User talk:Matikkapoika

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Welcome!

Hello, Matikkapoika, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few good links for newcomers:

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! By the way, please be sure to sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~) to produce your name and the current date, or three tildes (~~~) for just your name. If you have any questions, you can post to the help desk or ask me on my talk page. Again, welcome! RJFJR 04:17, September 8, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Diophantine equation

Thank you for your change at Diophantine equation. One remark though. It is good if you use an edit summary when you make changes. At the beginning I was confused to why you did the change. Of course, after I clicked on the link to Catalan's conjecture I figured out what the matter was, but explaining that in the edit summary would have been nice. :) That's a small thing, but I thought I would let you know. Cheers, Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 22:13, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

OK. I try to remember that next time. --Matikkapoika 22:42, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Eisenstein's criterion

I undid your change at Eisenstein's criterion. There, you replaced the elementary statement of Eisenstein's criterion with its more general form in abstract rings. I think that may confuse people who don't know these concepts. On Wikipedia, it is good to keep things as elementary as possible, and any generalizations better be in their own paragraph or section, prefereable towards the bottom. If you wish, you could write such a new section in Eisenstein's criterion explaining how it works for abstract rings, and providing maybe an example or two. Thanks. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 17:00, 16 February 2006 (UTC)

There is no point to write some piece of information twice. Your version is a special case of my version. --Matikkapoika 22:28, 16 February 2006 (UTC)
Being more general is not always helpful. By insisting on the general case you may be cutting the article readership in half if not more; as almost all college students understand polynomial division and know about integers/rational numbers, but very few know about factorial rings and the like. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 23:09, 16 February 2006 (UTC)
But I can write an article about factorial rings if you want. The whole idea of doing mathematics is to generalize results. I do not know how many modern mathematics paper you have read or wrote but in my opinion the results must be as general as possible. It looks like English Wikipedia is not a good place for me. I think I should read more advanced texts. Bye. --Matikkapoika 01:05, 17 February 2006 (UTC)
I have a PhD in mathematics, if that tells you anything. Now, the purpose of mathematics is not at all about generalizing results; it is about giving answers to problems. Sometimes generalizations are an awesome tool, as it allows one to see the the true reason a mathematical statement is true, and to work on an entire class of problems at the same time. Sometimes generalizatons are fruitless, as people get lost in more and more abstract domains, losing all connection with why a certain piece of mathematics is important. And a general result is sometimes too general to understand its true significance.
I may say that you are too quick in deciding if Wikipedia is not the place for you; I would suggest you wait a month or two before making an opinion. But indeed, if you do decide to contribute, you have to be aware that this is a general purpose encyclopedia, read by many people, and where serious mathematicians are a minority. That does not mean serious mathematics is out; rather that one should always keep an eye on the acessibility of articles.
I would have loved a section in that aticle on factrorial rings with a beautiful application to a serious problem, like polinomials of two variables (polynomials in one variable with the coefficients in the factorial ring of polynomials in one variable). That would have been a productive generalization. What you wrote instead was a fruitless generalization, and that's the reason I reverted it. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 02:02, 17 February 2006 (UTC)
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