Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Bailey Notation

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The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was delete. Can't sleep, clown will eat me 01:07, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Bailey Notation

Bailey Notation (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs) – (View log)

unreferenced notation, fails the Google test, WP:N, WP:NOR -- Kl4m T C 00:20, 3 October 2007 (UTC)


With all due respect, it was not made up. I happen to be related to the designer, and (yes i did read about personal opinions and bias) i think i did keep the article quite neutral. The problem is that most of the scientific and mathematical community have not yet heard much about it, as he only came up with the idea in the beginning of this year. However, it is becoming more and more widely used.
If you want to talk to him, i can give you an e-mail address for him; he normally checks his e-mail at the university every evening. I have checked with him that it is fine to give you this one: martinpbailey@yahoo.co.uk
Looking at it from another point of view, though, is this the sort of thing a schoolboy would dream up? Teacosythesecond 01:05, 3 October 2007 (UTC)

  • Keep until an expert can be recruited to i) verify the existence of this article and ii) to attest to the notability of this notation. There does appear to be a mathematician by the name of Martin Bailey who is Chair of the Conference commitee of the Mathematical Association. A search of Google scholar [1] attests to the existence of four different types of Bailey notation (we might need a disambig if we keep this one), one being a method to notate the branches of trees, one that appears to be an early system of phonetics, one for the notation of minerals and one which appears with regard to mathematics the description of one paper reads "For the ordinary and the generalised hypergeometric series we found it convenient to use Bailey's notation". —Preceding unsigned comment added by KTo288 (talk • contribs) 01:37, 3 October 2007 (UTC) Sorry forgot my sig.KTo288 01:49, 3 October 2007 (UTC)
  • Delete I bow to the superior knowledge of others.KTo288 08:47, 3 October 2007 (UTC)

Note, a request for help has been placed at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Mathematics.KTo288 01:49, 3 October 2007 (UTC)

  • Delete. It's good that KTo288 asked for help at WT:WPM (I came from there), but his/her reasoning is completely wrong. No expert is needed to verify this article or attest to notability. What is needed is multiple reliable sources. According to the article creator, this was made up by the inventor at the beginning of this year and "most of the scientific and mathematical community have not yet heard much about it". Ok, so there's a claim that "it is becoming more and more widely used". Well, then let's see the use! Cite some papers. Otherwise I don't see why this any different than creating an article on something I made up several months ago and am trying to publish now (I am a professional mathematician). I would think if I did so, it would be reasonable to reject it based on WP:NOR and I don't see why this case is any different. --Horoball 02:11, 3 October 2007 (UTC)
    • Comment Thankyou to you and everyone else from WT:WPM. KTo288 08:47, 3 October 2007 (UTC)
  • Delete. The article is completely uncited. No notability or verifiability. Doctormatt 02:26, 3 October 2007 (UTC)
  • Delete as either non-notable, original research or hoax. I haven't found a reference to indicate this exists. The author says it was invented this year. All Google scholar hits [2] by KTo288 are older and appear unrelated. Saying "Bailey's notation" in a paper does not by itself indicate that this is a real name for a notation. It often just indicates that the author chose to use the same notation as in a listed reference by somebody called Bailey. The paper with "For the ordinary and the generalised hypergeometric series we found it convenient to use Bailey's notation" has a reference to "W. N. Bailey, Generalized hypergeometric series, Cambridge, 1935". Bailey Notation currently has two references. The first [3] is about Graham's number with nothing about Bailey notation. The second is only given as "Large Number Theories, by Maxamillion Taylor and Jane P. Schäfer (published September 2007)". No place of publication is given and I haven't found it. "Maxamillion Taylor" has a single Google hit [4] on a dead goldfish, and "Maxamillion" is a suspicious name for the alleged author of "Large Number Theories". "Jane P. Schäfer" has zero Google hits.[5] PrimeHunter 02:29, 3 October 2007 (UTC)
  • Thankyou for your comments. Martin Bailey is my grandfather and a great man, but i happen to know his greatest fear is to be forgotten about when he dies. His health is failing (he is 69), and he knows he doesnt have long left. I tried (and i think i succeeded) in keeping personal values and opinions out of the article, but i can see now that i need to be patient and wait until more of the world hears about it. I know that even if it is only by an obscure notation, my grandfather will be happy to be remembered. Unfortunatley, I know very little personally about it; most of what i wrote was with the help of Martin and my own problem solving skills (this was the main reason for my lack of refrences). I will try again at a later date, when more papers etc have been published and there is a space in wiki for it.
In response to the comment on the authorship of the book, I'm afraid i didn't have it handy at the time of writing - i had intended to edit it later. I believe i may have misspelled their names. Anyway, thats beside the point now.
Thankyou again. Teacosythesecond 02:40, 3 October 2007 (UTC)
  • Comment: for what it's worth, Large Number Theories does not appear to be the exact title of any existing book; with electronic catalogs, it's hard to find approximate titles. If the author can come back with the real title and authorship, that would be good. For what it's worth, this notation does seem a slight improvement on the existing notations; but WP is not the place to campaign for it. A letter to American Mathematical Monthly would be better, but this may simply not be enough of an improvement to catch on. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 16:01, 5 October 2007 (UTC)
  • Delete obviously, as no references exist. – Smyth\talk 00:00, 7 October 2007 (UTC)
  • Delete. No sources, and the Google searches offered above by previous commenters suggest that no others are likely to be found. EdJohnston 17:33, 7 October 2007 (UTC)
  • Comment: Bailey notation is all but useless anyway. As far as I can make out its sole purpose is to make expressing Graham's number marginally easier, but explaining Bailey notation is more complicated than explaining Graham's number. Bailey notation cannot express any other notable nontrivial whatsoever. The article itself contains several extremely obvious mathematical errors which I have removed but will not work on further until this is decided, and explains Bailey notation in a fairly confusing and contradictory fashion, not very rigorously at all. In any case, we already have Jonathan Bowers' array notation, which is better-designed, vastly more powerful, and equally non-notable. I therefore find it extremely difficult to believe Bailey notation will every attain the notability requirements. -- SamSim 23:01, 7 October 2007 (UTC)


The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.