This is typical sophomoric writing, sometimes literally done by 2nd year
students, actual sophomores. It is not limited to math; my particular pet
peeve is our philosophy articles.
A skilled teacher with years of experience teaching at the college level
can often make such subjects much more understandable.
Fred
There has been some interesting debate on the site
about technical
articles. There has been some (fairly heated) discussion here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:FAC#Some_thoughts_from_an_FA-ne…
(That discussion is mostly over, so best not to stir it up again).
And more here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Make_technical_articles_underst…
And the section immediately below it.
I found it ironic that when I discussed a particular article here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:CBM#Mathematics_article_I_found_diff…
The edit that was made to make the article more accessible (to me, at
least), was reverted:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Poincar%C3%A9_conjecture&diff…
With the edit summary:
"It's a boundary not a surface--but no need to put in the lede, people
can follow the link)".
Unfortunately, following the link didn't really help me.
"In mathematics, a 3-manifold is a 3-dimensional manifold. The
topological, piecewise-linear, and smooth categories are all
equivalent in three dimensions, so little distinction is made in
whether we are dealing with say, topological 3-manifolds, or smooth
3-manifolds."
I found the edit made to the original article much clearer, in that it
said that the 3-sphere is the "the surface of the [[unit ball]] in
four-dimensional space." I suppose adding the word "informally" might
soothe mathematicians who insist on precise language.
Carcharoth
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