 (UTC)


 * Very odd. As I say, it exhibits this problem on both of the machines I have access to: work and home, and on Google Chrome only. I can't get IE to connect to it (but then I can't get IE to connect to anything, I never use it). --prime mover (talk) 10:12, 30 January 2016 (UTC)


 * This has been happing to me for the past few months on the Canary version of Chrome. I assumed it was a bug that would be fixed. I guess it has made its way into the stable branch. --Joe (talk) 16:56, 30 January 2016 (UTC)
 * According to Stack Overflow this has been fixed in MathJax. --Joe (talk) 16:58, 30 January 2016 (UTC)
 * Updated MathJax, should be fixed now. --Joe (talk) 16:59, 30 January 2016 (UTC)


 * Yep, after a page refresh, this is now looking okay. Although I may stick with Firefox, the version I currently have (and have been using all day) seems to run more easily than Google Chrome ... the only thing I don't like about it is the tab management paradigm. --prime mover (talk) 20:28, 30 January 2016 (UTC)

Template:BookReference
Some recent pages brought the need to support more authors in the BookReference template. I've expanded it to 6, and also included a whitespaced sample of the (for display reasons necessarily) cluttered wiki code producing it. This should help in making such templates more maintenance friendly. &mdash; Lord_Farin (talk) 14:52, 21 March 2016 (UTC)
 * I think something might have gone wrong with it -- check out the Book:Books page. Also, Template:Book needs a similar expansion.  I'd work on it myself but I lack the patience tonight :-) --prime mover (talk) 20:49, 21 March 2016 (UTC)
 * Done. (And this time, I did check that it works on existing stuff ;).) &mdash; Lord_Farin (talk) 11:45, 25 March 2016 (UTC)
 * Nice one. Might not have been good in all browsers, though -- I found you have to use  instead of a space at the start of any string after a pipe delimiter that is being used as an "else", otherwise the space is not interpreted. --prime mover (talk) 12:30, 25 March 2016 (UTC)

Invitation for suggestions on improvements to presentation of oscillatory systems
There's a lot of new material that's been added in the Mechanics section, all of which is working towards a treatment of (so far as I've reached) resonance. The overall plan is that the general second order ODEs defining the underlying mathematics be established separately from the applications (whether they be moving carts attached to walls by springs or L-R-C circuits, or whatever) and hence to decouple the mathematics from the physics.

I'd welcome suggestions as to how to assemble the various categories, and also how to structure the pages and even to name the pages if they appear to be inadequate. Also, any definitions which appear loose or inaccurate (and there are plenty) I definitely want to improve.

I may well be changing direction after this, as I'm getting tired. --prime mover (talk) 13:01, 27 March 2016 (UTC)


 * Good work. Personally I find physical applications of ODEs boring, so I'll refrain from having an opinion on that front. As to the particular ODEs, I would probably go with the following scheme:
 * ODE LHS (basically TeX without backslashes and braces)
 * /Homogeneous
 * /Inhomogeneous
 * /Instance
 * Furthermore I think there is a need for clear overview pages of the calibre Trigonometric Identities (e.g. Linear Second-Order ODEs). As much as possible, these should have TeX'ed click-throughs. Naming convention close to TeX will help searchability.
 * If all becomes too much to maintain, we will eventually end up introducing the Example namespace we've kept out thus far. For now, however, subpages will be fine. (We might even consider sub-wikis or other cross-wiki collaborations, but this is at present unrealistic.) &mdash; Lord_Farin (talk) 18:00, 28 March 2016 (UTC)


 * Overview pages was something I started, but they got a little unwieldy and I reckoned it would be easier to go back to them, but I never did.


 * Another thought I had was to subcategorise the 2nd order ones further into the three categories: over-, critically and underdamped, and then resonant, but at the "pure" level rather than at the application level, but that came to me late as I got into the thread with the oscillating cart. And there is a lot in there which need to be pulled back into the abstract, but that also needs work which I'm not prepared to do at the moment, I'm going to need to let it rest a little before I can see it from a fresh angle.


 * All contributions welcome here. I've not seen an example before of such a structured categorised approach to arranging DE's into categories before, so as to exactly what it is we're trying to achieve, I confess I'm not sure where it's going. --prime mover (talk) 19:28, 28 March 2016 (UTC)


 * I think one reason why there is no good categorisation for ODEs is because unlike e.g. finite simple groups there is provable failure in classification: we cannot solve them all in "elementary" form. This also makes me less eager to attempt such a thing.
 * But then, admittedly I have been out of the theory of DEs and everything that goes with them for a long time, so maybe I'm not in a position to comment on this. &mdash; Lord_Farin (talk) 19:13, 30 March 2016 (UTC)

Template:explain spans too many lines. It makes bad reading experience.
Example to illustrate that template:explain is bad.

Two solutions:

1. Use template:clarify.

2. Remove redundant sentences in template:explain.

Golopot (talk) 03:28, 7 April 2016 (UTC)


 * I disagree. --prime mover (talk) 05:43, 7 April 2016 (UTC)


 * I like the template as it is, but that page is a an eye sore. What I'd prefer to see is the explain template used once there and either it lists all the problems in one section like a summary, or to have the explain not mention any specifics and have a smaller cleaner template like clarify to each specific. Whatever the case, those template shouldn't exist on the page, so this really is a nit pick. --Ybab321 (talk) 11:27, 7 April 2016 (UTC)


 * My take on this is that "explain" templates should not be there in the first place. They are supposed to make the page ugly, so as to inspire people who know what they are talking about to put in whatever fixes are necessary so as to allow that invocation of that template to be removed. --prime mover (talk) 12:19, 7 April 2016 (UTC)

First of all, thanks for the feedback. This helps to improve the site. (NB. Naturally you are encouraged to make changes yourself -- it's a wiki after all.) However I feel a third option didn't receive sufficient attention:

3. Resolve the calls to explain by improving the article.

That's what really ought to be done. I agree that the page is ugly and tough to read now, but the solution lies not with prettifying the maintenance template(s). That being said, I think Template:Explain could say everything in need of being said on three lines. I'll see what I can do about both. &mdash; Lord_Farin (talk) 14:33, 7 April 2016 (UTC)


 * Here goes: Fundamental Theorem of Algebra. &mdash; Lord_Farin (talk) 15:09, 7 April 2016 (UTC)

Problem loading WebFonts
After I have freshly booted up my (elderly Vista) machine (running Google Chrome), when I open certain pages I get a message in the bottom left corner of the screen saying: "Loading web-font TeX/Math/Italic" and the page just sits there, taking some time to finish. Then it puts the message up (same place): "Web-Fonts not available - using image fonts instead".

Take for example Area under Arc of Cycloid.

Examining the generated html, it looks, for example, something like this: 

Take as a contrast, for example, an element of a page Brachistochrone is Cycloid which does not show this error message: sin α

... which shows the Math-italic font being used as per normal.

The appearance of the mathematical text is different as well -- the one using images is heavier and slightly fuzzy.

Has anyone else noticed this, or does it look as though it is a problem with my machine? --prime mover (talk) 06:09, 13 April 2016 (UTC)


 * ... but now get this.


 * I have just made a no-change edit ("Edit" then "Save page") on the troublesome page Area under Arc of Cycloid in question, and now it is behaving correctly.


 * But now it has suddenly started doing it on Brachistochrone is Cycloid.


 * Ugh. And now Brachistochrone is Cycloid is working fine again. WTF? --prime mover (talk) 06:15, 13 April 2016 (UTC)

Prioritising stub and refactor-requiring pages
There are 993 pages that are marked as stubs, there are 853 pages that are marked as currently being refactored (refactor required or does this mean that someone is on the job?). This number is huge. Also Definition:Thermodynamics (for example) isn't marked as a stub, but looks like a stub. Surely there's more that can be said about thermodynamics!


 * Just a quick point: is intended to be more of a dictionary than an encyclopedia, hence its intention is to contain definitions rather than expositions (with the possible exception of the "Mathematician" namespace, where I confess to getting carried away sometimes). There is ample room for discursion on e.g. Wikipedia, with whom we are not and never will be in competition.  Our intention is to state the facts of a definition and that is all.


 * Hence although it "looks like a stub", to the extent that it fulfils its purpose: it defines what thermodynamics is. Such pages (those that define a branch of mathematics or other science) are not intended to be large. --prime mover (talk) 06:31, 22 April 2016 (UTC)

Anyway! I (the newest of the current newbies) would like to propose a grading system for stubs and a change to the refactoring system, and have a grade for each which denotes "low hanging fruit" to make it easier for newcomers to get started and learn. I'd rather (for example) have a proof for "equivalence relations partition a set" rejected on style grounds than pour time and effort into a longer, much more involved proof and have that declined.


 * Pages don't get "approved" or "declined" -- if their style does not come up to scratch they get a "tidy" template appended to them and then get brought up to style by one of the admins (er, yeah, that's me) who (irony alert) delights in such work.


 * So it should be no big deal. Paste up what you see fit; once it's in (if it's not a repeat of something already there, or is wildly incorrect) it stays -- and the only changes are those of, for example, stylistic improvement, correction of grammar/spelling or expansion of the argument, or rewording for clarity and/or linguistic consistency. --prime mover (talk) 06:42, 22 April 2016 (UTC)

Lastly (to keep this short) grades can convey urgency, for example Carathéodory's Theorem (Measure Theory) is extremely important in Measure Theory where as Book:Christopher Clapham/The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Mathematics, lets be honest, it isn't that urgent. Alec (talk) 19:51, 21 April 2016 (UTC)


 * Actually, I quite like that idea (particularly for stubs, anyway). I can see room for the Stub template to be expanded to take a new optional parameter "importance", or however the parameter may be named (let's be jocular and call it "defcon") to take a value of e.g. 1 to 5, where 1 is "goodness, this needs to be fixed urgently, it's embarrassing" and where 5 is "meh", and thence to automatically assign such pages into an appropriately-configured subcategory of the unwieldy and overflowing "stubs" category.


 * This is an area of development where "he who smelt it dealt it", so I'd be happy enough for you to take that on, if you so desire.


 * I am not so concerned about the "refactor" category, and (as I say to all new contributors) I would prefer to have this category left well alone except to old hands. --prime mover (talk) 06:38, 22 April 2016 (UTC)


 * These lakes of stubs/refactor pages/etc. are one of the biggest pain points this site has to deal with. Any ideas to break these categories into manageable chunks are most welcome.


 * One of the templates that might be (and at times, has been) used for this purpose is Template:Finish which signifies that while the mathematical content isn't too exciting, it's still some work to complete the page.


 * As to grading I'm not convinced yet it would work because of the inherent subjectivity involved. But there might be a case for something in between Template:Stub and Wanted proofs list.


 * Do you have concrete suggestions on how to introduce such sifting? &mdash; Lord_Farin (talk) 22:31, 21 April 2016 (UTC)


 * Just so as to get a handle on the quantity of work here, I have cleared 6 refactor flags over the last couple of days. It took all day to restructure the Definition:Polygonal Number refactor flag. The work is ongoing, and it gets picked up as and when the thread of what I am studying passes through one such.


 * As for the stubs, they are always available for someone coming into to see whether they want to try their hand. --prime mover (talk) 20:33, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

This old rubbish again
It has been once more pointed out that it is extremely bad form to name one's results after oneself. I understand that it displays an arrogance and egotism that have no place in the field of mathematics.

Once more there have been calls to take this result down again, on the grounds that it makes look bad.

While I completely take on board the philosophy behind this (there should be zero tolerance for self-aggrandisement in mathematics), for various reasons I am reluctant. So I will hold off purging it from the database if I get enough (? five or ten) well-argued posts to the contrary.


 * Just leave it there. It's not hurting anyone. &mdash; Lord_Farin (talk) 16:06, 26 April 2016 (UTC)