Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mathematics

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any, every, some

• For every number $\varepsilon >0,\ldots$0,\ldots }"/>

• For some number $\delta >0,\ldots$0,\ldots }"/>

It is clear that in standard English usage, the words "every" and "some" as used above are respectively universal and existential quantifiers.

"Any" can be a universal quantifier, as in:

"Any fool can see that."

(But "Anyone can be elected chair of the committee" doesn't mean the same thing as "Everyone can be elected chair of the committee.)

"Any" can also be an existential quantifier, as in:

• There isn't anyone here who can answer that question.

• Is there anyone here who can answer that question?

• If anyone knows the answer, please step forward.

I thought that there are three contexts in which "any" is an existential quantifier:

• negations,
• questions, and
• conditional clauses,

those being the three exhibited above.

But then in the article titled Causality conditions, I found this:

• A manifold satisfying any of the weaker causality conditions defined above may fail to do so if the metric is given a small perturbation.

Here, "any" is used as an existential quantifier, and it is not clear to me that it is one of those three kinds. Thus my list appears to be incomplete.

A grammar question rather than a math question, but one to which mathematicians are in more desparate need to pay attention than is perhaps anyone else.

What should be added to this list? Michael Hardy (talk) 18:51, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

In the above quotation, "any" is a universal quantifier. D.Lazard (talk) 19:02, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

You can still see "any" here as a universal quantifier, in the sense that "for all of these weaker causality conditions, a manifold satisfying said condition can fail to do so if <rest of sentence>." I would argue that the existential quantifier here is actually hidden in "can", in the sense that "a manifold satisfying said condition can fail to do so if..." is shorthand for "there exists a manifold satisfying said condition that fails to do so if..." GalacticShoe (talk) 19:09, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

Because pushing a negation through a $\forall$ flips it to a $\exists$ and vice-versa, examples involving negation — including "not", "fails", "never", etc. — can be argued about endlessly. It seems to me that math textbook authors solve this problem by stating each definition and theorem as clearly as they can, relying on the proof to clarify the exact meaning of a theorem in a pinch, and tolerating looser talk in discussions between theorems. Mgnbar (talk) 19:30, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

The correct phrasing is "for any (every) said condition, there exists a manifold satisfying it that fails to do so if...". So the hidden existential quantifier does not refer to the same thing. D.Lazard (talk) 19:36, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

The meaning of the expression "a manifold satisfying any of the weaker causality conditions defined above" is a manifold which falls into one or more of the classes defined by the previous causality conditions; as previously stated in the article, if it falls into one of them, it also falls into the previous classes, as they are nested with stricter conditions listed later. But the manifolds of particular interest for that section are the strongly causal ones (the immediately preceding condition). My understanding based on the article's text is that "stably causal" means a strongly causal manifold which remains strongly causal under any possible perturbation of a chosen (arbitrarily small) magnitude. Or another way of saying this: if a manifold is "stably causal", then there exists some specific size of perturbation for which every smaller perturbation of the manifold preserves the strong causality property. From what I can tell the perturbations of other kinds of causality-condition-satisfying manifolds are not at issue (beyond the initial mention, for context, that for each of the earlier conditions there exists some manifold satisfying it which can be perturbed into not satisfying it by an arbitrarily small perturbation). –jacobolus (t) 19:41, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

Some months ago, the was consensus that "any" should be avoided (in order not to require the reader to be familiar with discussions like the above one), see MOS:MATH#ANY. - Jochen Burghardt (talk) 20:10, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

Rephrasing this particular passage is more complicated than the examples given there, as it expresses a somewhat tricky logical claim. I don't think this one is really ambiguous in context, but it could be rephrased as e.g. "For each of the weaker causality conditions defined above, there are some manifolds satisfying the condition which can be made to violate it by arbitrarily small perturbations." –jacobolus (t) 21:43, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

Jacobulus last suggestion is perfect. To answer Micheal Hardy's original question, there is yet another sense of any: in this case, it's "menu choice": "pick any one item from this menu". Menu choice is similar to exclusive-or, but is not truth-valued, it is object-valued. Menu choice shows up as a fragment of linear logic (for example, the quantum no-cloning theorem, which says "you can only have one of these") but also in vending machines "for a dollar you pick one item" and in mutex locks in computing (one user at a time.) Menu choice is a really cool tool in foundational logic. 67.198.37.16 (talk) 07:34, 4 March 2024 (UTC)

Original research on Wikipedia

Hello, I am a mathematician from the German Wikipedia. There we had recently a user that basically "misused" the German Wikipedia to publish his own "research" (if you can call it even that...). Basically the user computed a LOT of things with Wolfram Alpha and published all his computations in the German Wikipedia to a point where the articles became unreadable. He even invented his own names for functions and the user - according to his own words - does not have a formal degree in mathematics. In my opinion most of the stuff was not even relevant for an encylopedia. In the end a lot of his entries were deleted and after a heated discussion the user got banned. Long story short the user was/is also active in the English Wikipedia (see Special:Contributions/Reformbenediktiner). I am not so familliar with the English Wikipedia policies but I know that original research is also not allowed, so I thought I should maybe notify people here and they could at least have a look at some of the affected articles like for example Theta function, Rogers–Ramanujan continued fraction, Fubini's theorem#Example Application, Jacobi elliptic functions, Rogers–Ramanujan identities etc. If you see some math in color, that was probably done by this user. In the German Wikipedia the user did not use any source material and just computed things with Wolfram Alpha. Whether it all was correct or not, I am not even sure. It would be good if people would have a look at the affected English articles as well and give their judgement.--Tensorproduct (talk) 19:42, 22 February 2024 (UTC)

FYI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Reformbenediktiner PatrickR2 (talk) 19:48, 22 February 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for this report. I just removed a lot of this from Poisson summation formula (two long and almost entirely unsourced sections). Probably the others listed above and the contributions of this user need similar scrutiny. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:28, 22 February 2024 (UTC)

Yes, unfortunately every post by him needs scrutiny. In the German Wikipedia eventually almost all of his math edits were removed. Many users asked him many times to provide sources but he kept on editing without providing any source. It seems to be the same here as Jacobolus' example below shows--Tensorproduct (talk) 21:18, 22 February 2024 (UTC)

Example discussion: Talk:Lemniscate_elliptic_functions#Sources? –jacobolus (t) 20:49, 22 February 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for letting us know. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 21:03, 22 February 2024 (UTC)

Here was another recent discussion: Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Mathematics/Archive/2023/Jul#Theta_function. --JBL (talk) 18:58, 2 March 2024 (UTC)

Huh. I spotted the stuff at theta function, and scratched my head a bit about it. I would be happier if much or most of this was removed, or maybe moved to a distinct article. Many of the relations are cool-looking! Yes, it is not uncommon for stuff similar to this to be published in journals. However, the cutting edge academic journals & books will say things similar this in the intro: In 1837, Kummer listed three identities for hypergeometric functions; this was extended to 50 by 1880, and 240 in 1920 and a general algorithm to generate a countable number of such identities was given in 1960. However, it did not list all of them, and neither did algorithms x,y,z proposed in 1980 and in this paper we explore the structure of algorithmic generators ... and so you realize these guys are talking about a kind-of fractal splattered all through this landscape of inter-related identities, and how to best understand/describe that fractal. (As far as I know, there aren't any articles on WP that even scratch the surface of this topic, and it would be cool if there were... but, whatever.) The problem is that the enthusiastic amateur is unaware that he's dong the algebraic equivalent of publishing cool-looking zooms of the Mandelbrot set. Yes, its still cool looking. But is not where the action is, and it is a clutter and distracting, if you were reading the article to find something else, e.g. look up some factoid about riemann surfaces, and that factoid is now buried in reams of wild identities. 67.198.37.16 (talk) 08:13, 4 March 2024 (UTC)

It's up to you guys if you want to check every edit of him, whether it is legit or not (like we did in the German Wikipedia), or you want to save time and just remove them. For me is "computing stuff with Wolfram Alpha and not adding to the mathematical theory" not mathematics and hence not relevant for an encylopedia.--Tensorproduct (talk) 22:05, 8 March 2024 (UTC)

Merge?

On pl wiki, User:Epsilon598 suggested AM–GM inequality, QM-AM-GM-HM inequalities and Generalized mean may need a merge. Thoughts? _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 02:07, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

Actually, Pythagorean means should also be at least linked to the others. In Polish all of these inequalities are usually called simply "inequalities among means", which is also used in at least one of these articles. This name is not nearly as fitting in English as it is in Polish, but would be my first guess. Epsilon598 (talk) 02:45, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

I usually hear this called "Power Mean Inequality" in English (which is currently a redirect to Generalized_mean#Generalized_mean_inequality). Elestrophe (talk) 16:38, 7 March 2024 (UTC)

Is Wolfram Mathworld reliable?

Related to the previous discussion, is Wolfram Mathworld reliable? I took the reviewing Talk:Arithmetic/GA2, and I claim that Wolfram Mathworld is not reliable sources, but the nominator claimed the otherwise. Now I'm very confused. Dedhert.Jr (talk) 07:12, 2 March 2024 (UTC)

I believe it's been discussed here before, although I can't find it now. In my opinion a mathworld source is better than no source, but not much beyond that. (I think that was also the general consensus from previous discussion.) Gumshoe2 (talk) 17:01, 2 March 2024 (UTC)

It seems to never have been discussed at WP:RSN, but it has been discussed here many times, including the following:

• 2006/04 (several threads on that page are relevant)
• 2011/01
• 2011/06
• 2011/12 (also mentioned in two other threads on that page)
• 2014/01
• 2016/01
• 2019/04
• 2019/10 (two consecutive sections mention it)
• 2021/03

I would say that these threads indicate a consensus among math editors that MathWorld is a usable but mediocre source, reliable for basic factual questions, but questionable as an indicator of notability and questionable when it comes to issues of terminology. --JBL (talk) 18:57, 2 March 2024 (UTC)

Mathworld usually doesn't make outright false mathematical claims, but has a tendency to repeat (or invent?) dubious historical/naming claims. –jacobolus (t) 19:40, 2 March 2024 (UTC)

I agree with the above two comments. It is not so unreliable that it must be immediately removed and replaced by a [citation needed] tag, as some sources are, but it is so frequently error-riddled that it is almost always better to use a different source. For a Good Article review, in particular, I think that better sources should be used. For Arithmetic, I replaced one MathWorld source by a much better one (a chapter in The Princeton Companion to Mathematics) and removed the other one as it was redundant and used only to source some alternative terminology, the sort of thing MathWorld is worst at. There still remains a MathWorld external link, of dubious value according to WP:ELNO #1. —David Eppstein (talk) 19:37, 2 March 2024 (UTC)

It seems Eric Wolfgang Weisstein created and maintains MathWorld, which is licensed by Wolfram Research. It is not self-published and from Weisstein's credentials, I don't see a good reason for categorizing this as an unreliable source. Are there any obvious points from WP:RS that suggest otherwise? Phlsph7 (talk) 13:39, 6 March 2024 (UTC)

It's not the worst ever source (Weisstein doesn't write outright nonsense and usually cites some other sources), but I'd put it on par with some professor's blog, course notes, math overflow answers, or similar: content written by someone with expertise in the general topic, but not vetted or carefully fact-checked. It's much less reliable as a source than e.g the articles by O'Connor and Robertson at MacTutor, and even those are often not a perfect reflection of the current scholarly consensus. Where possible it's best to compare multiple recent sources by subject-specific expects. –jacobolus (t) 15:19, 6 March 2024 (UTC)

Weisstein's degrees were all in astronomy. And I'm not even aware of anybody trained in mathematics who could be a reliable source for so much mathematical material. Gumshoe2 (talk) 17:44, 6 March 2024 (UTC)

I don't particularly care about Weisstein's credentials, but I have too often found mistakes and neologisms in MathWorld to give my full trust in it. There are of course also many mistakes in Wikipedia itself, but we don't allow Wikipedia to be used as a reference. —David Eppstein (talk) 18:29, 6 March 2024 (UTC)

@David Eppstein I'm curious now. Can you give me an example of some mistakes in MathWorld? Also, what about external links? Can MathWorld be used for external links as well? Dedhert.Jr (talk) 04:02, 7 March 2024 (UTC)

Mathworld can be used as either a source or in the 'exernal links' section, but also doesn't have to be. If a particular Mathworld page doesn't add anything that isn't in an article or other accessible sources, I'd take it out from the external links section. If another better source can be cited for any particular claim, I'd cite that one instead of Mathworld. Any claim sourced to Mathworld should be double checked in better sources anyway, as it's often a bit sloppy. At that point you can just cite the other source you found. –jacobolus (t) 05:04, 7 March 2024 (UTC)

@Jacobolus Ahh. I see. What I meant is not for Arithmetic, but for whole articles in general. An example is GA Malfatti circles, or GA Square pyramid in which two MathWorlds being used in external links. Should they (as well as the rest of them, if possible) be excluded in this case? How did one know that whether some kind of website or any sources will be included as external links? Dedhert.Jr (talk) 05:44, 7 March 2024 (UTC)

I wouldn't rush out to automatically remove Mathworld from all articles; that would be controversial and probably harmful. But if I'm otherwise looking at an article and its sources, I'll click the mathworld link and review whether it really seems helpful to readers to include, and when it doesn't I just take it out. –jacobolus (t) 05:56, 7 March 2024 (UTC)

One example of a mistake in MathWorld, since you're focused on polyhedra: at the time I brought Jessen's icosahedron up to GA status, the MathWorld article gave an incorrect construction based on the coordinates of a regular icosahedron. The current version fixes that.

Another example of what I think is a mistake, of terminology for polyhedra: Isohedron describes as a "trapezoidal dodecahedron" (bottom right corner of table) a shape that I think is properly called a "deltoidal dodecahedron" [1]. The trapezoidal dodecahedron is something else, not an isohedron [2]. See Special:Diff/1150447755.

Again, it is not hard to find similar mistakes in Wikipedia itself, but that is not the same kind of problem because we don't use Wikipedia as a reference. When we use MathWorld as a reference we need to be careful, more than with some other sources. —David Eppstein (talk) 07:34, 7 March 2024 (UTC)

Ahh... I see, then. Just in case, I think I prefer to find better sources for the external links. Dedhert.Jr (talk) 12:32, 7 March 2024 (UTC)

I linked to a few other discussions in my general advice essay. MathWorld being untrustworthy for terminology has been an ongoing theme. XOR'easter (talk) 17:20, 6 March 2024 (UTC)

I'd agree with assessment above that Mathworld is a mediocre but usable source and one needs to apply some common sense when using it. But imho it isn't really worse than many other (properly) published mediocre math sources out there such as various small math dictionaries and lexicons. Much of the Mathworld content is also published in book form for by CRC press btw.. For a freely accessible online resource for math history topics the MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive is usually a better alternative.--Kmhkmh (talk) 08:49, 7 March 2024 (UTC)

It seems to conflate distinct concepts and to make general statements that are only true in specific contexts. -- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 16:33, 7 March 2024 (UTC)

While in my experience MathWorld is particularly bad (on terminology issues; the actual math is usually right), even if it were better on that, it would still be a tertiary source, as is MacTutor, as is Princeton Companion (at least arguably), and as are "various small math dictionaries and lexicons". We should really strain to avoid using tertiary sources when good secondary sources are available. (Though it's reasonable to point readers to a link inside a tertiary source in "Further reading", as an aid to readers who want to look something up quickly.) --Trovatore (talk) 22:44, 7 March 2024 (UTC)

Notability of John H. Wolfe

The article John H. Wolfe has gone through a PROD, but still has issues as it is based on one secondary textbook claim that his work on model-based clustering matters. It was created directly by a novice editor (Stat3472 33 edits). The article model-based clustering supports him as the inventor, but whether this is big enough for notability is unclear. Comments on that talk page please. Ldm1954 (talk) 09:57, 2 March 2024 (UTC)

≙

There is a discussion about the ≙ character that needs attention from mathematical editors at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2024 March 2#≙. Thryduulf (talk) 12:35, 2 March 2024 (UTC)

Mental calculation

Does anyone feel like cleaning up Mental calculation? It's roughly as disorganized as one would expect. XOR'easter (talk) 18:35, 3 March 2024 (UTC)

Brouwer–Hilbert controversy

Should this article be renamed to Grundlagenstreit? This is the name often given in the literature to this debate. I do not know much about it but it seemed odd when I was looking for it. See for example Brouwer's biography ReyHahn (talk) 10:01, 4 March 2024 (UTC)

For me, naming an obscure topic from 100 years ago using an unfamiliar non-English word (German?) is the same as deleting the article.

Maybe "Grundlagenstreit, the Brouwer–Hilbert controversy"? Johnjbarton (talk) 15:45, 4 March 2024 (UTC)

Maybe the term Grundlagenstreit should be included in the lede; it seems common enough in writings about the topic. XOR'easter (talk) 16:18, 4 March 2024 (UTC)

Apparently Grundlagenstreit means "foundational debate", and was related to Hilbert's book Grundlagen der Geometrie. Seems fine to me to create a redirect and mention the name in the lead section (doesn't need to be bolded in my opinion). –jacobolus (t) 16:30, 4 March 2024 (UTC)

No, but theree should be a printworthy redirect from Grundlagenstreit to the article. -- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 16:28, 4 March 2024 (UTC)

Thank you all, I prefer to keep it bold but that can be discussed. As for the main topic I consider this  Done.--ReyHahn (talk) 21:06, 4 March 2024 (UTC)

Notice of discussion

 Note: A discussion at Wikipedia talk:Good article nominations might be of interest to members of this project. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 22:23, 7 March 2024 (UTC)

Inconsistent

In the interest of keeping this Project rational, it can be noted that as things stand, a function may be partial or total or multivalued or univalent. The terms "partial function" and "multivalued function" are self-contradictory, they are oxymorons. According to WP:Article names, consistency is one of the parameters of evaluation. Tolerating contradiction, as in the two article names, invites arbitrary deductions since any proposition may be deduced from a contradiction. A function is a type of relation so its variants are best described with properties of relations. A partial function is a univalent relation, and a multivalued function is a relation. Rgdboer (talk) 01:09, 10 March 2024 (UTC)

It's established mathematical terminology, and it's also pretty common in English generally (see, for example, Subsective modifier). - CRGreathouse (t | c) 01:17, 10 March 2024 (UTC)

Lots of things have names of the form [modifier] [something] to indicate that it is a generalization or variant form of something or something modified in a certain way rather than a special case of something. A Reuleaux triangle is not actually a triangle. A truncated icosahedron is not actually an an icosahedron, and a snub cube is not a cube. "Partial function" is no different. There is nothing inconsistent about this naming convention. See also WP:COMMONNAME and WP:NEO. —David Eppstein (talk) 01:29, 10 March 2024 (UTC)

Well put. I would add that a skew field may be a field but is not necessarily a field, which maybe is more directly analogous to the case at hand, since a partial function may be a function but is not necessarily a function. --Trovatore (talk) 03:28, 10 March 2024 (UTC)

I don't believe Wikipedia claims to be "rational", nor would we want it to be. Rationality has its limits; irrationality knowns no bounds. Johnjbarton (talk) 01:56, 10 March 2024 (UTC)

It's also often much harder to keep things rational. — MarkH₂₁^talk 03:51, 10 March 2024 (UTC)

You could argue that irrationality has its limits too :P GalacticShoe (talk) 04:09, 10 March 2024 (UTC)

The first goal of article names should be reflecting common usage among reliable sources, especially those from professional practitioners, with common alternative names listed/explained in the article text. This helps the widest range of readers to get up to speed with the terminology and conventions they will find in other sources. Other goals are subsidiary to that, and any "irrational" features of the most widely used and accepted nomenclature can be explained in text.

If you have a problem with widespread mathematical conventions, the place to fix it is in the mathematical literature, not in Wikipedia. (But making an explicit note when terminology is confusing, ambiguous, historically revisionist, politicized, a misattribution, etc. could be helpful.) –jacobolus (t) 04:27, 10 March 2024 (UTC)

Also, for considering the original example, the general meaning of "function" refers to univariate total function, but, in many texts, partial functions and multivariate functions are simply called functions. These generalized functions may be considered as functions in the first sense, by changing of domain. This is for this reason that I have added recently the subsections "Partial functions" and "Multivariate functions" to Function (mathematics)#Definition, with explanations on these terminology shifts. D.Lazard (talk) 09:54, 10 March 2024 (UTC)

Torsion tensor

Could you join the dispute at Talk:Torsion tensor?

The summary of the discussion (in my view point) is written in the section Discussion between Tito Omburo and Idutsu.

---Idutsu (talk) 14:20, 14 March 2024 (UTC), editor of japanese Wikipedia.

I've spent a long time trying to make sense of the torsion tensor in terms of normal coordinate systems. I came to the conclusion a long time ago that the #Twisting of reference frames section of the torsion page was wrong. Not in interpretation, but literally mathematically incorrect. The relationships asserted between the torsion tensor and the development of a frame along a curve don't match: the expression people think of for the rotational development of a coordinate frame correspond only to the covariant derivative of the frame along the curve, not to the difference of covariant derivatives as appears in the torsion tensor.

I've never seen any source which actually went through the details of this interpretation and explained it, and I've seen many mathoverflow posts just like Bill Thurstons which wax lyrical about interpretations of torsion without ever explaining in mathematical detail how the formula of torsion relates directly to the development of a coordinate frame along a curve.

I don't have any skin in the game of your discussion but if it were me I would try to hold this to a very high standard of reference because it is a notoriously wishy-washy subject in differential geometry. The conclusions of Tu & Spivak that there is no actual detailed mathematical link between the name torsion and some of the more elementary interpretations of twisting of a frame around a curve seem to hold up to my scrutiny at least. Tazerenix (talk) 06:23, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

Is this the part you disagree with?

The foregoing considerations can be made more quantitative by considering a small parallelogram, originating at the point $p\in M$, with sides $v,w\in T_{p}M$. Then the tangent bivector to the parallelogram is $v\wedge w\in \Lambda ^{2}T_{p}M$. The development of this parallelogram, using the connection, is no longer closed in general, and the displacement in going around the loop is translation by the vector $\Theta (v,w)$, where $\Theta$ is the torsion tensor, up to higher order terms in $v,w$.

Gumshoe2 (talk) 13:36, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

No, that's the standard interpretation of the torsion tensor geometrically. However I reject that it has much to do with the english word "torsion". The section of the page I was referring to has since been removed. My comments were just general that care should be taken with this subject to get high quality sources! Tazerenix (talk) 22:09, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

The article has been substantially revised since the bad version that User:Tazerenix is referring to. I wrote the above description in terms of the tangent bivector to replace the mathematically wrong section that had been there before. What I wrote is correct and supported by sources. There may however be different factors of two in place in the article, which I have not checked in detail. So this interpretation is satisfied up to a factor of two that is subject to checking conventions.

The connection with development, however, is well-known and easily understood. I have given a detailed example in the image in the lede. Basically the idea is to take a closed curve $\gamma$ in the manifold, and a parallel coframe $\theta ^{i}$ along $\gamma$, and then solve the ODE $dx^{i}=\gamma ^{*}\theta$ for coordinates $x^{i}$. When the torsion vanishes (and the curve is null homotopic), the developed curve is also closed (a consequence of the Ambrose-Singer theorem, or alternatively even Stokes' theorem is sufficient.)

When the torsion does not vanish, it means that there is a non-trivial translation component to the holonomy for the affine group, and so the developed curve need not be closed. I think the current image at the top of Torsion tensor nicely illustrates this, and as a bonus shows the connection to Frenet-Serret torsion. Tito Omburo (talk) 20:15, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

Requested move at Talk:N = 2 superconformal algebra#Requested move 7 March 2024

There is a requested move discussion at Talk:N = 2 superconformal algebra#Requested move 7 March 2024 that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. Killarnee (talk) 23:44, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

Tom Ilmanen

Good day! Is there some experienced editor interested in helping me create an article about Tom Ilmanen? He seems like notable enough (many papers cited by hundreds each), but it's hard to find sources about him (not about his work). :( I've made a beginning draft: Draft:Tom Ilmanen. Thanks! Gererhyme (talk) 10:27, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

I wouldn't say that "his best known mathematical works are in cooperation with Gerhard Huisken," since they only have two research papers together. It would be better to say something like: "Huisken and Ilmanen used inverse mean curvature flow to prove the Riemannian Penrose conjecture, which was resolved at the same time in greater generality by Hubert Bray using alternative methods." This article could be used as a reference.

I also wouldn't refer to "the Huisken-Ilmanen conjecture" unless grammatically in the particular context of talking about a particular conjecture by Huisken and Ilmanen. As far as I know, there has not been anything widely known as "the Huisken-Ilmanen conjecture." Even the article by Dong and Song resolving the conjecture says only "This confirms a conjecture of G. Huisken and T. Ilmanen." (It's not clear to me how significant the conjecture or its proof should be regarded as being.) Gumshoe2 (talk) 13:31, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

Wow!!! Thank you very much, Gumshoe2!!! Gererhyme (talk) 13:34, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

Happy to help. Not sure what can be done to help establish wiki-notability, although I believe it's fully orthodox to regard Huisken-Ilmanen's paper as seminal and the other three publications you've listed as highly notable as well. (Speaking of which, his book should be regarded as a research contribution and not as a textbook.) You might have to just hope to come across a sympathetic admin when submitting the draft. Gumshoe2 (talk) 13:49, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

It may be a small help to cite Yau's well-known list of open problems where the Riemannian Penrose inequality is the fifteenth problem. Gumshoe2 (talk) 14:05, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

Thank you so much!!! "Review waiting, please be patient. This may take 8 weeks or more." EIGHT WEEKS OR MORE....... ZZZzzzzzZzZZzZ "be patient" hahaha. :) Gererhyme (talk) 14:30, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

And now in mainspace, and passed through NPP. A nice short article. My one constructive suggestion would be to use the Quanta article as a source to say something meaningful about Ilmanen, rather than just dump it into a "further reading" section. --JBL (talk) 23:00, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

Nice suggestion, JBL!! Thank you! ^^ I'll follow it, but I need some rest before doing so (yesterday I edited Wikipedia for something like 12 straight hours!). In fact, it was from Quanta Magazine I first heard of Ilmanen! Gererhyme (talk) 11:18, 16 March 2024 (UTC)