User talk:Gbgustafson

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Cheers! prime mover (talk) 08:21, 27 September 2019 (EDT)

6 October 2019
Edited the current proof of the Banach Fixed Point Theorem. Not sure how new theorems are submitted. First attempt was to edit an existing proof. I proceeded by example from other pages. It took about a week to get used to the House Style, which uses macros and environments similar to my own used for books, monographs and papers.

14 October 2019
R.Gow in the Irish Math Bulletin 28 (1992), p 45, uses the term "Vandermonde matrix" as the transpose of the Vandermonde matrix as currently defined in ProofWiki and Wikipedia. I also saw a difference in definitions for interpolation problems, especially Wikipedia.


 * There are enough variants of the Vandermonde matrix (is "Vandemonde" a spello of Gow's?) that I wonder whether we're due for a refactoring so as to explicitly document them all and explain the nuances. Admittedly the differences are more-or-less trivial (1-based vs x-based, transposes of each) but may be profitable for a newcomer. Thoughts? --prime mover (talk) 10:08, 14 October 2019 (EDT)

Missing "r" in Vandermonde was my typo, a cheap keyboard feature. The nuances are already covered in what exists on the page. I vote NO for explaining nuances.

Alexander C. Atiken (1939) cites (page 50) Vandermonde (1771) as the founder of notation and calculus for determinants, but uses the term "alternant" for what is defined in ProofWiki as a "Vandermonde determinant." Aitken's source for history is Muir's volumes on the history of determinants. I will add a reference to alternants and to Aitken's book. Aitken never used any form of Vandermonde's matrix except the first form on the ProofWiki page, ones in column 1, using term "alternant", e.g., A(0123) in his notation.

15 October 2019
Edits to Vandermonde and Aitken acknowledged and appreciated. All proofread. Edits appear correct.

15 October 2019
Help:FAQ and Help provided less than 5% of the information that I needed to get started. More admin effort is not requested.
 * The help pages and documentation here are very much underdeveloped, so I think this is fair. Caliburn (talk) 08:26, 16 October 2019 (EDT)


 * No matter how we dictate the precise structure of the site, and no matter how many links we generate and present to the users to point to them, it will never be enough.


 * We like to hope that contributors can learn by example: to see what's currently being done and doing likewise. Some manage well at this. Others, who are familiar with other systems, and have their own preferred method of working, have more difficulty. We could spend a lot of time writing many pages of detailed instructions as to how to craft a page on, but (at least for me) life's too short. --prime mover (talk) 19:37, 16 October 2019 (EDT)

17 October 2019
I read the messages from Caliburn and prime mover. All of the reasons supplied were already known to me from reading user talk on the site. I agree that documentation is a moving target and admins have their hands full. Further, it is extremely difficult for site maintainers to guess what a new contibutor will need in terms of what to read first and how to find information. I have some ideas which could be implemented, but I also don't have the time to do it. So I don't expect anyone else is going to rise from the flames to do it either. Thanks for the feedback!