"Charles Matthews" <[email protected]> wrote in message news:[email protected]... > Over in the recondite if productive arena of WikiProject Mathematics, > fresh eyeballs have been looking over articles in areas that retain a > structure imposed up to five years ago, and not much liking what they > see. Basically there were POV forks introduced in areas, to calm down > edit wars, at a time when the "POV fork" concept was not so well > understood. I remember well the relief with which User:Kevin Baas was > given a sandbox for his treatment of tensors. > > So now it doesn't all look so good any more. This cuts to fundamentals, > because mathematicians feel that the topic sentence in an article should > serve as a definition. For comparison, I looked at [[quantum field > theory]] for a comparison: reads "Quantum field theory (QFT) provides a > theoretical framework for constructing quantum mechanical models of > systems classically described by fields or of many-body systems." So it > tells you what QFT does, not what it is (unsurprising, with the jury > still out). The mathematicians' take is clearly limited to areas where > you can say definitely what something is (i.e. the domain of axiomatic > definitions). > > That being said, there seems to be the scope for clarifying how an area > that is axiomatic should be organised according to our revered > principles of summary style (WP:SS). There are numerous instances, it > seems, where we have "menu style" in place of "summary style", i.e. > different treatments according to taste. The foundational issue does > seem to need addressing, and could cause quite some upheavals (such as > we have got out of the habit of living with). It could be that we now > accept articles with titles like [[introduction to string theory]], as > pedagogic stepping stones. But neutrality means, surely, that treatments > that are really "introduction to X from the POV of Y" are out of place, > or at least to be seriously deprecated.
In "The Edge of Tomorrow", Isaac Asimov did a good treatment of forks in mathematics. Three of them stem from variations on Euclid's fifth postlate, which defines parallel. It's an excellent book; alternates fact with tangential fiction. _______ Quantum Mechanics, n.: The dreams from which stuff is made. _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
