Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/A-class rating/2008

The following discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Pi (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs) review
Nominated by: —Disavian (^talk/_contribs) 18:25, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

I'm closing this as a no pass. Interest has unfortunately died off (perhaps reverting vandalism is also taking its toll), and progress seems to have stopped. More pictures would be nice, including inscribing polygons in circles. Also, as mentioned below, there needs to be something said about the fascination with Pi in popular culture. I think some of the comments below indicate that really what is needed here is a re-thinking of the whole article's organization. Just patching things up locally is not the way to go. A global picture needs to be planned out first. --C S (talk) 20:53, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

Overall, the article is very sound. There are a few more copyediting issues I will look into. The section Calculating π could use a diagram of an inscribed polygon. A few things need references to meet the scientific citation guidelines. The spirit of these guidelines includes giving a citation whenever a claim is made that something was done by a particular person or in a particular year.

• Ferdinand von Lindemann in 1882
• Johann Heinrich Lambert proved the irrationality of π in 1761,
• Adrien-Marie Legendre proved in 1794 that also π² is irrational.
• Leonhard Euler in 1735 solved the famous Basel problem
• John von Neumann used ENIAC to compute 2037 digits of π in 1949
• Additional thousands of decimal places were obtained in the following decades, with the million-digit milestone passed in 1973
• The methods have been used by Yasumasa Kanada and team to set most of the π calculation records since 1980, up to a calculation of 206,158,430,000 decimals of π in 1999.

It's good to see this important article being improved so much. — Carl (CBM · talk) 16:38, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

Nice article. Keep going! Some ideas:

• why do you separate "Numerical value" from "Calculating pi"?
• The link "See also: history of mathematical notation" seems to belong to the 'The letter π' section.
• Memorizing digits is not really a historical subject. (Actually, I think you devote too much space to this topic here. I'd suggest to trim down this section quite a bit and merge it into a new section "pi in popular culture" or something).
• Eulers identity deserves (imo) a more central place. It's so beautiful.
• The 'fascination with the number [which] has even carried over into culture at large.' is not at all covered in the text. I would like to see this somewhere. There is an interesting German general audience book on Pi by Jörg Arndt, Christoph Haenel (I dont know if there is an English edition).
• The list of (especially the physical) formula where pi shows up is relatively little compelling. Try to trim down while increasing the (not yet extant) part which conveys some of the fascination you are referring to earlier.
• I faintly remember that the study of these constants was considered to be a divine discipline in early times. (Have a look at the German article). Ptolemaic image comes to my mind. It may not be terribly important mathematics-wise, but cultural-historically it is.
• "So, in particular, π is not affected by the shape of the universe"? Sounds correct to me, but pretty weird / superfluous. 43 also does not change when the universe shall change one day. Yet it is not mentioned at 43 :-)
• I would like to see a (short) indication why the definitions via circumference vs. area of the circle give the same answer.
• In general, if the article gets too long by elaborating on the above aspects, just trim down the (n+1)st stage of approximation of the numbers of pi. Jakob.scholbach (talk) 17:23, 11 December 2007 (UTC)
• Subdividing the references section into parts would really help the reader who wants to find, say, the basics about elementary geometrical aspects of pi. Journals should be given with an ISSN. Jakob.scholbach (talk) 17:26, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

Thanks to both of you for your suggestions! With an exam on Friday, I don't have time to address these things immediately, but I have transcluded the review on the talk page in the hopes that someone else can help.

• Jakob.scholbach: The way the references system works doesn't allow you to section it into parts, AFAIK. The references section isn't actually that long, so the length of that section isn't too much of a concern. I'd actually say that the longer the ref section, the better, as it means that the article is more verified.

—Disavian (^talk/_contribs) 18:53, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

Hey, some 60 refs is not long?? It is actually pretty long if you need to look for an introduction of pi in general euclidian geometry, say. Moreover, using the templates refbegin and refend, as well as reflist allows separation between specific refs and more general ones. (see Elephant for an example). Moreover the harvtxt templates are a solution. Also, please keep in mind that references serve the purpose to invite the reader to find out more. Given a concrete question, the references section should direct the reader to the reference which probably answers this question without urging the reader to read the whole article above. The longer the ref section, the better but also the more structured the better. Jakob.scholbach (talk) 15:01, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

Are all the major objections addressed? It seems to be the case to me. Perhaps it's time to close this with a pass. --C S (talk) 13:27, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

Agreed. Visit me at Ftbhrygvn (Talk|Contribs|Log|Userboxes) 08:27, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

Actually, I'm glad I didn't close it because there are still some problems. Jakob noted above that the subsection "naturality" in section "Advanced properties" seems superfluous. I agree. I can't really make heads or tails of why we need a section on this. The entire content (once you trim away the nonessentials) is "Pi is not a physical constant. It is mathematical. Although it appears in many physics formulas, if you define things like units a different way, they won't appear." Do we really need a section on this? A sentence mentioning that it is not a physical constant (somewhere in the article) and another in the physics applications section should more than suffice. --C S (talk) 19:37, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page, such as the current discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.