Talk:Turán's brick factory problem

Turán's brick factory problem has been listed as one of the Mathematics good articles under the good article criteria. If you can improve it further, please do so. If it no longer meets these criteria, you can reassess it.
Review: September 19, 2017. (Reviewed version).

A fact from Turán's brick factory problem appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 7 October 2017 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that when Pál Turán was forced to work in a brick factory during World War II, the bumpy crossings of the cart tracks inspired him to ask how to draw graphs with few crossings?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2017/October. The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Turán's brick factory problem.

Wikipedia

"with a given number of vertices"[edit]

In this edit, David Eppstein changed the first sentence from "... in a drawing of the complete bipartite graph $K m,n$ " to "... in a drawing of a complete bipartite graph with a given number of vertices." This change has one obvious advantage, in that the new version requires less notation. Unfortunately, it is also not accurate: the complete bipartite graphs K_{2, 4} and K_{3, 3} both have 6 vertices. One could add more words to make it precise again, but I feel like that would be worse than the original version. (FWIW, I would be willing to accept this level of imprecision if the description were entirely informal (e.g., if the words "complete bipartite graph" were replaced with some phrase understandable without any knowledge of mathematics).) --JBL (talk) 16:14, 29 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

The intent was to make it less WP:TECHNICAL by keeping unnecessary formulas out of the lead. We don't use the parameters m and n anywhere else in that section, so why even mention them? But it should be possible to resolve the ambiguity you describe without resorting to more formulas. —David Eppstein (talk) 17:35, 29 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I understood the motivation and think it's a good one. What about just ending the sentence after "a complete bipartite graph"? (Unfortunately this phrase is already going to be an obstruction for many readers.) --JBL (talk) 23:40, 29 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Simpler is better, but I think if you stop there it's too easily misunderstood as being about some particular bipartite graph rather than all of them. But the "every" in the next paragraph makes it clear enough? —David Eppstein (talk) 00:14, 30 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I think so. --JBL (talk) 22:14, 30 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]