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view · edit Frequently asked questions To view an explanation to the answer, click on the [show] link to the right of the question. Are Wikipedia's mathematics articles targeted at professional mathematicians? No, we target our articles at an appropriate audience. Usually this is an interested layman. However, this is not always possible. Some advanced topics require substantial mathematical background to understand. This is no different from other specialized fields such as law and medical science. If you believe that an article is too advanced, please leave a detailed comment on the article's talk page. If you understand the article and believe you can make it simpler, you are also welcome to improve it, in the framework of the BOLD, revert, discuss cycle. Why is it so difficult to learn mathematics from Wikipedia articles? Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a textbook. Wikipedia articles are not supposed to be pedagogic treatments of their topics. Readers who are interested in learning a subject should consult a textbook listed in the article's references. If the article does not have references, ask for some on the article's talk page or at Wikipedia:Reference desk/Mathematics. Wikipedia's sister projects Wikibooks which hosts textbooks, and Wikiversity which hosts collaborative learning projects, may be additional resources to consider. See also: Using Wikipedia for mathematics self-study Why are Wikipedia mathematics articles so abstract? Abstraction is a fundamental part of mathematics. Even the concept of a number is an abstraction. Comprehensive articles may be forced to use abstract language because that language is the only language available to give a correct and thorough description of their topic. Because of this, some parts of some articles may not be accessible to readers without a lot of mathematical background. If you believe that an article is overly abstract, then please leave a detailed comment on the talk page. If you can provide a more down-to-earth exposition, then you are welcome to add that to the article. Why don't Wikipedia's mathematics articles define or link all of the terms they use? Sometimes editors leave out definitions or links that they believe will distract the reader. If you believe that a mathematics article would be more clear with an additional definition or link, please add to the article. If you are not able to do so yourself, ask for assistance on the article's talk page. Why don't many mathematics articles start with a definition? We try to make mathematics articles as accessible to the largest likely audience as possible. In order to achieve this, often an intuitive explanation of something precedes a rigorous definition. The first few paragraphs of an article (called the lead) are supposed to provide an accessible summary of the article appropriate to the target audience. Depending on the target audience, it may or may not be appropriate to include any formal details in the lead, and these are often put into a dedicated section of the article. If you believe that the article would benefit from having more formal details in the lead, please add them or discuss the matter on the article's talk page. Why don't mathematics articles include lists of prerequisites? A well-written article should establish its context well enough that it does not need a separate list of prerequisites. Furthermore, directly addressing the reader breaks Wikipedia's encyclopedic tone. If you are unable to determine an article's context and prerequisites, please ask for help on the talk page. Why are Wikipedia's mathematics articles so hard to read? We strive to make our articles comprehensive, technically correct and easy to read. Sometimes it is difficult to achieve all three. If you have trouble understanding an article, please post a specific question on the article's talk page. Why don't math pages rely more on helpful YouTube videos and media coverage of mathematical issues? Mathematical content of YouTube videos is often unreliable (though some may be useful for pedagogical purposes rather than as references). Media reports are typically sensationalistic. This is why they are generally avoided.

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In trying to clean up a ... thing, I noticed the article Pascal's simplex. It doesn't look like a topic that can sustain a whole encyclopedia article. Pascal's pyramid is not in great shape, either. I feel like some de-OR-ing, merging, and redirecting is warranted here, but maybe others have a better sense of what is going on. XOR'easter (talk) 02:01, 8 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I have looked at Pascal's pyramid from time to time, and it always induced a deep sigh. I agree that there's only one article's-worth of content here; I'm sure there must be some other adequate sources out there, but I don't know where. --158.144.178.11 (talk) 17:12, 9 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I haven't found much. There's more than nothing (e.g., [1] and [2]), but it seems like pretty slim pickings. Maybe the first step is to redirect both Pascal's pyramid and Pascal's simplex to Pascal's triangle § To higher dimensions. XOR'easter (talk) 03:19, 12 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Google scholar: "pascal pyramid" has 342 results and "pascal tetrahedron" has a further 123 results. pascal trinomial has 1,510 results, at least many of which seem relevant. –jacobolus (t) 03:50, 12 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I did some searching but was disappointed by how quickly the results trailed off into unpublished preprints and weird stuff. I could well have been pessimistic. XOR'easter (talk) 04:51, 12 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

It's a kind of "let's explore the patterns" topic which can be examined without much prerequisite knowledge, so plenty of the sources are aimed at a student audience. I'm not sure there's all that much to say, but I think it's at least enough to make an article about. –jacobolus (t) 06:22, 12 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I think Pascal's simplex should be merged into Pascal's pyramid. Mathwriter2718 (talk) 12:49, 23 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with this. There are hundreds of sources mentioning "pascal's pyramid" or "pascal's tetrahedron" or "pascal's 3-simplex" or similar, and only dozens of sources mentioning "pascal's polytope", "pascal's simplex", "pascal's hypertetrahedron", or the like. Our article Pascal's simplex is currently completely unsourced and not very encyclopedic. I think we can merge it into Pascal's pyramid and cut the content down to something pretty brief, mostly a pointer to the handful of sources that turn up in a literature search. –jacobolus (t) 06:51, 24 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

That sounds like a good idea. XOR'easter (talk) 19:03, 24 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

See Talk:Pascal's_pyramid#Merge_proposal. Mathwriter2718 (talk) 03:12, 25 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Please check the recent edits to Modular arithmetic - I don't think that they are constructive. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 05:25, 18 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

If you are talking of the 3 last edits by a new editor (username in red), I reverted them before reading this post. D.Lazard (talk) 09:52, 18 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, thanks. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 17:53, 25 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Eppstein, D.; Lewis, J. B.; Woodroofe, Russ; XOR'easter (2025), "Princ-wiki-a mathematica: Wikipedia editing and mathematics" (PDF), Notices of the AMS, 72 (1): 65–73. —David Eppstein (talk) 18:53, 20 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Nice work. Hopefully giving a balanced impression of what lies in store for editors attracts more potential contributions than it scares away. :-P –jacobolus (t) 20:26, 20 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I've just finished reading it from beggining to end. Btw, I've noticed even articles about Fields Medalist can be stubby (e.g. Shigefumi Mori). Yesterday I wondered if it was not because so few professional mathematicians participate in Wikipedia work. Duseverse (talk) 20:56, 20 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

As an alternative guess, I suggest that biographies don't interest everyone. Johnjbarton (talk) 21:52, 20 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, unfortunately (because one can learn a lot of math beggining by reading biographies, IMO). Duseverse (talk) 22:36, 20 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

To our list of Wikipedia articles that don't exist, about subjects that don't exist, which includes Omphalology, we can add Non-Riemannian hypersquare. Michael Hardy (talk) 21:20, 22 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

For at least 15 years, maybe more, I've thought an article like this ought to appear in a publication of that sort, and pondered attempting to write one, and never really felt up to it, and this one is better than what I would have done. I may write a response that complements it by adding some specific tips about editing Wikipedia articles. Michael Hardy (talk) 03:59, 24 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@David Eppstein, @XOR'easter. That is unexpected. Good job! Dedhert.Jr (talk) 04:02, 24 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks to the pointer in The Signpost, I just finished reading "Wikipedia Editing and Mathematics" (doi:10.1090/noti3096). I don't speak math very well but I do know communication and readability and it's so good. Also, funny. One line even earned my highest honor, inclusion on User:Jengod/Notable quotables, right below a Beyoncé lyric. Seriously tho, thanks to all the contributors. I know it will have good effects on our math content and it was a joy to read. Cheers, jengod (talk) 04:44, 27 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

What, if anything, do we want to do about Wikifunctions? David Eppstein recently reverted the addition of a link to it at the top of Ackermann function, saying it didn't belong in the lead and perhaps not anywhere.

I see David's point, particularly in regards to this function, which will in most cases never return (e.g. ${\displaystyle A(4,3)}$ will take longer than the age of the universe to compute). But it also kind of reminds me of Wiktionary links, which are usually a good thing, and I could see this possibly making sense in some cases. If not, it's kind of like saying we've decided the Wikifunctions project itself isn't useful (which of course may be true; at least I'm not sure exactly what it's supposed to be useful for).

Anyway, not sure. Just thought maybe we should think about it. --Trovatore (talk) 22:54, 22 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I would recommend putting these in the "See also" sections of pages, if anywhere. Abstract Wikipedia § Development (2020–present) doesn't sound promising:

According to an evaluation by four Google Fellows working on the project, it was at a "substantial risk of failure" due to its poor technical plan. The Google Fellows recommended that Abstract Wikipedia be decoupled from Wikifunctions, that Wikifunctions refine MediaWiki's support for programming in Lua rather than having a completely new language, and that Abstract Wikipedia converge on a unified approach to natural language generation (NLG) that builds on open source software if possible.

The Wikimedia Foundation staff responded to this report by completely rejecting the idea that Abstract Wikipedia and Wikifunctions could be separated, and accusing the Google Fellows of making "fallacies and false comparisons". The Wikimedia Foundation also stated that using existing NLG pipelines like Grammatical Framework could not support certain languages such as the Niger–Congo B languages, and would also "replicate the trends of an imperialist English-focused Western-thinking industry."

This cites Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2023-01-01/Technology_report, which, OMG. Here's the creator's explanation of the goal of Abstract Wikipedia:

"Instead of saying "in order to deny her the advantage of the incumbent, the board votes in January 2018 to replace her with Mark Farrell as interim mayor until the special elections", imagine we say something more abstract such as elect(elector: Board of Supervisors, electee: Mark Farrell, position: Mayor of San Francisco, reason: deny(advantage of incumbency, London Breed)) – and even more, all of these would be language-independent identifiers, so that thing would actually look more like Q40231(Q3658756, Q6767574, Q1343202(Q6015536, Q6669880)).

Looking further though denial (Q1343202) is described as "rejecting a fact despite the overwhelming evidence of its truth based on fear of its outcome", which as far as I can tell is a completely incorrect sense of the word to use here. And Q6015536 is linked to the article Incumbency advantage for appointed U.S. senators, which is also moderately off of the intended topic. That's without mentioning that none of the proposed logic about the meaning of elect(...) is yet defined anywhere, and seems quite difficult to do for every possible English sentence, as seems to be the goal here. An inability to make a single simple example work gives some indication of how extremely difficult this would be as a project.

–jacobolus (t) 23:02, 22 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Ohhh...kayyy. One of the Foundation's wild hares, I guess. Someday the WMF is going to get studied as an example of the pathologies that can overtake a well-meaning organization. --Trovatore (talk) 23:09, 22 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I don't see these as different in kind from the random online forms for calculating things that are all over the web, that I routinely remove from external links. Like those, I get the impression that a lot of the impetus for adding the link is to promote the site rather than to provide a useful resource.

You never really know what algorithm they're using, how efficient it is, what issues with numerical precision they might have, etc. Maybe being an official WMF project gaves them a little something extra. But then, in this case, there's also the disadvantage that it will not ever compute any nontrivial values of the function.

I would prefer not linking them at all, but if they are to be linked they belong in the external links section with the commons and wiktionary links. —David Eppstein (talk) 23:19, 22 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I didn't know about Abstract Wikipedia. It sounds implausible to me. If the underlying motive here is to push AW, I'd say we hold off on that at least till there's some sort of Minimal Viable Product. I don't think we need to be early adopters there.

Anyway, I'm satisfied to leave things as they are for now. I just wanted to get the question out for discussion. --Trovatore (talk)

Of all the possible things to waste several people-years of salary on with nothing to show at the end, Abstract Wikipedia and Wikifunctions isn't the worst thing I can imagine. But if I had to bet I'd put extremely long odds on this endeavor accomplishing any nontrivial portion of its stated goals. I don't think we need to be promoting it from Wikipedia articles about algorithms or mathematical functions, but to the extent that we do, it should definitely go down at the bottom of pages in 'See also' or 'External links', not up at the top. –jacobolus (t) 23:48, 22 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not sure how this article is on my watchlist (looks like I have one edit from 2021) but could someone knowledgeable on the topic please review these recent edits? Folly Mox (talk) 13:38, 24 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Please see discussion at Talk:Four-dimensional space § Animation fails standards and Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Accessibility § Looping GIFs and accessibility re whether looping GIFs such as File:8-cell-simple.gif can be allowed as illustrations of articles, on the supposed grounds that because the loop cannot be stopped there is an accessibility problem with them. —David Eppstein (talk) 23:41, 24 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I'm justifying this merge on the grounds of WP:content fork since about two thirds of the Naive set theory artilce is just describing the basic properties of sets, which is already covered in Set (mathematics) and Set theory. Join the dicussion at: Talk:Naive set theory#Merge with Set theory? Farkle Griffen (talk) 00:15, 28 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

It might be a good idea.

The problem is that there are two different uses of the phrase naive set theory, plus an (incorrect) narrative that conflates them.

One meaning is just set theory without formalization, kind of the way Cantor thought of it. The other meaning is set theory that includes unrestricted comprehension and leads to Russell's paradox and the other antinomies.

The incorrect, but widely believed, narrative, is that these are essentially the same thing, and that formalization was the cure for the antinomies.

It's very difficult to address all of these disparate threads in a coherent article at the title naive set theory, and doing it instead in a section of the main set theory article might indeed make sense. --Trovatore (talk) 00:26, 28 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

There was a surprising amount of references / further reading to predatory journals in this article, which I've purged. I think what remains is mostly OK, but I'm no expert on fuzzy sets, so a second look wouldn't hurt.

I also notice that there's remaining reference to Florentin Smarandache about "Neutrosophic fuzzy sets" there too. I haven't touched it, but it may be unwarranted/undue/craycray stuff.

Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 13:38, 29 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

This and fractional calculus are areas popular with the people who publish in predatory journals. Probably the references reflect that. —David Eppstein (talk) 18:07, 29 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Fuzzy review for fuzzy sets.... XOR'easter (talk) 19:18, 29 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Can I invent fuzzy fractional calculus? It's an operator that returns something of the order of the regular integral, to the nth power of the integral ${\displaystyle \int _{\text{fuzzy}}^{n}{x}dx={O{\bigl (}x^{2}{\bigr )}}^{n}}$. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 20:52, 29 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Google Scholar already reports some 329 papers on fuzzy fractional calculus, in journals of such unimpeachable quality as Chaos, Solitons, & Fractals, the Iranian Journal of Fuzzy Systems, MDPI Mathematics, etc. —David Eppstein (talk) 21:28, 29 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Damn, and here I thought I could outcrank the cranks. I suppose I could always claim this came to me through divine revelation and 'publish' via vixra. But more seriously, wrt neutrosophic fuzzy sets, is that undue/fringe, or was Smarandache on something valid? Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 03:21, 30 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Personally I would nuke it. JBL (talk) 22:25, 30 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I wonder if Wikipedia would be improved if there were a bot that automatically removes recently added predatory sources and replaces the citations with ^{[citation needed]}. Probably would get into a lot of edit wars. Mathwriter2718 (talk) 02:03, 30 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Bot are bad for this, because there will always be 'So and so published this widely reported weirdo idea in Journal of Nonsense, a predatory journal.' But also predatory is a rather ill-defined term. There's a spectrum of shitiness, and where exactly the line is drawn is subjective. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 03:25, 30 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

You can always check WP:CITEWATCH and WP:UPSD for help finding garbage publications though. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 03:26, 30 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Fuzzy logic is not logic. It is bogus. JRSpriggs (talk) 18:53, 30 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

This discussion over at WikiProject Physics may also be of relevance to the community here. XOR'easter (talk) 19:18, 29 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Alfred North Whitehead has been nominated for a good article reassessment. If you are interested in the discussion, please participate by adding your comments to the reassessment page. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status may be removed from the article. Z1720 (talk) 23:09, 1 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Silly question, and while this maybe isn't directly project related, our PEMDAS article doesn't seem to answer it. I stumbled upon this problem on an random forum, and there are two clans for answers

${\displaystyle 2^{3^{2^{1^{0}}}}=8^{2^{1^{0}}}=64^{1^{0}}=64^{0}=1}$ (inner exponent priority A)

and

${\displaystyle 2^{3^{2^{1^{0}}}}=2^{3^{2^{1}}}=2^{3^{2}}=2^{9}=512}$ (outer exponent priority B)

I'm pretty sure the correct answer is A otherwise the multiplication of exponent rules wouldn't work, but I haven't ever seen any textbook/class/etc. address order of exponents specifically. Does anyone have such a resource/reference? Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 23:53, 3 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Check out Order_of_operations#Serial_exponentiation. B is the usual. --{{u|Mark viking}} {Talk} 00:13, 4 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The reason B is usual is that A can be expressed more directly as ${\displaystyle 2^{3\cdot 2\cdot 1\cdot 0}}$. —David Eppstein (talk) 00:33, 4 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Hmmm. I see... Interesting. I would have assumed the other way for the usual. I also see it's arbitrary/varies with implementation. Not sure why I overlooked that section. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 03:39, 4 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Just noting a rather mundane observation that μ operator appears to be one of the only articles with a (Greek) special character in the name, rather than its anglicization. Only other exception I could find is Ξ function. Tule-hog (talk) 22:29, 4 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Hello! Is there anyone willing to help me improve the article An Introduction to Non-Classical Logic? Thank you! P.S. I did not find a WikiProject on Logic, so Math is the closest relative! :) MathKeduor7 (talk) 08:17, 5 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I was going to point you to Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Philosophy as the other close relative, but you appear to have already found it. —David Eppstein (talk) 08:29, 5 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]