User:Chan-Ho Suh/todo/notability guide for mathematicians

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I will start off with assuming that not every mathematician should have a biography in Wikipedia. See WP:Notability for reasons on why notability should be an issue. Mathematics, being a rather technical subject at times, offers additional reasons in particular on why non-notable mathematicians should not be included. Non-notable math bios open the door to cluttering the mathematics portion of Wikipedia with unimportant mathematics. In the interest of accuracy and verifiability, enormous amounts of time are either wasted on checking the work (since it can be hard work to go through the mathematics), or it is left to languish, ridiculous or completely non-interesting though it may be (since mathematics is intimidating to non-mathematicians).

The purpose here is to lay out some notability guidelines for mathematicians. At this point, I can only offer guidelines for the so-called pure mathematicisn, as that is where my experience lies. I will also assume that the notability of the mathematician rests primarily on his/her mathematical work, not on other factors, e.g., being called the Unabomber or writing a famous children's book.

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[edit] Number of backlinks

One useful criterion so that we don't lose sight of the point of requiring "notability" is to look at the backlinks. Are there any? If not, why not? Sometimes it's very clear that a bio should be included because time after time one sees a name linked in red and finally someone makes an article. In those cases, the person's contributions are substantial enough that people with no interest or knowledge of the mathematician are creating articles on him/her.

Remember that we're trying to create an encyclopedia that will be useful to people seeking to expand their knowledge. Is creating a bio on someone whose work is referenced frequently a useful contribution? Many mathematicians, great as they are, are not so interesting to write or read about. At best, their bios will be stubs listing the theorems they've proven. However, there is utility here. Even the list of contributions provides a particular way of navigating those articles that may be interesting. For example, it is sometimes illuminating to see that mathematician X worked on subject A and also subject B. There are insights to be gained that may not be garnered from just perusing the mathematics articles. Additionally if a mathematician is particularly important, the bio may spur someone to write on some of this mathematician's contributions that did not make it into Wikipedia thus far.

So I would regard having some backlinks, say, to substantive articles, as a pretty good indicator that the bio should be kept. The situation is more difficult if there are no backlinks. I have run across this situation many times, and in a large number of those cases, the article was just a stub or abbreviated cv, with little sign it would ever be more. No indication is given of the mathematician's specific contributions, e.g. a theorem. Sometimes the creator just did a bad job of starting the article in which case the remaining parts of this essay ought to help figure out what is going on.

[edit] Notable publications

Mathematical work is often published, and in the interest of WP:Verifiability, the publications should occur in reliable sources such as peer-reviewed mathematical journals. What constitutes a notable publication? First, a big hint is the prestige of the journal. For pure mathematics, the #1 journal in terms of prestige is the Annals of Mathematics. The prestige is significant enough that merely a single publication in this journal should satisfy most notability concerns you may have.

Here is a list of the relative prestige of the top handful of prestigious journals in pure mathematics:

  1. Annals of Mathematics
  2. Publications Mathématiques de l'IHÉS
  3. Journal of the American Mathematical Society
  4. Inventiones Mathematicae

As mentioned above, publication in the Annals is particularly prestigious. But having several publications in these other journals is a sufficient mark of distinction and editors should feel confident that including their bios and articles on their research is providing a useful service.

There are also a number of less prestigious, but internationally-renowned journals. These are not ranked since that would not only be highly contentious, but also be misleading.

(need to expand list!)

All the above are what are called "general audience", meaning that a very smart and knowledgable mathematician ought to be able to read a minute part of the abstract for the paper. There are further more specialized journals, some of which are highly respected in their sub-discipline but not well-known in the general mathematical community. If further scrutiny of these kinds of journals is required, the best thing to do is stop by a WikiProject such as Wikiproject Mathematics and ask for some help.

[edit] Number of publications

It should be noted that the number of publications can be highly misleading. For example, in most areas of mathematics, conference proceedings undergo a great deal less scrutiny and one can inflate one's list of publications by publishing many articles in conference proceedings. It is fair to say that a pure mathematician having just two Annals publications (and several other high profile publications) is often considered to be far more important and influential than a mathematician with even a few hundred publications mainly consisting of papers in obscure journals and conference proceedings. One should keep in mind that publishing several papers a year, especially in some subdisciplines, is not uncommon and that in many cases, longevity will lead to a substantive publication list, regardless of merit.

[edit] Notable positions

There are some very prestigious tenured positions at particular universities. Determining notability of some mathematicians can be difficult if they eschew the normal means of establishing their credentials. For example, they may turn down awards or not publish their work preferring to just distribute preprints through either the arXiv or informally through other mathematicians. Luckily, oftentimes such mathematicians will have a prestigious tenured position which affords them the luxury of avoiding the "publish or perish" paradigm. Thus their notability can be established through the simple fact that they are tenured in a top-ranking mathematics department.

[edit] U.S.

  • Princeton
  • MIT
  • Harvard
  • Berkeley
  • Stanford

These are the top departments in the U.S. It is highly unlikely, if not impossible, for any full professor in such a department to not have done a significant piece of research.

[edit] United Kingdom

  • Cambridge University
  • Oxford University

(need to expand the above!)

[edit] Awards

See List_of_medals#Mathematics for a list of well-known mathematics prizes. If, for example, a mathematician's only claim to fame is to have won an award not on this list, this should be looked at very cautiously.

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