User talk:R.e.b.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Archive
Archives

/2005 /2006 /2007 /2008


Contents

[edit] Abbreviations of journal names

I see you're editing the Harvard citations template:

At Wikipedia talk:Citing sources I've attempted a sort of case against the conventional practice of abbreviating journal names. Have you seen that? Do you have any views on this? Michael Hardy (talk) 02:02, 20 April 2008 (UTC)

I usually abbreviate journal names because I am cut-and-pasting them from some other source, and am too lazy to expand them (it's tiresome enough formatting them correctly without this extra burden). It might be slightly better to have journal names in full if there is no standard abbreviation but I think it will be hard to persuade anyone to do this rather tedious job. Probably someone will write a bot to do this sooner or later, so I would just wait. R.e.b. (talk) 04:06, 20 April 2008 (UTC)
I'm happy to fix any math references that need fixing. I think Ann Math and TransAm are pretty standard, and I take it these are in the template talk namespace, so don't need real fixing? I definitely agree that it is better to give full journal names, but this is just one of hundreds of cleanup tasks.
One reason I am happy to fix references is because it is so *easy*. I use zeteo and MathSciNet. First find the article at MathSci, export as BibTeX, then paste the bibtex into zeteo, fix anything missing (like DOI or online URL or wikilink for author), and then zeteo formats the {{citation}} for you. If you need the same article again later, it is easy to look it up.
On the other hand, I am all for division of labor. I would prefer R.e.b. spend his time writing well referenced articles, and leave expanding abbreviations to bots or wiki gnomes like myself. I enjoy checking and formatting references as it a good excuse to read them. JackSchmidt (talk) 04:32, 20 April 2008 (UTC)

Maybe Jakob Scholbach would be willing to set up zeteo so it automatically expands journal abbreviations. R.e.b. (talk) 14:46, 20 April 2008 (UTC)

Annals of Mathematics
Abbreviated title Ann. of Math.
Discipline {{{discipline}}}
Language English
Publication details
Publisher {{{publisher}}} ({{{country}}})
Indexing
ISSN 0003-486X
Hi. Here is the reply to your post at my talk page: What exactly do you want me to do? At this time, zeteo does have a field for an abbreviated journal name. If somebody happens to add an item with journal name "Ann. of Math. (2)", for example, it will instead use the full name "Annals of Mathematics. Second Series". So this should already work. On the other hand, what I wanted to do, is adding all journals (also mentioned in the thread) to the database including their ISSNs, so that people don't have to add the stuff. But there are also many misspelled names etc. Does this help? I'm currently also thinking of other means, such as scanning all WP articles for these journal templates such as so that we can get all information somewhere available. Jakob.scholbach (talk) 13:40, 21 April 2008 (UTC)
As an addendum: the abbreviated journal names usually come from MathSciNet bibtex items. Most entries in the db are, however, the result of parsing the citation templates present in WP articles (math, and partly physics, I'm just doing physics). So, most journals don't feature an abbreaviated name. As I said, I will try to fill up the db with all math journals, taken from this list. But this list is probably far from exhaustive. Jakob.scholbach (talk) 14:07, 21 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Abdelazer

Greetings. E's skills of diplomacy are not what they used to be, as evidenced by my user page. 131.111.24.95 (talk) 19:12, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

Answer not a fool according to his (or her) folly, lest thou also be like unto him (or her). R.e.b. (talk) 21:16, 29 May 2008 (UTC)
Indeed. In hindsight, some stones are better left unturned. 131.111.24.95 (talk) 15:44, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Codegrees of complex reflections groups?

Regarding this very useful page Complex reflection group, any chance that someone will add in to the table a new column containing the also very useful "codegrees" of the irreducible complex reflection groups, available at the end of this article by Broue, Malle, Rouquier. -- Vic Reiner, Univ. of Minnesota 128.101.152.22 (talk) 20:03, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

I've added this reference to the page. The codegrees would indeed be good to add to the table, but I'm too lazy to do this now. This being wikipedia, there is nothing to stop you adding them yourself. R.e.b. (talk) 21:16, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

Nothing stopping me except underconfidence about my Wiki skills, so I'm very grateful that you did add them-- thank you! Vic R. 128.101.152.22 (talk) 7:36, 3 June 2008

[edit] Anti-knot?

I vaguely seem to recall that you may have worked on one or more articles related to the topic of this one: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Anti-knot. I could be wrong. I suspect that this non-existence result already appears in more than one article. Can you shed any light? Michael Hardy (talk) 06:16, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

No, I havn't worked on this article, which as C S says seems to be little more than some hopelessly garbled attempts to prove a standard result. Come to think of it, I did indeed write an article related to this: you may be thinking of Mazur swindle. R.e.b. (talk) 00:06, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

That's the one I had in mind. If you hadn't identified it, I don't know if I'd ever have found it. I'm thinking about whether the title should redirect to some other article, and I couldn't clearly remember what I had seen. Thanks. Michael Hardy (talk) 00:53, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Problem of Apollonius

Hi R.e.b.!

We're preparing the problem of Apollonius for FA, and we need a reference for the connection to the circle method, which you added on May 7th to the Applications section? If you could come up with one, that's be great! More generally, if you had any suggestions for the article, I'd appreciate it very much. Thanks muchly, Willow (talk) 09:34, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

The example I added is somewhat bogus, as it only uses the easy special case when the three initial circles are tangent, so maybe the honest thing to do is just delete it. If you still want to keep it, anything about the circle method would do as a reference; for example, sections 5.5 and 5.6 of
Apostol, Tom M. (1990), Modular functions and Dirichlet series in number theory (2nd ed.), Berlin, New York: Springer-Verlag, ISBN 978-0-387-97127-8 
The article Ford circle has a nice picture of what is going on. R.e.b. (talk) 00:22, 2 June 2008 (UTC)