User talk:Linus44

Welcome
Welcome to ProofWiki! Since you're new, you may want to check out the general help page. It's the best first stop to see how things are done (next to reading proofs, of course!). Please feel free to contribute to whichever area of mathematics interests you, either by adding new proofs, or fixing up existing ones. If you have any questions please feel free to contact me, or post your question on the questions page.

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Cheers, prime.mover (talk)

Properties of Degree
We're obviously on precisely the same page here (literally!) as this was the next proof (after tidying up after the infrastructure update) that I was going to post! You're not working your way through Hartley and Hawkes yourself, are you?

Keep up the damn fine work, bro - and bear with me when I reformat stuff into our (so far unwritten) house style. --prime mover 00:48, 8 February 2011 (CST)


 * Just read your comment (later deleted) on polynomials: if you have a strategy for axiomatic foundation of Galois theory, then feel free to go for it. You've noticed there's a lot of groundwork done already - but the author of most of this (ahem, me) has little background in it except what's been self-taught, so feel free to rewrite or amend if stuff is insufficiently precise or accurate. And if you have an idea of how to turn into crystal the amorphous sludge that currently constitutes the section on polynomials, then go for it. --prime mover 00:59, 8 February 2011 (CST)

The big picture
You're obviously focused here - I'll let you get on with it as you definitely seem to be in the zone.

You just happened to turn up as we're in the middle of changing the infrastructure to use a new LaTeX package MathJax. Some of the old commands no longer work like \or and \and - I'm replacing them with \lor and \land as I go - and display text formatting insists on centre justifying, which doesn't work too well here.

It'll shake itself down in time, no doubt, but in the meantime expect plenty of pages to not look as good as they should. IF you see any then feel free to try and fix them, and if you have problems let me know and I'll see what I can do. --prime mover 00:22, 9 February 2011 (CST)


 * ... Just pick it up as you go along, you're all right.--prime mover 00:46, 9 February 2011 (CST)

Comments, then ...
You said "comments welcome, okay then ...

Nice job. In the groove.

There's a few stylistic and "house standard" issues which you may want to take on board (not to worry if not, it'll get changed).


 * Good to separate each entity in LaTeX with a space - a rule of thumb is put a space between each variable and before each backslash starting a command. It's not important, but it makes it readable and allows for a saner line breaking.


 * More tediously, anything parenthesised ought to be between $\left({ left and right }\right)$ delimiters. Not sure if this is relevant any more actually, but with MediaWiki in particular this enforced the browser to space things neatly, even in cases where what's in the middle is a single letter. E.g. $f \left({x}\right)$ not $f(x)$. This needs to be waived, of course, if the brackets involved are in different latex strings.


 * You've noticed that the delimiter of choice is now dollar not . The latter renders still, but interestingly not in transclusions (see Trigonometric Identities for an example of lots of transclusions). There is an ongoing exercise to convert all math delimiters to dollars.


 * Finally (this time round), the writing style here is (barring the occasional page or two in symbolic logic written by someone who didn't get it) "short and sweet."


 * Long sentences are likely to be split up into shorter ones.


 * Each sentence needs to go on a separate line.


 * The result is that it is easy to follow.


 * The above fact continues to hold even when the proof is tortuously complex.


 * Other minor stylistic quibbles are relatively inconsequential: display equations aren't punctuated with a full stop (that's an Ian Stewartism), lines before a display equation end with a colon:
 * because this is a display equation

and punctuation does not go inside a latex object (despite what they say on wikipedia).

That is:
 * Hence the result for $f(x)$.

not:


 * Hence the result for $f(x).$

And yes I know I've broken more than one of the above rules in the above.

Keep on trucking.--prime mover 13:34, 11 February 2011 (CST)

Numbering equations and referring back
Like this:
 * $\label{einstein} e = m c^2$

Then you can refer back to \eqref{einstein} like this.

This is new with the MathJax package.

I'm not sure how limited we are on how such equations may be formatted. I'm not a fan of centre justification on a wiki page as it doesn't lend itself to the eye when the sentences are short. I haven't found a way to define the default for display equations to default to left justification. I believe you can do it in standard LaTeX documents (long time since I wrote one) so it ought to be doable here.

What I tend to do in the meantime is do it manually:


 * $(1) \quad e = m c^2$

Then you can refer back to $(1)$ like this.

--prime mover 02:13, 12 February 2011 (CST)

Help page
Wow! Nice one. That was something I was going to get round to doing one time. Saves me a pain! Thx. --prime mover 02:18, 12 February 2011 (CST)

... in fact it encouraged me to work on it. --prime mover 04:11, 12 February 2011 (CST)