I’m sure some math grad could understand this but like nah this shit above my pay grade.
Ok I’m not being paid at all, but still …
There’s two kinds of theorems:
- 1+1=2
- In a lagomorphic skeueumorphism of the second Hamiltonian, the lagrangian of the resulting inverse transform cannot be bounded by the integral that defines the n-manifold of the refractive vector matrix in less than y cardinal degrees of freedom
And then the second theorem ends up being absolutely critical to agriculture somehow
I hate that the word salad you posted almost feels sensible but it’s just not. My brain tries to understand only to be witch slapped
Isn’t lagomorph just the scientific name for rabbits?
Yeah and skeuemorph is when a new design mimics a previous one. Like using the graphic of a torn piece of paper to put a citation on in a video essay.
I’m reminded of my undergrad having to go word by word. Ok. What does that mean?
It’s complete nonsense jargon
Yeah that’s a fairly common problem with math heavy Wikipedia articles. I’ve seen it discussed on Wikipedia discussion pages a few times. Of course the subject matter is often inaccessible to begin with but then those math explanations are often considerably harder to follow then text books which seems unnecessary.
As it appears most people writing articles on Wikipedia are trying very hard to look clever
I give the authors the benefit of the doubt and would say they just lack the necessary skill or coordination to explain and structure the articles better.
Text books have the advantage that they are made by small teams with teaching experience. So they know better how to structure things for learning and they have an easier time sticking to a consistent form.
Of course there is also some amount of refusal to accept improvements.
Hyperlink maxxing
Yeah, math wikipedia is pretty egregious. It’s not even that it’s for a technical audience, it’s more like it’s for an audience who already knows the thing. Or it’s just someone trying to show off how much jargon they can use to define a thing.
But it can be fixed! Look at the opening paragraph of Field_(mathematics) from 2015
In abstract algebra, a field is a nonzero commutative ring that contains a multiplicative inverse for every nonzero element, or equivalently a ring whose nonzero elements form an abelian group under multiplication. As such it is an algebraic structure with notions of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division satisfying the appropriate abelian group equations and distributive law. The most commonly used fields are the field of real numbers, the field of complex numbers, and the field of rational numbers, but there are also finite fields, fields of functions, algebraic number fields, p-adic fields, and so forth.
What the fuck is that, right?
And the version now:
In mathematics, a field is a set on which addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division are defined and behave as the corresponding operations on rational numbers do. A field is thus a fundamental algebraic structure that is widely used in algebra, number theory, and many other areas of mathematics.
For a long time, the editors of maths Wikipedia took objection to any ‘simplifying’ edits to make things more accessible, if they even slightly changed the meaning. Seems like a misunderstanding of what an encyclopedia is for, to me - overview first, expand afterwards. But I suppose mathematicians wouldn’t be mathematicians if they weren’t borderline obsessive. That first definition is probably more ‘correct’ although you’re quite correct that it’s almost unreadable.
Huh. Didn’t think that a field needed to have division defined on it, at least not in the ‘multiplication is the opposite of division’ way you’d expect. Learn something new every day.
It needs inverses i suspect
Huh. Didn’t think that a field needed to have division defined on it, at least not in the ‘multiplication is the opposite of division’ way you’d expect. Learn something new every day.
actually I dont think it does. A field has addition and multiplication as operations.
To get subtraction you have a negative element for each element in the field (such that
a + (-a) = 0). similarly there is an inverse of every element exept 0 (a * 1/a = 1)but then it might aswell be like defining 4 operations so thats maybe a better way to think about it
At least fields are an easy enough topic so once you see a example it clicks. But for the more niche topics where you really need a simple explanation cause the concept is complicated, the wiki writers will give you a definition that needs a whole degree in math to understand.
Even though the theorem is supposed to be usable by engineers and physicists too (cause you know, we also gotta use this shit to do our work).
There is genuinely a problem where anything remotely math related is just unreadable to a general audience, same for some philosophy stuff, and that is genuinely a failure of wikipedia. The solution would be the Simple English wikipedia being fucking mandatory on technical subjects, but no
I get that writing about certain topics for a “general audience” can be difficult or unrealistic, but these feel like they’re incomprehensible to anyone outside of the exact same sub-field.
as someone who understands half of those words (not doing a math degree), math wikipedia is nice when you are confronted with young-shit-fuck conjecture in a text and you don’t remember what it is. it gives you an overview and links to related concepts you might also want to refresh your memory on. only english is good though the other languages are unfortunately basically just stubs.
Yeah I get that a lot. It’s how I use math wiki as well. But when I genuinely want to learn something cause I gotta use it and need a quick reference It’s either
- This is the easiest thing ever (ex- topology article)
Or
- [Refer to picture in the post]
it’s not useful for learning at all. it’s not formatted to be educational it’s formatted to be informative. you go on something like the addition page and they have group theory stuff on it. it’s just not a good difficulty curve.
I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect some of the more advanced math on there to be accessible to a general audience, but it’d be nice if it was aimed at like… a math undergrad trying to understand something a year ahead of their curriculum, you know? Instead of someone who already knows all of it and just needs a refresher on which one’s the Young-Shit-Fuck Conjecture and which one’s the Cox–Zucker Machine.
Indistinguishable from word salad.
Yeah. The kind of person who understands this statement probably already knows what the theorem means.
Math Wikipedia is great when you’re already familiar with the language. I feel like most people who use math wikipedia are people in the field who use it to quickly look up technical definitions and properties. But that’s maybe not what an encyclopedia is for so I get why there’s a push to simplify the language to make it accessible for everyone. It would be nice if there was another website for people within the field that can be used to quickly look up the technical stuff
Tag yourself, I’m the Pontryagin dual group
I could not possibly be considered harmonic or positive-semidefinite so Imma have to go with locally compact.
