User talk:Triathematician

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Contents 1 Initial context setting 2 The latest version of Limits 3 Articles you might like to edit, from SuggestBot 4 topology

[edit] Initial context setting

It's really inappropriate to begin a Wikipedia article by saying "Given a Lie group G,...", as if you could assume the reader is a mathematician. You need to tell the lay reader immediately that mathematics is what the article is about. I began reading an article titled schismatic temperament, and being familiar with the usual meaning of the word schismatic and the usual meaning of the word temperament, I thought maybe it was an article about a psychiatric disorder. I got all the way to the end of the first sentence without finding out otherwise. It was actually about musical tuning. I put in some introductory context-setting words "In music, ...". That's all it takes. Michael Hardy (talk) 02:57, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the info. Triathematician (talk) 19:47, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] The latest version of Limits

Yes, I like your most recent version best of all. Putting the informal and non-specific description before the more specific (though still informal) description does alleviate my concern about its accuracy. Silly rabbit (talk) 18:56, 4 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Articles you might like to edit, from SuggestBot

SuggestBot predicts that you will enjoy editing some of these articles. Have fun!

Stubs Lake Braddock Secondary School Mathematical statistics Marjorie Rice Fiber bundle Bracket polynomial GROMACS Carl Sandburg Middle School Self-deception William Thurston Manifold decomposition Atiyah–Singer index theorem Polylogarithmic Similarity invariance Identity map Spinor bundle Holmes Middle School (Fairfax County, Virginia) Iverson bracket Infix notation Principal part

Cleanup Falls Church High School Implicit function Eye of Sauron Merge Lists of integrals Spin (physics) Chaos Add Sources George C. Marshall High School H-B Woodlawn Langley High School Wikify Knot invariant Stream processing Dual-mode phone Expand Signature of a knot Alonzo Church Riemann tensor (general relativity)

SuggestBot picks articles in a number of ways based on other articles you've edited, including straight text similarity, following wikilinks, and matching your editing patterns against those of other Wikipedians. It tries to recommend only articles that other Wikipedians have marked as needing work. Your contributions make Wikipedia better -- thanks for helping.

If you have feedback on how to make SuggestBot better, please tell me on SuggestBot's talk page. Thanks from ForteTuba, SuggestBot's caretaker.

P.S. You received these suggestions because your name was listed on the SuggestBot request page. If this was in error, sorry about the confusion. -- SuggestBot (talk) 18:40, 11 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] topology

While I agree that an article intro should speak to the average reader, I strongly believe that an introduction should not make statements that are false. There are plenty of examples of topology (the donut coffee cup being the most familiar) that convey some of the feel of topology without making statements that are incorrect. Rick Norwood (talk) 12:22, 20 March 2008 (UTC)

I appreciate your comments, but I disagree. The topology article has been fairly stable for a long time, and while I am sure it can be improved, I do not think it needs a major rewrite.

When I first came to Wikipedia, I spent my first year editing articles on mathematics topics that were not currently covered in Wikipedia. Only then did I begin to work on a few of the more important articles, such as topology. Rick Norwood (talk) 12:33, 21 March 2008 (UTC)