User talk:David Farris

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Hi David, I'm happy to see you got an account finally; I was wondering who made the excellent edits to Floer homology and related articles. You might find it helpful to look at this welcome page.--C S 14:58, 9 October 2005 (UTC)

Contents

[edit] Hi David, take a glance at our userpage, please!

Erkabo 08:29, 13 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Pseudoholomorphic curves article merge

Welcome, David. You look familiar; I think we've met at some conference. Probably you're not checking your old anonymous talk page anymore and didn't see that I've merged Pseudoholomorphic curves into Pseudoholomorphic curve. (Disclosure: I am the original editor of the latter.) Let me know if you have a problem with this. Please continue your interesting contributions. Joshuardavis 13:44, 20 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Symplectic manifold

Hi David. Thanks for expanding the article at Symplectic manifold. I saw your cry for help and tried to improve the formatting of the mathematical expression. You can only use TeX by embedding it inside <math> ... </math> tags. For instance, <math> A \times (B \cup C) </math> gives A \times (B \cup C) . However, using this in running text (like $...$ in TeX) often looks terrible, so most people tend to use it only on seperate lines (like $$...$$ in TeX).

You can find some hints at Wikipedia:Manual of Style (mathematics). More maths-related help can be found on Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics, which is also a good place to ask questions.

Cheers, Jitse Niesen (talk) 12:37, 31 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Sources for Continuation map

Hello, good work on Continuation map, and thanks for the contribution. However, you forgot to add any references to the article. Keeping Wikipedia accurate and verifiable is very important, and there is currently a push to encourage editors to cite the sources they used when adding content. What websites, books, or other places did you learn the information that you added to Continuation map? Would it be possible for you to mention them in the article? Thank you very much. - SimonP 06:06, 4 December 2005 (UTC)

Hi David. I replaced "X cross I" by "X × I" in the article. To get this formula, you type: ''X'' &times; ''I'' . I'm telling you because I'm not 100% sure this is what you meant with "cross" (I have only once read about finite-dimensional Morse theory). This gives me the opportunity to urge you to follow Simon's request. One of the big problems that Wikipedia face is that people trust it only a little (rightly so, in my opinion). Adding references will not completely solve it, but it will help, and I expect that it's not that much work for you to think of a standard text book on Morse homology (which also lacked references, by the way) or even an article in which the continuation map is defined. I guess you're at a university so you should know all about references; don't worry about the citation style. Thanks. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 13:15, 4 December 2005 (UTC)

Your interpretation of cross is correct, thanks very much for fixing that!. Unfortunately, I don't offhand know which article of Floer in which it's defined (that's not where I learned it from), which is surely the right article to cite. I've added references to original papers in several other wikipedia articles that didn't have them, which is i believe more important than a textbook reference, which is all most math articles seem to have. -- David Farris

References to original papers are definitely nice to have. However, often they are hard to read or hard to get hold of, and it's easier to learn from a textbook or review paper; in that case, references to other sources are also useful. But any reference treating the material whatsoever is vastly preferable to no references at all. So that for adding references to Morse homology, and writing the article in the first place. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 22:43, 4 December 2005 (UTC) (to add your name and a timestamp, type four tildes like ~~~~ or click the button with a picture of a signature just above the edit box, see WP:SIG)

[edit] Transversality

Thank you for making this article more user-friendly. When I read the original intro I wasn't even sure it was about math. Cheers, BrainyBroad 11:49, 7 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Good work!

Thanks for your work on the Bollywood article. Good corrections, good writing. There's lots of work to be done on Indian cinema, so if you're interested, pitch in! Zora 13:01, 12 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] India related links

Great work on Sholay and Bollywood. I see that Zora has beaten me to it in commending you. I'm appending some links for wikipedians interested in Indian content, Welcome!!--Gurubrahma 13:59, 12 December 2005 (UTC)

Links for Wikipedians interested in India content

Newcomers: Welcome kit | Register: Indian Wikipedians | Network: Noticeboard (WP:INWNB) | Browse: India | Open tasks
Contribute content: Wikiportal India - Indian current events (WP:INCE) - India collaboration of the week (WP:INCOTW) - Category adoptions


[edit] Morse homology

David, I've just reworked the Morse homology article, I think for the better, but please check it to make sure everything I said is true! I'm no expert. Joshuardavis 22:48, 1 March 2006 (UTC)

David, your recent edit to Morse homology includes a mysterious (but tantalizing) sentence fragment "One nice approach", and some extra line breaks. Something got messed up? Joshua Davis 23:11, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

Hi David, would you like to take a look at the last section of Talk:Andreas_Floer?! Thank you! Rolf of Erkabo 05:41, 4 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] A spectral sequence between Khovanov homology and knot Floer homology?

Hi David,

I think part of your edit [1] on the Khovanov homology page is incorrect. It's only conjectured that there's a spectral sequence connecting Khovanov homology with knot Floer homology, as far as I'm aware (Conjecture 3.1 of arXiv:math.GT/0505662, in particular.) I've fixed it, at [2]. --ScottMorrison 19:09, 21 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Floer homology edits

Hi David,

Thanks for your post about my recent edits to the Floer homology page. I look forward to seeing what you write and will try to give some constructive criticism when I read it.

If I understand your comments correctly, you feel that I've been a little imprecise in the introduction that I wrote. I agree! I think, however, that it's important to keep the audience in mind. While Wikipedia's style manual asks that the introduction to an article be accessible to a general audience, I don't think that's possible here. But it should be possible to let a reader with some math background (e.g. an undergraduate) understand what area(s) of mathematics Floer homology belongs to and what problems it helps us study (counting fixed points of symplectomorphisms or constructing invariants of manifolds to understand their structure). I believe this point was made by a reader in the talk section of the article.

Knuth wrote (in the TeXbook?) that a good clear lie is often better than incomprehensible truth. Perhaps the place for more precision is in later sections.

Thanks for your contributions.

Cheers, David M. Austin (talk) 03:02, 3 January 2008 (UTC)