The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.
... that when adding or subtracting two unit fractions, the sum isn't usually a unit fraction? Source: Betz, William (1957), Algebra for Today, First Year, Ginn, p. 370
Wouldn't it be better to say "the result" rather than "the sum"? The result of a subtraction is called the difference and not the sum. --Moscow Connection (talk) 02:02, 30 March 2023 (UTC)
I'd like to propose an alternate hook that I think is very catchy:
The source is here, also referenced in the article. This hook has 188 characters. TheLonelyPather (talk) 18:33, 2 April 2023 (UTC)
I'm very sympathetic to the goal of making a hook that is not just a statement of mathematical fact, but somehow relates more broadly to the world. But this one is not a statement that is actually in the article. The article itself just links to a series formula. The series formula that I assume you mean is for π/4, not π itself. The article says nothing about Leibniz beyond repeating his name in the name for the formula. It says nothing about Gregory. It says nothing about "an unknown Indian mathematician", nor for that matter about known Indian mathematician Madhava. Nor should it; that would be an unnecessary level of detail for this article. The phrasing, out of chronological order, emphasizing the European contribution and dismissing the Indian contribution as unknown, is unnecessarily unflammatory. And the article says nothing about this formula being intended as a way to approximate π. Without these claims, I don't think this hook is usable. Instead, how about:
Understood. I agree that the hook is a far stretch in the "approximate pi" part, and so I have retracted the hook.
To respond to your concerns, the order of the mathematicians is introduced not by me, but by the source pdf: "The series (2) was obtained independently by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz [...] James Gregory [...] and an Indian Mathematician of the fifteenth century whose identity is not definitely known." (pp. 291) TheLonelyPather (talk) 20:08, 2 April 2023 (UTC)
Wouldn't it be better to say "the result" rather than "the sum"? The result of a subtraction is called the difference and not the sum. --Moscow Connection (talk) 02:02, 30 March 2023 (UTC)
Approve ALT2. BorgQueen (talk) 23:03, 4 April 2023 (UTC)