User talk:Jitse Niesen/Archive14

hello

Hello Jitse, thanks for the welcome. What strikes me is the number of math competitors to Wikipedia: PlanetMath, Mathworld, Scholarpedia,indopedia,Groupprops,artofproblemsolving.com. But Wikipedia looks like it will grow to be the largest. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Delaszk (talk • contribs) 20:26, 5 July 2008 (UTC)

your bot

Hi Jitse,

I have seen that you and your bot are able to compile a list of all mathematics articles. How do you do this? Simply all articles which are in Category:Mathematics? I ask for the following reason: I want to set up a metric measuring the distance between two (not necessarily math) articles A1 and A2. I thought, I take the smallest category which contains both A1 and A2, and take this as an indicator for closeness of the A1 and A2. However, I run into problems related to the existence of cycles, and more disturbingly, that the category structure is not really hierarchical, i.e. some cat C1 is "contained" in C2, even if they are, in reality more like siblings instead of parent/child.

Thanks,

Jakob.scholbach (talk) 12:24, 13 July 2008 (UTC)

Hi Jakob. You're not the first one who discovered that the category system is not really right for automatic analysis. My bot simply uses the list of mathematics articles to decide which articles to include. Oleg Alexandrov and his Mathbot take care of this list. The Mathbot uses List of mathematics categories, which Oleg updates by hand. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 12:56, 13 July 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Articles for creation/Archive header

Wouldn't it be better to have this as a subpage of your bots username or just to include the text in your bots source code itself because all it consists of is a single template, rather than put another page out there that no one else uses? -IcĕwedgЁ (ťalķ) 05:10, 17 July 2008 (UTC)

blahtex

Hi Jitse.

It seems blahtex.org has gone done since last I checked it. I've since found out someone else has taken over development (http://gva.noekeon.org/blahtexml/index.html), but I'm wondering if you still have anything left from your mediawiki implementation. Cheers, Ben (talk) 02:42, 21 July 2008 (UTC)

No problem, and thanks for the reply. I still have some questions, but I'm a little busy at the moment so I'll get back to you a bit later on if that's ok. Cheers, Ben (talk) 12:38, 12 August 2008 (UTC).

Arabic Numerals edit

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Francis_Schonken#Arabic_Numerals —Preceding unsigned comment added by 213.42.21.148 (talk) 00:02, 28 July 2008 (UTC)

Thanks

Thank you for reverting my edit to Derivative. It was completely my fault for missing the problem with nf among all the other changes. Please forgive me =) --mboverload@ 16:06, 31 July 2008 (UTC)

Optimal classification

Hi Jitse - I saw that you reverted several link insertions to optimal classification, and I wanted to check in with you. The article was deleted a few days ago as a result of Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Optimal classification, and since then, the original contributor has republished the materials on wikibooks:Optimal Classification, and started adding links here which points to the WikiBooks article (as well as some of his/her other articles there). The editor has some personal issues with me ([1]), so I'm trying very hard to stay out of this situation. But you should expect some more links in the next few days. --Jiuguang (talk) 20:57, 1 August 2008 (UTC)

I am roughly aware of the situation. But I didn't know about the article at WikiBooks; that probably explains what the editor was trying to do. Thanks for the heads-up. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 21:48, 1 August 2008 (UTC)

I think we agree that links to the Wikipedia are not in any way a violation of Wikipedia policy and that like so many other issues with Jiuguang now coming to light as part of his sophisticated imagination, Jiuguang has proven himself to be the equivalent of an anthropologist who uncovers an ancient settlement which he feels will undermine his position and proceeds to recruit others to help him operate the bulldozer to prevent its discovery by other anthropologists. Be warned, Jiuguang is a Chinese Communist agent. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.100.1.18 (talk • contribs)

I knew it!! We, of course, all suspected this, as there is no plausible reason someone could be trying to keep your research off Wikipedia...unless they are Communist spies. --C S (talk) 07:58, 2 August 2008 (UTC)

C S, being a young and silly college student provides you with an opportunity to be both wrong and sarcastic to a certain extent. Then one day you learn that your wrongfulness and sarcasm have stopped being corrected by your fellow students and instructors and that you must now learn to do that job out on the street all by yourself. When you get there please let me know. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.100.10.193 (talk) 15:24, 2 August 2008 (UTC)

thanks

thanks for correction on Erdos number. AMS needs to fix instructions! 216.80.119.92 (talk) 22:51, 2 August 2008 (UTC)

Hoffman and Johnson

Hello Jitse. Thanks for your contributions to the discussion as well as the articles. For me, you are a real inspiration by staying cool, polite and focussing on key issues/requirements regarding article and reference requirements on WP. -- Crowsnest (talk) 12:34, 7 August 2008 (UTC)

Thank you. You're not doing bad either. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 13:08, 7 August 2008 (UTC)

Feng Kang from Shaoxing

Chinese Wikipeda diary Feng Kang his father cames from Shaoxing, near Suzhou.I had been writed Hans Putmans,he was a Dutch, too. I hope you like this item. (talk) 13:12, 7 August 2008 (UTC)

real/comples at Talk:Positive-definite_matrix

You recently added a comment at Talk:Positive-definite_matrix, and I wondered if you could weight in on weather the article should start with the real case or the complex case. Pdbailey (talk) 13:16, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

And whether the weather is cloudy or sunny? JRSpriggs (talk) 15:46, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

Pdbailey, I replied at the talk page of the article. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 16:09, 15 August 2008 (UTC)

Sorry for that edit, it wasn't my best edit. thanks for fixing it. Pdbailey (talk) 23:03, 16 August 2008 (UTC)

Accent

<'Almost' because of my accent> - why is a Dutch accent less acceptable than, say, a Welsh one? Indeed I assumed you were a native speaker. Rothorpe (talk) 13:17, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. That formulation is a bit unfortunate. I don't think a Dutch accent is less acceptable than a Welsh one. There is a problem when people don't understand me because of my accent, but that rarely happens (in that respect, Glaswegian is far worse). It marks me as an outsider, but I don't care, and I'm not trying to change my accent. I probably couldn't do it even if I wanted to.

My command of informal language is noticeably worse than that of formal language, but that usually doesn't show on Wikipedia. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 16:18, 15 August 2008 (UTC)

d'Alembert's paradox

Dear Jitse, I restructured the article. If you like to: can you check and improve. Thanks, Crowsnest (talk) 13:16, 16 August 2008 (UTC)

Use of nobel icons

As someone who participated in the discussion regarding the use of Nobel icons earlier this year, I would like to inform you that there is a discussion regarding this matter. Your opinion is welcome at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style. Cheers, « Diligent Terrier [talk] 00:02, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

Positive-definite matrix

I'm confused why you reverted my edit in Positive-definite matrix. This was a simple rewording. I do not see any difference in content. Skippydo (talk) 19:35, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

I think you are misunderstanding the current text. That section goes:

The following properties are equivalent to M being a positive-definite matrix:

1. …
2. …
3. M is the Gram matrix of ${\textbf {x}}_{1},\ldots ,{\textbf {x}}_{n}$ …

In other words, it states the theorem:

M is positive definite if and only if M is a Gram matrix.

The bit that you changed ("M is the Gram matrix of …") is not a definition, but it is the second half of a theorem. After you changed it, the theorem becomes:

M is positive definite if and only if, given a set of linearly independent vectors ${\textbf {x}}_{1},\ldots ,{\textbf {x}}_{n},$ the matrix M defined by $M_{ij}={\textbf {x}}_{i}^{*}{\textbf {x}}_{j}$ is referred to as the Gram matrix.

That does not seem to make sense, so that is why I reverted your edit. Perhaps we should think about rewriting that section to make it easier to understand. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 20:42, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

Very good. Thank you. Skippydo (talk) 21:32, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

Re: Bernstein blending function redirect

Thank you for the redirect. I cannot fathom your embarrassment; you:

1. confirmed that my reasoning and presentation was sound, establishing a consensus, and
2. set up the redirect.

That leaves you with little to write about. So be it. There is no call for embarrassment in writing just enough to convey an idea and no more.

I'd like to remark that I'm relieved. I'm sure you've noticed that notation both reveals and obscures. To my mind, the article was a case of the latter rather than the former, but I felt obliged to make the case so that it would be sufficiently clear to a third party. In going at length, I thought that my presentation might lack terseness and venture into pedantry, but, the fact that the article was not registering as a content fork among mathematically inclined Wikipedians over the course of a year suggested to me that a basic, though wordy, presentation was in order — which inclines to embarrass me. However, I'm relieved to note that my presentation was clear to you, or, at least, clear enough for you. Take care. Gosgood (talk) 15:27, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

Smoothed analysis and Cooperative optimization

I probably am getting confused. Could you tell me what is your understanding of the title of this reference: “A Polynomial Time Algorithm for Solving NP-hard Problems in Practice” which is on the Cooperative optimization page. Delaszk (talk) 21:43, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

That's a good question. I'm not sure what the title means, NP-hard problems cannot be solved in polynomial time (to be precise, if a polynomial-time algorithm were found, it would prove P=NP and thus solve a major problem). So the key words in the title are "in practice".

The paper doesn't talk at all about polynomial time as far as I can see. It does show that the algorithm needs very few iterations on average to solve 98% of a set of 1000 randomly generated test problems. My personal opinion is that the title is a poor reflection of the contents of the paper. What do you think?

I'm not sure that a link from smoothed analysis to cooperative optimization is inappropriate. My feeling is that the work on cooperative optimization is based on heuristics and experiments. In contract, smoothed analysis is rigorous, in that theorems are proved, but it's not clear exactly what these theorems mean in practice. Cooperative optimization seems to belong to what I call the engineering approach, while smoothed analysis belongs to the mathematics approach. I believe that there are quite a number of heuristic algorithms that are claimed to be able to solve many NP-hard problems fast (for example, particle swarm optimization). I'm not sure that cooperative optimization is particularly good within the class of heuristic algorithms – at least, I have yet to see evidence of that – so I feel that we should not pick out one particular heuristic algorithm. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 13:34, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

I think that a type of problem which is NP-complete may have instances (choices of the parameters of the problem) for which it is not hard. For some such types, these may constitute a large percentage of the cases. So a claim that such a problem can be solved in polynomial time in, say, 98% of the cases (with 2% being exponentially difficult) may not necessarily be false.

It is also possible that they are replacing the full NP-complete problem with a related problem where only an approximate solution is needed (see Approximation algorithm). These can be much easier. For example, instead of asking for the very fastest route for making deliveries (see Travelling salesman problem), one might ask for a route which is at least as fast as 99.9% of the routes. JRSpriggs (talk) 16:34, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

Picking out one particular heuristic algorithm for inclusion in the smoothed analysis article is perhaps unjustifed, but whenever the article gets round to being expanded then I think it will mention that there are many heuristic algorithms with a similar claim to polynomial-time but have not yet been rigourously proved.Delaszk (talk) 19:48, 1 September 2008 (UTC)

JSTOR

Hi. I noticed that you were in the category of editors who have access to JSTOR. Do you mind doing a JSTOR search on Sharon Batt? Thanks! Pie is good ^{(Apple is the best)} 23:34, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

Sorry for the delay. In case you still need it, here are the results:

1. Review: Social Disease; Sharon Batt; Reviewed work(s): Breast Cancer: Society Shapes an Epidemic by Anne S. Kasper and Susan Ferguson; The Women's Review of Books, Vol. 18, No. 6 (Mar., 2001), pp. 14
2. Review; Cheryl L. Cole; Reviewed work(s): The Politics of Women's Bodies: Sexuality, Appearance and Behavior by Rose Weitz;Contemporary Sociology, Vol. 28, No. 5 (Sep., 1999), pp. 621-623
3. Review: Imperfectly Rational, Somewhat Economic; Ellen Chesler; Who Pays for the Kids? Gender and the Structures of Constraint by Nancy Folbre; The Women's Review of Books, Vol. 12, No. 5 (Feb., 1995), pp. 15-16
4. Front Matter; Social Problems, Vol. 31, No. 3, Thematic Issue on the Family (Feb., 1984)
5. Front Matter; Social Problems, Vol. 31, No. 4 (Apr., 1984)
6. Front Matter; Social Problems, Vol. 32, No. 1, Thematic Issue on Minorities and Social Movements (Oct., 1984)
7. Front Matter; Social Problems, Vol. 31, No. 5 (Jun., 1984)
8. Front Matter; Social Problems, Vol. 32, No. 2 (Dec., 1984)
9. Front Matter; The Women's Review of Books, Vol. 18, No. 6 (Mar., 2001), pp. 2-13
10. This Month's Bookshelf; The Women's Review of Books, Vol. 12, No. 3 (Dec., 1994), pp. 35

It's a bit hard for me at the moment to access the articles because I'm not at my office, so I'm not sure there's anything worthwhile in there. If you need access, please ask somebody else, or wait till Monday week (22 Sept). -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 11:31, 12 September 2008 (UTC)

I wouldn't mind the wait, as long as I get access to the text eventually. Pie is good ^{(Apple is the best)} 19:42, 12 September 2008 (UTC)

Hmmm, are you there? Pie is good ^{(Apple is the best)} 00:52, 30 September 2008 (UTC)

Further details: Ref. 1 is a review by Batt. Ref. 2 is a review of a book that Batt co-wrote a chapter in contemplating "women's vexed relationship to breasts". Ref. 3 is an ad for Patient no more: the politics of breast cancer. Refs 4–8 mention that Batt was "assistant to the editor" for those issues. Ref. 9 is an entry in the table of contents for Ref. 1, and has this bibliographic blurb:

SHARON BATT holds the Nancy Rowell Jackman Chair in Women's Studies at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She is the author of Patient No More: The Politics of Breast Cancer (Gynergy Books, 1994) and co-founded the advocacy group Breast Cancer Action Montreal. She is a member of the Putting People First Collaborative, an initiative by feminist women's health groups in the United States and Canada to counter the corporate message on health. Sierra Productions is developing a made-for-television film based on her work in the breast cancer movement.

Ref. 10 only mentions the book Patient no more: the politics of breast cancer with no further information. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 11:50, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

AfC bot

Hi Jitse,

You may or may not have noticed that we have recently been trailing a new process for unregistered users to submit articles for creation. (See the discussion at WikiProject Articles for creation/Proposed new entry process.) In the new process only requests for new redirects (and possibly new categories but these are rare) go on the Articles for creation/Today page. As there are only a few such requests per day it seems unnecessary to be archiving these pages every day. We can probably manually archive them weekly or fortnightly. I/we would be keen to hear your thoughts on this. Also, how easy would it be to adapt your bot to perform its "defanging" on submissions from the new process? (The new process is described on WikiProject Articles for creation/New instructions.) Best regards, MSGJ 14:55, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

Jitse? MSGJ 07:26, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

Sorry for the delay; I'm currently overseas. I turned the archiving bot off. I'll have a look at the new process when I have time; not sure when this will be but it may well be only in a week's time. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 09:33, 11 September 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, and no hurry, whenever you have time. On behalf of the AFC project thanks for all the work your bot has put in since 2006. And hopefully it will still be useful in the future :) By the way, I'm a maths researcher in Newcastle; nothing as difficult as numerical analysis though. MSGJ 13:06, 11 September 2008 (UTC)

Nothing to be sorry about!

Amusing that we were both doing the same thing at exactly the same time, you were just faster. RegardsJohn Z (talk) 17:21, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

aharon42 new editor-

Hi, my name is Aharon42 and I am a new editor. I would like to help add references and to edit the calculus pages. I tutor math but am not an expert in it ( I am going to medical school). I have some questions about how to type with math symbols, especially the more complicated ones. I would also like to work with more experienced editors like yourself. May I collaborate with you and ask you questions from time to time? I would be happy to do referencing or scut work in exchange for an internship. Cheersaharon42 (talk) 13:10, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

I have learned how to display the formulas by looking at the source where other people have done what I want to do. And I find Help:Displaying a formula to be quite useful when working in TeX. Also see Wikipedia:How to edit a page. JRSpriggs (talk) 00:20, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

Aharon42, you wrote to me at a time where I was overseas and really busy, so it took me a while to respond. I'll be most happy to try and help you with any questions you may have. Many of our articles on calculus could use a bit of work. I can also look over your shoulder and give you advice on a specific article if you would like, just tell me the article you're working on. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 11:35, 20 September 2008 (UTC)

Random math page?

I like this feature, but the link http://www.ma.hw.ac.uk/~jitse/wikipedia/rpim.php doesn't seem to work. Randomblue (talk) 13:42, 14 September 2008 (UTC)

Usually this kind of problem is due to a problem with the Internet being slow or the remote server being down temporarily. Neither is something which Jitse could do anything about. JRSpriggs (talk) 17:08, 14 September 2008 (UTC)

It's working again. As JRSpriggs said, I couldn't do anything about it. Nevertheless, I appreciate Randomblue's note; sometimes it is my fault. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 11:25, 20 September 2008 (UTC)

bot?

Your bot seems to have been sleeping for several days. Michael Hardy (talk) 18:05, 18 September 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, I hadn't noticed that. Too busy now that term is due to start. I had a look but it's not really clear yet what's going wrong, so it may take a couple of days before it comes back. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 11:23, 20 September 2008 (UTC)

Steffensen's method

Sorry, misread that as "one step of the secand method". Fredrik Johansson 12:59, 20 September 2008 (UTC)

Still waiting...

I'm still waiting for access to the documents listed here. Thanks!